The author sets out with a realistic portrayal of a phase of life, but he yields to the force of convention which required a moral and happy ending—an influence not unknown in the drama of Western countries.
Our plays, from “The Merchant of Venice” to “Madam X”, abound in court scenes, but the Chinese theater makes use of this effective device even more frequently. A play called “The Chalk Circle” presents in a trial scene a story almost identical with a Biblical one. Two women appearing before a judge with a child each claim it as their own. The judge orders the child placed in a circle drawn on the floor, while the women are to decide who is the mother by pulling at the child in a sort of tug-of-war. One woman refuses to hurt the child by pulling at his arm, and the judge decides with Solomonic wisdom that she must be the true mother. Very frequently these plays are satirical in character, making sport of the notoriously corrupt judges. In one of the naively primitive speeches of introduction, required by the theatrical convention of every character on entering the stage, a judge is made to say, “I am the governor of Ching-Chou. My name is Sou Shen. Although I fulfill the functions of a judge, yet I do not know a single article of the code. I like only one thing and that is money. By means of the bright metal every plaintiff can always make sure the winning of his suit.”
ILLUSTRATION BY A CHINESE ARTIST FOR “THE CHALK CIRCLE”
“The Transmigration of You Hsin” is a play dealing with the popular superstitions regarding the reincarnation of souls in much the same spirit in which Voltaire in “Candide” treats the belief that this is the best of all possible worlds. As in Gogol’s “Revizor” the government sends an inspector to a certain village where the officials of the law court are said to be corrupt. The rumor of the coming inspection reaches town before the inspector; and most of the judges flee. Only You Hsin remains, together with the clerks and minor officials. One of these expresses his surprise at the fact that You Hsin is going to meet the inspector so calmly, especially since he had recently accepted a scandalously large bribe. You Hsin answers, “Yes, to be sure, I’ve accepted presents. But my friend, you certainly are simple! Isn’t it necessary that we fulfill our destiny? No one can die before his time has come. Have the courts ever prolonged by one minute the life of a man? If it were otherwise people would no longer believe in lucky and unlucky fates; they would no longer call Heaven and Earth the arbiters of life and death.” A famous anchorite appears prophesying that You Hsin will die within two hours. Then the inspector enters the village and begins immediately his examination of the court records. However, since he is an extremely stupid and incapable man, the clerks succeed in persuading him that everything is in order. But You Hsin in his home has fallen ill. He implores his beautiful wife never to show her face in public and to remain a widow forever. He dies at the very hour the holy man had foretold—even though his death is not due to a sentence imposed on him because of his corrupt practices.
You Hsin’s soul appears before the judge of the lower world. As he had been very avaricious in life his punishment is to consist in having to gather coppers tossed into a deep kettle of boiling oil. But the holy man appears and obtains forgiveness for You Hsin, because he allows himself to be quickly converted to Taoism and makes the vows of poverty and chastity. The judge will even grant him the boon of a speedy return to earth. He cannot reënter his own body, because his wife has been a bit precipitate in cremating it; but he is allowed to enter that of a butcher who has just died, a blue-eyed, lame, and otherwise ugly man. The butcher’s parents, wife, and neighbors are engaged in mourning, when the dead man suddenly rises from his coffin. You Hsin wants, first of all, to see his pretty wife, but when he tries to walk he stumbles with his lame leg. As they hand him the crutch he reflects, “Ah, yes, in my former life I had a crooked conscience and in this life I have a crooked and useless leg. I realize only too well the heavenly justice!” The butcher’s relatives follow him to his former home, where his wife had been happy to receive him after he had fully explained his miraculous return. A violent quarrel breaks out between the two women, each of whom claims her husband. The case is taken before the stupid imperial inspector, who is in great perplexity before the question as to whether the body or the soul constitutes the husband. The case and the play end when the anchorite arrives to remind You Hsin of his vows and to take him into the unworldly wilderness.
Plautus’ and Molière’s subject for a comedy of character, the miser, has been employed by a Chinese playwright with strong local color to his humor. One of the many scenes of his play describes how the miser comes to feel that he must have a son to pray at his grave and therefore decides to buy one from an unlucky scholar reduced by poverty to selling his children. He offers the parents one ounce of silver. The mother exclaims in her disappointment, “Why, for that sum you couldn’t buy a boy modeled in clay.” Perhaps this is a bit unmotherly in sentiment, but the retort is truly miserly, “Yes, but a boy of clay does not eat or cause other expenses.” When this sum is refused the miser instructs his servant to go once more to the man, to hold the silver high, very high, above his head and to say, “There, you poor scholar, His Excellency Lord Kou deigns to give you one precious ounce of silver.” His servant replies that no matter how high he holds it an ounce will be only an ounce; and finally he pays the father more out of his own wages!
When the son has reached the age of twenty the miser scolds him one day because he seems to think that money is for the purpose of buying food and clothes! By way of instruction he tells how one can live economically:
“One day I felt inclined to eat roast duck and therefore I went to the market to that shop which you know. They were just roasting a fine duck and the delicious juice was running down. Under the pretext of bargaining I handled it and soaked my fingers thoroughly in the gravy. Then I went home without having bought it and called for a plate of boiled rice. With each spoonful of rice I sucked one finger. At the fourth spoonful I became tired and fell asleep. During my nap a treacherous dog came and licked my last finger. When on awakening I noticed this theft, I became so angry that I have been ill ever since.”
The house is in need of a picture of the god of luck, and the miser instructs his son to order the artist to paint a rear view, because to paint the face costs most. When he is about to die he orders his son to bury him not in a coffin of pine, nor even of willow wood, but to use the old watering trough standing in the back yard. The son objects that it is too short, but the father instructs him to chop his body in two to make it fit. “And there is one more important thing I wish to say to you before I die; don’t use my good ax to cut me in two, but borrow one from the neighbor.”