The above are only two metres out of many, but enough perhaps to give to any one who will read them with a pause or quasi-caesura, as marked by ° in each specimen, a fair idea of the rhythmic lilt of Chinese poetry. To the trained ear, the effect is most pleasing; and when this scansion, so to speak, is united with rhyme and choice diction, the result is a vehicle for verse, artificial no doubt, and elaborate, but admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese language. Moreover, in the hands of the great poets this artificiality disappears altogether. Each word seems to slip naturally into its place; and so far from having been introduced by violence for the ends of prosody, it appears to be the very best word that could have been chosen, even had there been no trammels of any kind, so effectually is the art of the poet concealed by art. From the long string of names which have shed lustre upon this glorious age of Chinese poetry, it may suffice for the present purpose to mention the following, all of the very first rank.
Mêng Hao-jan, A.D. 689-740, failed to succeed at the public competitive examinations, and retired to the mountains where he led the life of a recluse. Later on, he obtained an official post; but he was of a timid disposition, and once when the emperor, attracted by his fame, came to visit him, he hid himself under the bed. His hiding-place was revealed by Wang Wei, a brother poet who was present. The latter, A.D. 699-759, in addition to being a first-rank poet, was also a landscape-painter of great distinction. He was further a firm believer in Buddhism; and after losing his wife and mother, he turned his mountain home into a Buddhist monastery. Of all poets, not one has made his name more widely known than Li Po, or Li T‘ai-po, A.D. 705-762, popularly known as the Banished Angel, so heavenly were the poems he dashed off, always under the influence of wine. He is said to have met his death, after a tipsy frolic, by leaning out of a boat to embrace the reflection of the moon. Tu Fu, A.D. 712-770, is generally ranked with Li Po, the two being jointly spoken of as the chief poets of their age. The former had indeed such a high opinion of his own poetry that he prescribed it for malarial fever. He led a chequered and wandering life, and died from the effects of eating roast beef and drinking white wine to excess, immediately after a long fast. Po Chü-i, A.D. 772-846, was a very prolific poet. He held several high official posts, but found time for a considerable output of some of the finest poetry in the language. His poems were collected by Imperial command, and engraved upon tablets of stone. In one of them he anticipates by eight centuries the famous ode by Malherbe, À Du Perrier, sur la mort de sa fille.
The T‘ang dynasty with all its glories had not long passed away before another imperial house arose, under which poetry flourished again in full vigour. The poets of the Sung dynasty, A.D. 960-1260, were many and varied in style; but their work, much of it of the very highest order, was becoming perhaps a trifle more formal and precise. Life seemed to be taken more seriously than under the gay and pleasure-loving T‘angs. The long list of Sung poets includes such names as Ssŭ-ma Kuang, Ou-yang Hsiu and Wang An-shih, to be mentioned by and by, the first two as historians and the last as political reformer. A still more familiar name in popular estimation is that of Su Tung-p‘o, A.D. 103-1101, partly known for his romantic career, now in court favour, now banished to the wilds, but still more renowned as a brilliant poet and writer of fascinating essays.
The Mongols, A.D. 1260-1368, who succeeded the Sungs, and the Mings who followed the Sungs and bring us down to the year 1644, helped indeed, especially the Mings, to swell the volume of Chinese verse, but without reaching the high level of the two great poetical periods above-mentioned. Then came the present dynasty of Manchu Tatars, of whom the same tale must be told, in spite of two highly-cultured emperors, K‘ang Hsi and Ch‘ien Lung, both of them poets and one of them author of a collection containing no fewer than 33,950 pieces, most of which, it must be said, are but four-line stanzas, of no literary value whatever. It may be stated in this connexion that whereas China has never produced an epic in verse, it is not true that all Chinese poems are quite short, running only to ten or a dozen lines at the most. Many pieces run to several hundred lines, though the Chinese poet does not usually affect length, one of his highest efforts being the four-line stanza, known as the “stop-short,” in which “the words stop while the sense goes on,” expanding in the mind of the reader by the suggestive art of the poet. The “stop-short” is the converse of the epigram, which ends in a satisfying turn of thought to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up; it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, is merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings. The last of the four lines is called the “surprise line”; but the revelation it gives is never a complete one: the words stop, but the sense goes on. Just as in the pictorial art of China, so in her poetic art is suggestiveness the great end and aim of the artist. Beginners are taught that the three canons of verse composition are lucidity, simplicity and correctness of diction. Yet some critics have boldly declared for obscurity of expression, alleging that the piquancy of a thought is enhanced by its skilful concealment. For the foreign student, it is not necessary to accentuate the obscurity and difficulty even of poems in which the motive is simple enough. The constant introduction of classical allusions, often in the vaguest terms, and the almost unlimited licence as to the order of words, offer quite sufficient obstacles to easy and rapid comprehension. Poetry has been defined by one Chinese writer as “clothing with words the emotions which surge through the heart.” The chief moods of the Chinese poet are a pure delight in the varying phenomena of nature, and a boundless sympathy with the woes and sufferings of humanity. Erotic poetry is not absent, but it is not a feature proportionate in extent to the great body of Chinese verse; it is always restrained, and never lapses from a high level of purity and decorum. In his love for hill and stream which he peoples with genii, and for tree and flower which he endows with sentient souls, the Chinese poet is perhaps seen at his very best; his views of life are somewhat too deeply tinged with melancholy, and often loaded with an overwhelming sadness “at the doubtful doom of human kind.” In his lighter moods he draws inspiration, and in his darker moods consolation from the wine-cup. Hard-drinking, not to say drunkenness, seems to have been universal among Chinese poets, and a considerable amount of talent has been expended upon the glorification of wine. From Taoist, and especially from Buddhist sources, many poets have obtained glimpses to make them less forlorn; but it cannot be said that there is any definitely religious poetry in the Chinese language.
