and a class ideology. I quote in part from Ku Yenwu in his Essays on these "Students,"
written at the beginning of the Manchu regime.
There must be half a million of these students in the three hundred hsien. What they
learn is writing for the examinations, and not one in several tens can write decently.
Not one in a thousand really has mastered the classic learning and could be used by
the Emperor. . ?. They are excused from official labour, are free from the oppression
of the bureaucrats and exempt from the punishment of flogging at court, and may call
on magistrates in their scholars' gowns. Hence many people desire to be students, not
necessarily for the honour of the title, but for the protection of their persons and their families. Taking seventy per cent as the average, we have then three hundred and fifty
thousand students in the country who come for such official protec tion. ... It is these
students who go in and out of the yamen to interfere with the administration. It is
these students who rely on such power and bully the country people. It is these
students who make friends with the yamenites or become yamenites themselves. It is
these students who, whenever the administration does not follow their wish, bind
themselves together in a row. It is these students who know the secrets of the
officialdom and trade with them. . . . With the slightest rebuff, they cry out, "Yo u are
killing the scholars. You are burying Confucianists." . . , The greatest trouble of a
country is made when strangers come together and form a party. These students come
from all parts of the land, some from a distance of several hundred U9 others from a
distance often thousand IL They do not know each other's names or dialects. But once
they have passed the examinations . . . they form a solid, unbreakable block. The
mails are full of their letters of recommendation, and officialdom is full of their
private requests. . . .
Ku wrote in an age when this evil had been especially aggravated, but the parasitic
nature of these B.A.s and M.A.S, or educated loafers, is essentially unchanged down
to this day, when they have been redubbed "college graduates."
Not all of them, of course, are such blackguards. There are in every town and village
good, retiring, thrifty and contented scholars, who belong to the oppressed rather than
the oppressing class, because they choose to remain poor. Occasionally there are some
sound scholars in a town who purposely avoid the examinations and bury themselves
in their own learning. It is often from these people or from the more talented and
successful candidates that scholarly works are to be expected.
After all, the old scholar is, on the whole, a sounder product than the modern college
graduate. His knowledge of world geography is less reliable, but his training in
character and ordinary manners is more thorough. Both the old and modern
educational systems suffer from the foolish belief that you can weigh a man's
knowledge by a series of examinations, which must by necessity be of a mechanical
nature, and which must concentrate on the storing of information rather than on the
development of a critical mind. For a critical mind cannot be easily graded or given a
marking of 75 or 93, while a question on the dates of the Punic Wars can. Moreover,
any college examination must be of such a nature that students can prepare for it at a
week's notice, or all of them will flunk, and any knowledge that can be crammed at a
week's notice can be forgotten in as short a period. There have not yet been devised
any series of examinations which are cram-proof and studentproof, and the victims
are only the professors who are led to believe that their students have really
understood their subjects.
The old college system, whether in the village school or in the shuyiian (college of
higher standard), had a distinct advantage over the modern one, for the simple fact that, except for the oflBcial examinations which were entirely optional, it did not rdy
on the counting of "units" and "marks." It was a tutorial system, where the teacher
knew exactly what his pupils had or had not read, and where there was a very close
and intimate relationship between teacher and student. No one was promoted, and
no one ever "graduated," and no one studied for a diploma, because there was none.
Above all, no one was obliged to mark time and wait for the last lame sheep to jump
over the fence. No one was required to read three pages of economics on a Thursday
morning and stop at the second paragraph; he could read to the end of the chapter if
he wanted, and he had to if he was truly interested. And last of all, no one believed, or
tried to make others believe, that by piling up "units" of psychology, religion and
salesmanship and English constitutional history on a person, you can create an
educated man out of him. No one believed, or tried to make others believe, that you
can "test" a man's appreciation of Shakespeare by either a "paraphrase" of any passage
or by asking a question on the date of authorship of Othello, or by making him answer
questions on Elizabethan idioms. The only thing a college education really does for
a man is to instil in him such a permanent distaste for Elizabethan idioms and the De
Valorem commentaries that for the remainder of his life he will shun Shakespeare as
he shuns poison.
V. PROSE
There was very little good prose in the classical Chinese literature. This statement
perhaps sounds extremely unfair and needs clarification. There are many samples of
highflown, rhetorical prose, excellent in their way and possessing great virtuosity;
there are also many samples of poetic prose, which by their cadence of vowels are
eminently singable. In fact, the regular way of reading prose whether at schools or in
private was to sing them. There is really no appropriate word for this type of reading
in English; the so-called "singing" is to read the lines aloud with a kind of regulated
and exaggerated intonation, not according to any particular tune, but following more
or less the tonal values of the vowels in a general tune, somewhat similar to the
reading of the "lesson" by the dean of an Episcopalian church, but with the syllables a
great deal more drawn out.
