The Spirit of Chinese Poetry: Part One

[The Theosophical Path in August 1917. Morris’s views, and Chinese spellings, have been left to stand as originally written.] 

To every race come alternate periods of creation and rest; they have come to the Chinese, whom we have thought permanently stagnant and unprogressive. In their great ages, this people produced a wonderful literature, for the most part still to be revealed to the West; and certainly, the more it becomes known, the more it will be admired. Especially their poetry; of which, indeed, the revelation is strangely in process. That part of Young America which is interested in writing verse is more and more looking to Ancient China for inspiration. More and more of our younger poets — and their name is Legion — are feeling that the old sources, mainly Greek, are running dry; and that in Chinese poetry new fountains are being opened, not less wonderful, and as well-defined and distinctive in spirit and atmosphere. The only trouble is that they do not, perhaps, as a rule understand those basic ideas of religion and philosophy which made the world so wonderful to the great poets of China in the days of her glory.

One can but hope, in a short paper such as this, to give the merest sketch of the growth of Chinese poetry, and to indicate, by a few examples, some two or three of its peculiar characteristics. In these examples, let me say, the object has not been literal translation; it has been rather an inner than an outer fidelity: to give something of the spirit and color of the originals, not an exact rendering of their words. In reality, this is the only fair thing to do.

We must begin with Confucius; in whose days, as now, Chinese culture was at a low ebb. It had been declining for several hundred years. China lay all within the Hoangho Valley in the north; just as at the present time, she was a weak nation surrounded by a number of strong nations, all very jealous of each other and anxious to exploit poor China. The Chinese, then as now, were an unwarlike, home-loving, agricultural people much fought over by their neighbors; with traditions of a great past, of which they had become somewhat unworthy. But instead of having, as now, a vast and magnificent literature and a long and well attested history, they had only vague memories of their ancient glory and a large body of popular poetry, mainly perhaps unwritten down.

Among many other things Confucius was a collector of this folk-poetry. He gathered together all the ballads he could lay hands on; edited them, excluding all he deemed unworthy of a permanent place in literature, and published the rest in a volume known as the Shi King or Canon of Poetry, which consists of three hundred and five ‘odes,’ as they are called; a better term would be ballads. This book is held by native critics to be the root of the tree of Chinese poetic literature.

The ballads are nothing if not simple. There is no deep vein of poetry in them; probably the fact that they were the first Chinese poems to become at all known in the West, produced the idea that the Chinese are without poetic imagination. They deal with the surface of life: the doings of virtuous and wicked princes, from which the moral is duly extracted; the relation of the tillers to the soil they tilled; the short and simple annals of the poor. Now and again they rise to a certain degree of lyrical beauty in telling of personal joys or sorrows, chiefly sorrows. They express the lives of a home-loving, peace-loving peasantry with a penchant for virtue, untroubled with deep thoughts or imaginings. They differ from more familiar ballad literatures mainly in two respects: where other peoples have exalted war, they present it as a thing altogether loathsome. The home is their temple and source of light; family life appears to them the most sacred thing in the world. Secondly, they abhor impropriety. Love may be dealt with, but not debased. And here it may be remarked that, according to every authority, this is true of all Chinese literature. Judged from this standpoint — the attitude of their poetry to this matter — the Chinese are the civilized and we the barbarians. Nothing would be called poetry, or counted literature at all, that contained one line, one word or suggestion to offend. The most drunken rapscallion of a poet understood that his art was for other purposes.

The Shi King ballads are for the most part set to music and intended to be sung on ceremonial occasions; and I imagine there is a certain wistful music in the words, in the original, that redeems them from the utter baldness and flatness that appears in the translations one generally sees. Mr. Cranmer-Byng has dealt with them, in translating, more kindly and tactfully than most; they come from his hands, with at least the grace of quaintness and the air of being, what they are, natural growths. From his version we may take, as a specimen of their quality, this little song of an exile from Honanfu, the capital of the Chow Dynasty, in the time of Confucius waning to its fall:

 

Cold from the spring the waters pass

Down by the waving pampas grass.

All night long in dream I lie;

Ah  me, ah me, to awake and sigh,

Sigh for the City of Chow.

 

Cold from the spring the stream meanders

Darkly down by the oleanders.

All night long in dream I lie;

Ah me, ah me, to awake and sigh,

Sigh for the City of Chow!

Confucius, in selecting and canonizing these ballads, bequeathed them to posterity. Of all that existed in his time — over three thousand, — not one that he rejected has come down; those that he saved reflect his mind: there was something in their spirit that appealed to him intensely. For him, the basis of all religion, of all public morality and good government, lay in the home and family life. The State was a greater family; the emperor, the head and high priest of the national household. War was abhorrent, if for no other reason, because it assailed the quietude and continuity of the family life; immorality was a blasphemy against the altar of the home. And these ideals, certainly, came to be reflected in the poetry of after ages; which we may say was, on one side at least, a natural growth from the ballads of the Shi King. So that Confucius is to be called an ancestor of Chinese poetry; to say ‘the father’ would be going much too far. There is nothing in his system to account for the delicate imagination, the brilliant harmonies of color, developed in later centuries.