History.—One of the labours undertaken by Confucius was connected with a series of ancient documents—that is, ancient in his day—now passing under a collective title as Shu Ching (or Shoo King), and popularly known as the Canon, or Book, of History. Mere fragments as some of these documents are, it is from their pages of unknown date that we can supplement the pictures drawn for us in the Odes, of the early civilization of China. The work opens with an account of the legendary emperor Yao, who reigned 2357-2255 B.C., and was able by virtue of an elevated personality to give peace and happiness to his “black-haired” subjects. With the aid of capable astronomers, he determined the summer and winter solstices, and calculated approximately the length of the year, availing himself, as required, of the aid of an intercalary month. Finally, after a glorious reign, he ceded the throne to a man of the people, whose only claim to distinction was his unwavering practice of filial piety. Chapter ii. deals with the reign, 2255-2205 B.C., of this said man, known in history as the emperor Shun. In accordance with the monotheism of the day, he worshipped God in heaven with prayer and burnt offerings; he travelled on tours of inspection all over his then comparatively narrow empire; he established punishments, to be tempered with mercy; he appointed officials to superintend forestry, care of animals, religious observances, and music; and he organized a system of periodical examinations for public servants. Chapter iii. is devoted to details about the Great Yü, who reigned 2205-2197 B.C., having been called to the throne for his engineering success in draining the empire of a mighty inundation which early western writers sought to identify with Noah’s Flood. Another interesting chapter gives various geographical details, and enumerates the articles, gold, silver, copper, iron, steel, silken fabrics, feathers, ivory, hides, &c., &c., brought in under the reign of the Great Yü, as tribute from neighbouring countries. Other chapters include royal proclamations, speeches to troops, announcements of campaigns victoriously concluded, and similar subjects. One peculiarly interesting document is the Announcement against Drunkenness, which seems to have been for so many centuries a national vice, and then to have practically disappeared as such. For the past two or three hundred years, drunkenness has always been the exception rather than the rule. The Announcement, delivered in the 12th century B.C., points out that King Wên, the founder of the Chou dynasty, had wished for wine to be used only in connexion with sacrifices, and that divine favours had always been liberally showered upon the people when such a restriction had been observed. On the other hand, indulgence in strong drink had invariably attracted divine vengeance, and the fall and disruption of states had often been traceable to that cause. Even on sacrificial occasions, drunkenness is to be condemned. “When, however, you high officials and others have done your duty in ministering to the aged and to your sovereign, you may then eat to satiety and drink to elevation.” The Announcement winds up with an ancient maxim, “Do not seek to see yourself reflected in water, but in others,”—whose base actions should warn you not to commit the same; adding that those who after a due interval should be unable to give up intemperate habits would be put to death. It is worth noting, in concluding this brief notice of China’s earliest records, that from first to last there is no mention whatever of any distant country from which the “black-haired people” may have originally come; no vestige of any allusion to any other form of civilization, such as that of Babylonia, with its cuneiform script and baked-clay tablets, from which an attempt has been made to derive the native-born civilization of China. A few odd coincidences sum up the chief argument in favour of this now discredited theory.
The next step lands us on the confines, though scarcely in the domain, of history properly so called. Among his other literary labours, Confucius undertook to produce the annals of Lu, his native state; and beginning with the year 722 Annals of the Lu state. B.C., he carried the record down to his death in 479, after which it was continued for a few years, presumably by Tso-ch‘iu Ming, the shadowy author of the famous Commentary, to which the text is so deeply indebted for vitality and illumination. The work of Confucius is known as the Ch‘un Ch‘iu, the Springs and Autumns, q.d. Annals. It consists of a varying number of brief entries under each year of the reign of each successive ruler of Lu. The feudal system, initiated more than four centuries previously, and consisting of a number of vassal states owning allegiance to a central suzerain state, had already broken hopelessly down, so far as allegiance was concerned. For some time, the object of each vassal ruler had been the aggrandizement of his own state, with a view either to independence or to the hegemony, and the result was a state of almost constant warfare. Accordingly, the entries in the Ch‘un Ch‘iu refer largely to covenants entered into between contracting rulers, official visits from one to another of these rulers, their births and deaths, marriages, invasions of territory, battles, religious ceremonies, &c., interspersed with notices of striking natural phenomena such as eclipses, comets and earthquakes, and of important national calamities, such as floods, drought and famine. For instance, Duke Wên became ruler of Lu in 625 B.C., and under his 14th year, 612 B.C., we find twelve entries, of which the following are specimens:—
2. In spring, in the first month, the men of the Chu State invaded our southern border.
3. In summer, on the I-hai day of the fifth month, P‘an, Marquis of the Ch‘i State, died.
5. In autumn, in the seventh month, there was a comet, which entered Pei-ton (αβγδ in Ursa Major).
9. In the ninth month, a son of the Duke of Ch‘i murdered his ruler.