This type of poetic prose is especially bad in the euphuistic compositions of the fifth
and sixth centuries, which developed directly out of the fu, or high- flown prose, used
in imperial eulogies, as unnatural as any court poetry and as awkward as a Russian
ballet. Such euphuistic prose, running in parallel constructions of alternate sentences
of four and six syllables?hence called the ssulin or "four-six style," also called p*ien?i
or "parallel style"梬 as possible only in a dead and highly artificial language, entirely
cut apart from the living realities of the age. But neither euphuistic prose, nor poetic
prose, nor high- flown rhetorical prose is good prose. These may be called good prose
only by a wrong literary standard. By good prose I mean prose which has the sweep
and rhythm of a good chat by the fireside, such as used by the great story-tellers like Defoe or Swift or BoswelL Now it is clear that such prose is possible only in a living,
and not in an artificial, language. Extremely good prose there is in the non-classical
literature of novels written in the spoken language, but we are speaking of classical
writings.
The use of the literary language, with its peculiarly crisp style, makes this almost
impossible. First, good prose must be able to reflect the prosaic facts of life, and for
this task the old literary language was unsuited. Secondly, good prose must have the
sweep and width of canvas for full display of its powers, and the classical tradition
always inclined to extreme economy of words. It believed in concentration, selection,
sublimation and reorganization. Good prose must not be dainty, and the aim of
classical prose was only to be dainty. Good prose must move along with natural big
strides, and classical prose only moved about on bound feet, where every step was an
artistic gesture. Good prose requires perhaps ten to thirty thousand words for a
full- length portrait of a character, as for instance in Lytton Strachey's or Gamaliel
Bradford's portraits, and Chinese biographical sketches always limited themselves to
between two hundred and five hundred words. Good prose must not have too
well -balanced constructions, and the euphuistic prose was distinctly too
well -balanced.
Above all, good prose must be familiar, chatty and a little personal, and the Chinese
literary art consisted in concealing one's feelings and putting on an impersonal front.
One would expect a biography of at least five thousand words from Hou Ch'aochung,
giving an intimate portrait of his lover Li Hsiangchiin, and then finds that Hou did his
Biography of Miss Li in exactly three hundred and seventy- five words, written in a
manner as if he were describing the virtues of his neighbour's grandmother. Owing to
such a tradition, research on the lives of people of the past must for ever grope among
sketches of three or four hundred words, giving the barest beggar's outline of facts.
The true fact is, the literary language was entirely unsuitable to discuss or narrate
facts, which was the reason why writers of novels had to resort to the vernacular
language. The Chochiian, written probably in the third century B.C., still commanded
a power for describing battles. Ssiima Ch' ien (140-80? B.C.), the greatest master of
Chinese prose, still kept a close touch with the language of his day, and dared to
incorporate words which later scholars would have sneered at as "vulgar," and his
language still retained a virility unmatched by any later writer in the classical
language. Wang Gh'ung (A.D. 27-107) still wrote good prose, because he wrote more
or less as he thought, and was against tin&pr ieux style of writing. But after that
good prose became almost impossible. The terseness and refinement which the
literary language had come to may be seen in the following Life of Mr* Wu Liu (Five
Willows} by T'ao Yiianming (A.D. 327-427), supposed to be a portrait of himself, in
exactly one hundred and twenty- five Chinese words, and held up as a literary model:
Mr, [Wu Liu] is a native of I don' t know what place. His name and surname, too, are unknown. There are five willows by his house: hence the title. He is quiet and talks
very little. [He] does not care for money or fame. [He] likes to read books, without
trying to know their exact meaning. Whenever he appreciates [a passage], he is so
happy as to forget about his food. He loves wine, but, being poor, cannot always
provide it. His friends and relatives know this fact and they sometimes ask him to
come over for a drink. He always finishes the wine, and makes up his mind to be
drunk. After he gets drunk, he retires, and does not mind where he finds himself. His
walls are bare and do not shelter him from wind or sunshine. He wears a short jacket
of flax-cloth in tatters, and his rice-bowl is always empty. But he does not care. He
often writes to amuse himself and indicates his ambition in life, and forgets all about
the worldly successes or failures. He dies like that.
liat is dainty prose, but not good prose, according to our
definition. It is an absolute proof that the language was dead,
uppose one were compelled to read only prose of this type,
fhere the characterization is the vaguest, the facts are the
imsiest, and the narration the barest 梬 hat would happen to
ne's intellectual content?
This leads to a more important consideration of the intdlectial content of Chinese
prose works. If one picks up any 'Collected Works" of a writer, with which Chinese
libraries nd book stores abound (these always forming the largest livision in Chinese
catalogues), and examines its contents, one ias the feeling of being lost in a desert of
essays, sketches, dographies, prefaces, postscripts^ ceremonial writings, official
memorandums, and miscellaneous notes on a most promiscuous variety of topics,
historical, literary and supernatural. A most characteristic fact is that almost all such
works contain fifty per cent of poetry, and all scholars are poets. Remembering the
fact that many of these authors have elsewhere written consecutive treatises on special
topics, this promiscuity is perhaps pardonable. Against such kind considerations,
however, is the fact that these essays and sketches contain the cream of the literary
activity of many authors, and the only literary activity of most, and that they represent
to the Chinese "literature" par excellence. A Chinese schoolboy, in cultivating a prose
style, is made to repeat a selection of these essays and sketches as his literary models.
Further consider the fact that these represent the main bulk of the tremendous literary
activities of a tremendous number of scholars of all ages of a tremendously
literary- inclined nation, and one can feel only resignation or total disappointment.
Perhaps we are judging it by a modern standard which is foreign to it. The human
