“Most of them, alas! are prisoners,
And weeping will be my portion to the end.
With all the joyous spots in the empire,
Why must I remain in this place?
Ah, like the grub in smartweed, I am growing insensible to bitterness.”
By the last line he means to hint “how much a long communion tends to make us what we are.”
There was Ying Yang, who, when his own political career was cut short, wrote a poem with a title which may be interpreted as “Regret that a Bucephalus should stand idle.”
There was Liu Chêng, who was put to death for daring to cast an eye upon one of the favourites of the great general Ts‘ao Ts‘ao, virtual founder of the House of Wei. Ch‘ên Lin and Yüan Yü complete the tale.
TS’AO TS’AO
To these seven names an eighth and a ninth are added by courtesy: those of Ts‘ao Ts‘ao above mentioned, and of his third son, Ts‘ao Chih, the poet. The former played a remarkable part in Chinese history. His father had been adopted as son by the chief eunuch of the palace, and he himself was a wild young man much given to coursing and hawking. He managed, however, to graduate at the age of twenty, and, after distinguishing himself in a campaign against insurgents, raised a volunteer force to purge the country of various powerful chieftains who threatened the integrity of the empire. By degrees the supreme power passed into his hands, and he caused the weak Emperor to raise his daughter to the rank of Empress. He is popularly regarded as the type of a bold bad Minister and of a cunning unscrupulous rebel. His large armies are proverbial, and at one time he is said to have had so many as a million of men under arms. As an instance of the discipline which prevailed in his camp, it is said that he once condemned himself to death for having allowed his horse to shy into a field of grain, in accordance with his own severe regulations against any injury to standing crops. However, in lieu of losing his head, he was persuaded to satisfy his sense of justice by cutting off his hair. The following lines are from a song by him, written in an abrupt metre of four words to the line:—
“Here is wine, let us sing;
For man’s life is short,
Like the morning dew,
Its best days gone by.
But though we would rejoice,
Sorrows are hard to forget,
What will make us forget them?
Wine, and only wine.”
After Ts‘ao Ts‘ao’s death came the epoch of the Three Kingdoms, the romantic story of which is told in the famous novel to be mentioned later on. Ts‘ao Ts‘ao’s eldest son became the first Emperor of one of these, the Wei Kingdom, and Ts‘ao Chih, the poet, occupied an awkward position at court, an object of suspicion and dislike. At ten years of age he already excelled in composition, so much so that his father thought he must be a plagiarist; but he settled the question by producing off-hand poems on any given theme. “If all the talent of the world,” said a contemporary poet, “were represented by ten, Ts‘ao Chih would have eight, I should have one, and the rest of mankind one between them.” There is a story that on one occasion, at the bidding of his elder brother, probably with mischievous intent, he composed an impromptu stanza while walking only seven steps. It has been remembered more for its point than its poetry:—
“A fine dish of beans had been placed in the pot
With a view to a good mess of pottage all hot.
The beanstalks, aflame, a fierce heat were begetting,
The beans in the pot were all fuming and fretting.
Yet the beans and the stalks were not born to be foes;
Oh, why should these hurry to finish off those?”
The following extract from a poem of his contains a very well-known maxim, constantly in use at the present day:—