element is always there, too, human joys and sorrows, and back of these works there
were always men whose personal lives or social surroundings we may be interested in.
But being modern, we cannot help judging it by the modern standard. When one reads
Kuei Yukuang's biographical sketch of his mother, which is the work of the foremost
writer of his time and leader of a literary movement, and remembers that this is the highest product of a lifetime of devotion to learning, and then discovers in it only a
purely linguistic craftsmanship in imitating the ancients, laid over a paucity of
characterization, a vacuity of facts and a baldness of sentiment, one has a right to be
disappointed.
Good prose there is in Chinese classical literature, but one will have to find it for
oneself, with a new standard of valuation. Whether for liberation of thought and
sentiment or for liberation of style, one will have to find it among a class of slightly
unorthodox writers, with a slight tinge of heresy in them, who had so much
intellectual content that they must have had a natural contempt for the carcass of style.
Such writers are, for instance, Su Tungp'o, Ytian Chunglang, Yuan Mei, Li Liweng,
Kung Ting-an, all of whom were intellectual rebels, and whose writings were either
banned or greatly depreciated by the court critics at one time or another. They had that
personal style of writing or of thought which orthodox scholars regarded as friendly to
radical thought and dangerous to morality.
VI. LITERATURE AND POLITICS
It is natural that the bondage of language has brought with it the bondage of thought.
The literary language was dead, so dead that it could not express an exact thought. It
always lost itself in vague generalities. Brought up amidst such generalities, with a
total lack of discipline in logical reasoning, Chinese scholars often displayed an
extreme childishness of argument. This disparity between thought and literature
brought about a situation where thought and literature were regarded as having no
relation with one another.
This brings us to the relation between literature and politics. In order to understand
Chinese politics, one should understand Chinese literature. Perhaps one should here
avoid the word literature (wenhsilek) and speak of belles-lettres (wenchang). This
worship of belles- lettres as such has become a veritable mania in the nation. This is
clearest in modern public statements, whether of a student body, a commercial
concern, or a political party. In issuing such public statements, the first thought is how
to make them nice-sounding, how to word them beautifully. And the first thought of a
newspaper reader is whether such statements read nicely or not. Such statements
almost always say nothing,, but almost always say it beautifully. A palpable lie is
praised if it is told in good form.
This has led to a type of belles- lettres which, when translated into English, seems
extremely silly. Thus in a comparatively recent statement by an important political
party we read: "Whoever violates our national sovereignty and invades our territory,
we will drive them out! Whoever endangers the peace of the world, we will stop them!
We are determined. . , . We are resolved to exert our utmost, . . . We must unite
together. ..." A modern public would refuse to accept such a statement. They would require a more exact analysis of the foreign and domestic political situation of the
moment and a more detailed account of the ways and means by which they are going
to "drive out" the invaders and "stop9* the breakers of international peace. This
literary malpractice is sometimes carried to stupid extremes, as when a commercial
advertisement for silk stockings takes the form of a long five-hundred-word essay,
beginning with "Since the Manchurian provinces have been lost. . . ."
That does not mean, however, that the Chinese people are simple-minded. Their
literature is full of generalities, but it is not simple. Rather on the contrary, from this
hedging about the problems and these vague generalities of expression, there has
developed, strange to say, the utmost finesse of expression. The Chinese, versed in
this literary training, have learned to read between the lines, and it is the foreigners3
inability to read between the lines, or the fault of the bad translators in missing the
"meaning beyond the words" (as we say in Chinese) that causes the foreign
correspondents to curse both China and themselves for their inability to make head or
tail of such cleverly-worded and apparently harmless public statements.
For the Chinese have developed an art of mincing words?largely due, as we have seen,
to the monosyllabic character of the literary language 梐 nd we believe in words. It is
words by which we live and words which determine the victory in a political or legal
struggle. Chinese civil wars are always preceded by a battle of words in the form of
exchange of telegrams. The public assiduously read this exchange of abusiveness or
of polite recriminations or even brazen- faced lies, and decide which has a better
literary style, while they appreciate fully that an ominous cloud is hanging over the
horizon. This is called in Chinese "first politeness, and then weapons." The party
about to revolt charges the central government with "corruption" and "selling the
country to its enemy," while the central government more adroitly charges the
rebelling party to "co-operate for peace" and "for the unity of the nation," "because
we are living in a period of national trouble," etc., etc., while both armies move nearer
and nearer the clashing line and dig deeper and deeper trenches. The party that finds a
better-sounding pretext wins in the eyes of the public. The dead language therefore
became a dishonest language. Anything is permissible so long as you call it by the
wrong name.
Some instances of the Chinese literary finesse are the following. When a provincial
government embarked on a policy of public sale of opium, it found an extremely
clever war-cry of four syllables, "Imply banning in taxing," and the discovery of that
slogan alone carried the policy through as no other slogan possibly could. When the
Chinese government removed its capital from Nanking to Loyang following the
Shanghai War, it found another slogan called "long-term resistance." In Szechuen
some of the war- lords forced the farmers to plant opium, and had the cleverness to
call it "laziness tax," the tax being on those farmers who are lazy enough not to plant
opium. Recently, the same province has produced a new tax called "goodwill tax," i.e.,
an extra tax on top of those which are already thirty times the regula r farm tax, which is to bring about goodwill between the people and the soldiers by paying the soldiers
and making it unnecessary for the unpaid army further to help themselves. That is why,
when we are among ourselves, we laugh at the foreign devils for their
"simplemindedness."
