YÜAN MEI
Yüan Mei (1715-1797) is beyond all question the most popular writer of modern times. At the early age of nine he was inspired with a deep love for poetry, and soon became an adept at the art. Graduating in 1739, he was shortly afterwards sent to Kiangnan, and presently became magistrate at Nanking, where he greatly distinguished himself by the vigour and justice of his administration. A serious illness kept him for some time unemployed; and when on recovery he was sent into Shansi, he managed to quarrel with the Viceroy. At the early age of forty he retired from the official arena and led a life of lettered ease in his beautiful garden at Nanking. His letters, which have been published under the title of Hsiao Ts‘ang Shan Fang Ch‘ih Tu, are extremely witty and amusing, and at the same time are models of style. Many of the best are a trifle coarse, sufficiently so to rank them with some of the eighteenth-century literature on this side of the globe; the salt of all loses its savour in translation. The following are specimens:—
“I have received your letter congratulating me on my present prosperity, and am very much obliged for the same.
“At the end of the letter, however, you mention that you have a tobacco-pouch for me, which shall be sent on as soon as I forward you a stanza. Surely this reminds one of the evil days of the Chous and the Chêngs, when each State took pledges from the other. It certainly is not in keeping with the teaching of the sages, viz., that friends should be the first to give. Why then do you neglect that teaching for the custom of a degraded age?
“If for a tobacco-pouch you insist upon having a stanza, for a hat or a pair of boots you would want at least a poem; while your brother might send me a cloak or a coat, and expect to get a whole epic in return! In this way, the prosperity on which you congratulate me would not count for much.
“Shun Yü-t‘an of old sacrificed a bowl of rice and a perch to get a hundred waggons full of grain; he offered little and he wanted much. And have you not heard how a thousand pieces of silk were given for a single word? two beautiful girls for a stanza?—compared with which your tobacco-pouch seems small indeed. It is probably because you are a military man, accustomed to drill soldiers and to reward them with a silver medal when they hit the mark, that you have at last come to regard this as the proper treatment of an old friend.
“Did not Mencius forbid us to presume upon anything adventitious? And if friends may not presume upon their worth or position, how much less upon a tobacco-pouch? For a tobacco-pouch, pretty as it may be, is but the handiwork of a waiting-maid; while my verses, poor as they may be, are the outcome of my intellectual powers. So that to exchange the work of a waiting-maid’s fingers for the work of my brain, is a great compliment to the waiting-maid, but a small one to me. Not so if you yourself had cast away spear and sword, and grasping the needle and silk, had turned me out a tobacco-pouch of your own working. Then, had you asked me even for ten stanzas, I would freely have given them. But a great general knows his own strength as well as the enemy’s, and it would hardly be proper for me to lure you from men’s to women’s work, and place on your head a ribboned cap. How then do you venture to treat me as Ts‘ao Ts‘ao [on his death-bed treated his concubines], by bestowing on me an insignificant tobacco-pouch?
“Having nothing better to do, I have amused myself with these few lines at your expense. If you take them ill, of course I shall never get the pouch. But if you can mend your evil ways, then hurry up with the tobacco-pouch and trust to your luck for the verse.”