Nothing, for example, to account for a note struck even as early as in the poems of Chu Yuan, the first of the major poets. The warlike states that surrounded China in those days, had acquired a measure of Chinese culture; their royal houses were of Chinese descent; their erudite spoke and wrote Chinese. Chu Yuan was prime minister to the king of Tsu, a country lying south of what was then China Proper; he was banished by his master to regions southward still, the wild Yang-tse Valley, then beyond the pale of civilization altogether. He spent his exile roaming among the lakes, forests, and mountains, gathering the larkspurs in the valleys, and writing a longish poem called the Li Sao, which means ‘Falling into Trouble.’ Here are a few lines from one of its songs:

A spirit, robed in ivy and wisteria, roams among these mountains; a genius of august bearing, smiling mysteriously. His car is drawn by leopards and tigers; azalea-crowned, and decked in orchids, he goes; his banners are of cassia-bloom. Trailing behind him the sweetness of all flowers, he leaves a blossom of dreams in the heart of the one he visits, to haunt the memory forever.

There is here a feeling for the beauty and mystery of wild nature, of which we find no seed in Confucianism; but which we may trace without scruple to the teachings of Laotse, who, far more than Confucius, was the Father of all that is beautiful and wonderful in Chinese Poetry. These teachings collectively are known as Taoism; which one finds nearly always described as a wild and degraded superstition; but which in reality is a high and lovely mysticism packed with poetic inspiration. Its central idea is that which is conveyed in the word Tao, which can be translated in a thousand different ways. It is Universal Deity; and the Way to That: the Way, the Truth, and the Life. One is tempted to borrow a word from popular slang for it, and say it is IT — the finality, the grand Ne Plus Ultra. It is to be known, or attained, said Laotse, by self-emptiness: by the simplicity that has divested self of all desires, passions, affectations, opinionatedness, lies. It dwells within, and yet without, the Human Soul. It lies behind all visible forms; the vision unobscured by egotism may behold it as an inward Beauty inflaming and sustaining and singing through the skies, the trees, the soul, the waters and the mountains; it is the Good and the True, and also the Beautiful. “The knowledge of it is a divine silence, and the rest of all the senses”; the emptied of self shall behold it; the pure in heart shall see God. Laotse’s teaching, working upon the Chinese genius, taught the poet and artist a certain penetrating impersonality, of vision; they learned from it to

See, beneath the common things of day,

Eternal Beauty wander on her way.

It is the opal of religions, the pearl: all whiteness and simplicity without, but with strange fires of marvelous color burning in its heart. — I  speak, of course, of its and China’s days of glory; not of present degradations.

I think that this magical Taoism had touched the eyes of Chu Yuan a little; as, after the lapse of centuries, it was to touch the eyes of so many others, but it did not come to its own in poetry until the seventh century A. D., when the Dragon-boat Festival, held yearly to commemorate Chu Yuan’s death by drowning, had twinkled on the rivers of China upwards of nine hundred times. Meantime the Chinese Empire had been formed: conquered and united by one of those semi-barbarian kings: had flourished and decayed during four centuries under the great House of Han; had gone to pieces early in the third century of our era before invasions of Huns and Tartars; had seen civilization reborn, in the fifth century, in the Yangtse Valley; had been reunited at the end of the sixth and had passed, in the early seventh, into the Golden Age of the great Dynasty of the Tangs.

From the period between Chu Yuan and the Southern Renaissance little poetry comes down to us. A few of the poems of Su Wu and Li Ying, of later Han times; about nineteen poems by lesser or unnamed writers: they seem mainly Confucian in their tendencies, and are generally (to judge by the specimens I have seen) marked by a profound sadness. Simple as the ‘seamless robe of heaven,’ to which a critic compares them, they are yet filled with deep human feeling. Perhaps they give no greater revelation of beauty than do the ballads of the Shi King; but Confucius’ teaching had deepened the natural tendencies, the domestic devotions, of the Chinese; and the poems reach a level in purity and pity that gives them the right to be called art. Almost always you can hear the human heart beat in them; their burden is generally the pity and sorrow of war. An old man, driven off in his boyhood to fight the Huns, returns to the site of his fathers’ home; his memories have grown uncertain; he asks a peasant standing by, where the house stands or stood; and is led to it:

It was overgrown with grass, and desolate; a startled hare ran from her form in the kennel; pheasants flew from the carved ceiling-beams at his approach.

Where once the well-tilled fields had been, he gathered grain that had long run wild; he gathered mallows by the well in the courtyard, as he had so often done in his childhood.

He made a little fire, and cooked the food he had gathered; then, because there was none to share it with him, rose, left it untasted, and wandered away towards the east, weeping.

Just such a case as this old soldier’s was that of the poet Su Wu; he too was driven off by the recruiting sergeant, to be captured by the Huns, enslaved, and only to return in his old age. Here — a very famous poem — is his Farewell to his Wife, composed on the night of his departure:

Wife, we have been one-hearted all these years; our chief thought has been to give and receive love. Now our springtime has passed; our hearts must be pierced by grief. I cannot sleep, for counting the passing moments.