Such literary catastrophes are possible only in a nation believing in a false literary
standard, and are in fact merely the result of the wrong method of teaching
composition in primary schools. A modern Chinese, seeing the performance of such a
literary atrocity, can only do either of two things. First, he can take the traditional
view of literature and blandly regard it as pure belles- lettres, which need have no
correlation with the facts which the writing is supposed to convey梐 nd then read
between the lines. Or he must demand a closer approximation between words and
thought and a new literary standard, with a language more capable of expressing
man's life and thoughts. In other words, he must regard the prevalence of such
verbose statements as a malpractice more of a literary than of a political origin. But he
must also believe that unless such literary malpractices are weeded out, political
malpractices must also follow.
VII. LITERARY REVOLUTION
A literary revolution was in fact necessary, and a literary revolution came in 1917, led
by Dr. Hu Shih and Ch'en Tuhsiu, advocating the use of the spoken language as the
literary medium. There were other revolutions before this. Han Yu in the T'ang
Dynasty had revolted against the euphuistic style of the fifth and sixth centuries, and
advocated the use of a simple style, bringing it back to a saner literary standard and
giving us a more readable prose. But it was by going back to the early literature of the
Ghou Dynasty. This was still classical in point of view; it was only trying to imitate
the ancients, and it was not easy. After Han Yii, literary fashions fluctuated between
imitating the Ghou Period and the Ch' in-Han Period, and when Han Yii himself
became sufficiently ancient, the T'ang Period also became, at different times, a
great period itself for imitation* The Sung people imitated the T'angs, and the
Ming and Ch' ing writers imitated the T'angs and Sungs.
Literary fashions became then a battle of imitations.
Only as late as the end of the sixteenth century did there rise a man who said that
"modern people should write in the modern language," showing throughout a sound
historical perspective. This was Yuan Chunglang, together with his two brothers. Yuan
dared to incorporate words of ordinary intercourse and even slang words in his prose,
and for a time he obtained great literary vogue, with a school of followers known as
the Kung-an school (Kung-an being the name of Yiian's district). It was he, too, who
advocated the liberation of prose from current formal and stylistic conventions. It was
he who said that the way of writing essays was just to take the words down as they flow from your "wrist," i.e., from your pen. It was he who advocated a personal,
individualistic style, believing that literature was but the expression of one's
personality, hsingling, which should not be repressed.
But the use of commonplace and slang words was soon frowned upon by the orthodox
court critics, and this author received nothing except epithets like "frivolity,"
"inelegance," "unorthodoxy," in all histories of literature. Only as late as 1934 was
this founder of the personal style of writing rescued from partial or total oblivion.
Yuan also never had the courage, or the insight, to advocate the use ofpekhua, or the
vernacular tongue, in writing. It was rather the writers of popular novels who had
given up all ambition to literary fame and who were forced to write in the pehkua to
make their novels intelligible to the public that laid the true foundation of literature in
the living tongue. Consequently, when Dr. Hu Shih advocated the use of this medium,
he had, as he repeatedly insisted, the groundwork thoroughly prepared for him for
nearly a thousand years by these novelists, and people writing in the new medium had
ready first-class models before them. Hence its complete overwhelming success in the
space of three or four years.
Two important changes followed the literary revolution. First, the cultivation of the
personal, familiar style of writing, represented by the Chou brothers, Ghou Tsojen and
Ghou Shujen ("Lusin"), It is noteworthy that Ghou Tsojen was greatly influenced by
the school of Yuan Ghunglang. The second change was the so-called
"Europeanization of Chinese" in syntax as well as in vocabulary, as silly in the former
as it is inevitable in the latter. The introduction of Western terms is only natural, for
old terms axe not adequate to represent modern concepts. It began with Liang
Ch' ich'ao in the eighteen nineties, but was greatly aggravated or accelerated after 1917.
With the mania for Western things, this Europeanization of Chinese may well be
regarded as an aggravation, but the style introduced is so foreign to the Chinese
language that it cannot last This situation is especially bad in translations of foreign
works, which are as preposterous as they are unintelligible to the average Chinese
reader.
Actually, such atrocities are perpetrated by translators for no other reason than their
insufficient mastery of the foreign language, which forces them to translate word by
word without sensing the total concept of the phrase. (Notre-Dame de Paris has
actually been translated as "My Parisian Wife.") Imagine also the grotesqueness of
translating long English relative clauses following their antecedents into Chinese,
with the relative clauses (which do not exist in Chinese) changed into a long string of
modifiers extending over several lines before coining to the word they modify.
Certain changes are evident improvements, like the introduction of the loose
construction. Whereas it was impossible to put an if clause behind the main clause (/
shan' t go, if it rains), it is now possible to do so. This makes the prose so much more
supple and flexible.
Chinese prose has a great future before it. It can in time rival any national language
in power and beauty. The best modern English prose is distinguished by a healthy
