A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. Various Authors
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erred in the opposite direction, regarding their wives and concubines simply as instruments of procreation. For sympathy and intellectual companionship they looked only to their friends. But these friends were bound by no such tie as held women to their masters; sooner or later they drifted away to frontier campaigns, remote governorships, or country retirement. It would not be an exaggeration to say that half the poems in the Chinese language are poems of parting or separation.
Readers of these translations may imagine that the culture represented by Po Chü-i extended over the whole vast confines of China. This would, I think, be an error. Culture is essentially a metropolitan product. Chü-i was as much dépaysé at a provincial town as Charles Lamb would have been at Botany Bay. But the system of Chinese bureaucracy tended constantly to break up the literary coteries which formed at the capitals, and to drive the members out of the little corner of Shensi and Honan which to them was "home."
It was chiefly economic necessity which forced the poets of China into the meshes of bureaucracy — backed by the Confucian insistence on public service. To such as were landowners there remained the alternative of agricultural life, arduous and isolated.
The poet, then, usually passed through three stages of existence. In the first we find him with his friends at the capital, drinking, writing, and discussing: burdened by his office probably about as much as Pepys was burdened by his duties at the Admiralty. Next, having failed to curry favour with the Court, he is exiled to some provincial post, perhaps a thousand miles from anyone he cares to talk to. Finally, having scraped together enough money to buy husbands for his daughters, he retires to a small estate, collecting round him the remnants of those with whom he had shared the "feasts and frolics of old days."
I have spoken hitherto only of poets. But the poetess occupies a place of considerable importance in the first four centuries of our era, though the classical period [T'ang and Sung] produced no great woman writer. Her theme varies little; she is almost always a "rejected wife," cast adrift by her lord or sent back to her home. Probably her father would be unable to buy her another husband and there was no place for unmarried women in the Chinese social system. The moment, then, which produced such poems was one of supreme tragedy in a woman's life.
Love-poetry addressed by a man to a woman ceases after the Han dynasty; but a conventional type of love-poem, in which the poet [of either sex] speaks in the person of a deserted wife or concubine, continues to be popular. The theme appears to be almost an obsession with the T'ang and Sung poets. In a vague way, such poems were felt to be allegorical. Just as in the Confucian interpretation of the love-poems in the Odes [see below] the woman typifies the Minister, and the lover the Prince, so in those classical poems the poet in a veiled way laments the thwarting of his own public ambitions. Such tortuous expression of emotion did not lead to good poetry.
The "figures of speech," devices such as metaphor, simile, and play on words, are used by the Chinese with much more restraint than by us. "Metaphorical epithets" are occasionally to be met with; waves, for example, might perhaps be called "angry." But in general the adjective does not bear the heavy burden which our poets have laid upon it. The Chinese would call the sky "blue," "gray," or "cloudy," according to circumstances; but never "triumphant" or "terror-scourged."
The long Homeric simile, introduced for its own sake or to vary the monotony of narrative, is unknown to Chinese poetry. Shorter similes are sometimes found, as when the half-Chinese poet Altun compares the sky over the Mongolian steppe with the "walls of a tent"; but nothing could be found analogous to Mr. T. S. Eliot's comparison of the sky to a "patient etherized on a table." Except in popular poetry, puns are rare; but there are several characters which, owing to the wideness of their import, are used in a way almost equivalent to play on words.
Classical allusion, always the vice of Chinese poetry, finally destroyed it altogether. In the later periods [from the fourteenth century onwards] the use of elegant synonyms also prevailed. I have before me a "gradus" of the kind which the later poet used as an aid to composition. The moon should be called the "Silver Dish," "Frozen Wheel," or "Golden Ring." Allusions may in this connection be made to Yü Liang, who rode to heaven on the crescent moon; to the hermit T'ang, who controlled the genius of the New Moon, and kept him in his house as a candle — or to any other of some thirty stories which are given. The sun may be called "The Lantern-Dragon," the "Crow in Flight," the "White Colt," etc.
Such were the artificialities of later Chinese poetry.
Technique
TECHNIQUE
Certain elements are found, but in varying degree, in all human speech. It is difficult to conceive of a language in which rhyme, stress-accent, and tone-accent would not to some extent occur. In all languages some vowel-sounds are shorter than others and, in certain cases, two consecutive words begin with the same sound. Other such characteristics could be enumerated, but for the purposes of poetry it is these elements which man has principally exploited.
English poetry has used chiefly rhyme, stress, and alliteration. It is doubtful if tone has ever played a part; a conscious use has sporadically been made of quantity. Poetry naturally utilizes the most marked and definite characteristics of the language in which it is written. Such characteristics are used consciously by the poet; but less important elements also play their part, often only in a negative way. Thus the Japanese actually avoid rhyme; the Greeks did not exploit it, but seem to have tolerated it when it occurred accidentally.
The expedients consciously used by the Chinese before the sixth century were rhyme and length of line. A third element, inherent in the language, was not exploited before that date, but must always have been a factor in instinctive considerations of euphony. This element was "tone."
Chinese prosody distinguishes between two tones, a "flat" and a "deflected." In the first the syllable is enunciated in a level manner: the voice neither rises nor sinks. In the second, it [1] rises, [2] sinks, [3] is abruptly arrested. These varieties make up the Four Tones of Classical Chinese.[1]
The "deflected" tones are distinctly more emphatic, and so have a faint analogy to our stressed syllables. They are also, in an even more remote way, analogous to the long vowels of Latin prosody. A line ending with a "level" has consequently to some extent the effect of a "feminine ending." Certain causes, which I need not specify here, led to an increasing importance of "tone" in the Chinese language from the fifth century onwards. It was natural that this change should be reflected in Chinese prosody. A certain Shēn Yo [A. D. 441–513] first propounded the laws of tone-succession in poetry. From that time till the eighth century the Lü-shih or "strictly regulated poem" gradually evolved. But poets continued [and continue till to-day], side by side with their lü-shih, to write in the old metre which disregards tone, calling such poems Ku shih, "old poems." Previous European statements about Chinese prosody should be accepted with great caution. Writers have attempted to define the lü-shih with far too great precision.
The Chinese themselves are apt to forget that T'ang poets seldom obeyed the laws designed in later school-books as essential to classical poetry; or, if they notice that a verse by Li Po does not conform, they stigmatize it as "irregular and not to be imitated."
The reader will infer that the distinction between "old poems" and irregular lü-shih is often arbitrary. This is certainly the case; I have found the same poem classified differently in different native books. But it is possible to enumerate certain characteristics which distinguish the two kinds of verse. I will attempt to do so; but not till I have discussed rhyme, the other main element in Chinese prosody. It would be equally difficult to define accurately the difference between the couplets of Pope and those of William Morris. But it would not be impossible, by pointing out certain qualities of each, to enable a reader to distinguish between the two styles.
Rhyme.— Most Chinese syllables ended with a vowel or nasal sound. The Chinese rhyme was in reality a vowel assonance. Words in different consonants rhymed so long as the