Dearest, awake; the stars have set, and we must bravely meet the sorrow of parting. Ah me, the long marches weigh upon my mind! I shall fight; I shall show nothing but bravery to the foe; and yet we two may never meet again.

As you take my hand, unless I let these tears fall my heart would break, to hear you speak so tenderly of our love.

But courage! Let us think of the first days of our union. It will bear me up on the way; it will help you to endure your solitude.

And there may be for us the joy of meeting again; or it may be that Fate has decreed that only in the spirit I shall be with you forever.

It is very human; not one whit lifted above the common levels of human feeling; it says, in the simplest possible way, what millions are thinking and feeling in sorrowful Europe today. But it is of a humanity very much unspoiled. There is a dignity, a restraint, a balance; you are to respect that Chinaman and his wife. I do not quote it for its poetic values; but because it indicates so perfectly the average Chinese ideal of marriage and home life. We have perhaps been wont to contrast our own ‘magnificent enlightenment’ in these respects, with their supposed ‘oriental barbarism.’

The Southern Renaissance of the beginning of the fifth century gives us one noteworthy name: that of Tao Chien, or Tao Yuen-ming, who died in 427. He was something of an Epicurean by philosophy, but there was a very noble side to him; also a side of great importance in the evolution of Chinese poetry. Called from his farm to take office in the capital, he hymned by the way the delights of country life; and showed the genuineness of his hymning by soon relinquishing office and returning to his dear elms and orchards, his hills and his poultry, and “the dog barking in the lane.” Not a great poet himself, perhaps, he yet did prepare the way for great poets to come; like Wordsworth in England, he called on his race to go to nature, and seek inspiration in the simple country things.

For a couple of centuries civilization was gaining strength. Pilgrims, returning from India, brought back to Nankin, the southern capital, wonderful inspirations; the Yangtse was opened to the commerce of all southern Asia, and quickening influences, mainly Buddhistic, poured in. Buddhism reinforced and systematized the Taoist tendencies in the Chinese mind; though the two religions were often in keen rivalry, it is easy to see how by their mutual reactions they affected the racial genius. The grand flowering came in the seventh century. In 627 Tang Taitsong, the greatest of all Chinese sovereigns since Han Wuti, came to the throne; and presently the glories of his reign were being reflected in a splendor of poetry worthy of them. The Chinese eye became, as never before or since, alive to the flaming beauty of the world; perhaps there has never been a greater age of poetry anywhere in historic times.

It found its culmination in the reign of Tang Hsuentsong, in the first half of the eighth century; at whose court both Li Po and Tu Fu, the greatest of the Chinese poets, — the two brightest stars among many scarcely less brilliant — figured; but it did not cease until towards the fall of the Dynasty in the beginning of the tenth century. It would be useless to reel off names; but those two, Li Po and Tu Fu, must be remembered. There were few professional poets, in the western sense; poetry was an accomplishment essential to every gentleman. Such and such a major poet, we read, was “an official at the court of Hsuentsong,” “prefect of this or that district,” or “a minister under Tang Sutsong” — who in his spare time composed poetry. They were the Roosevelts, the Gladstones, or the Kitcheners of their time. Chinese ideals were all for the balanced life, a splendid poise of the faculties.

Yet these Tang poets devoted themselves with ardor to the art of poetry, evolving new rules of composition directed towards the attainment of a wonderful perfection of music and form. One must not suppose, because Mr. Ezra Pound and others are fond of translating them into ‘free verse,’ that they would have permitted themselves such formlessness. On the contrary, their forms are highly and exquisitely artificial; our English verse forms are generally ill-adapted for translating them, because too free and formless. The old French forms: the rondel, the ballade and the triolet: are more appropriate, because of their intricate rhyme schemes and haunted melody. As to the productiveness of this age: Wang Jao-chi, a couple of centuries ago, served literature well by compiling a Tang Anthology; in which he found it necessary to include, in nine hundred books, about fifty thousand poems. And this Wang Jaochi, was no incompetent critic: as the following from his preface shall testify:

“Beauty,” he says, “was born with the Heavens and the Earth. The sun, the moon, the mists of morning and evening, illumine each other; there is no pigment with which they are dyed. All the phenomena of the world, when set in motion, bring forth sound; and every sound implies some motion that caused it. The greatest of sounds are wind and thunder. Listen to the mountain storm racing over the rocks: as soon as it begins to move, the sound of it makes itself heard; not, indeed, actually in accordance with the laws of music, yet having a certain rhythm and system of its own. This is the natural or spontaneous voice of heaven and earth, the voice caused by the movement of the great forces. So too in the purest mood of the human heart, when the fire of the intellect is at its brightest, the Soul, if it be moved, will bring forth sound. Is it not a wondrous transformation, that out of this should be created literature? Poetry is the music of the Soul in motion.”

Of all the definitions of poetry one has ever heard, one remembers nothing better than this: Poetry is the music of the Soul in motion.

[end or part one]