mountain path and view the scene from the same perspective as the poet did.
In this way, and really through this trick of perspective, these pen-pictures gain a bold
relief impossible with other methods. It cannot be said that the Chinese poets were
conscious of the theory of this technique, but had in any case found the technique
itself. Hundreds of examples might be cited. With this technique of perspective, Wang
Wei (699759)> probably China's greatest descriptive poet, said:
In the mountains a night of rain,
And above the trees a hundred springs.
Of course, it requires a little effort to imagine "springs on treetops" (which are the
exact words in the original); but exactly because such a perspective is so rare and can
only be found when high mountain gorges, forming, after the previous night's rainfall,
a series of cascades in the distance, appear above the outline of some trees in the
foreground, the reader gains a clear perspective otherwise impossible. As with the
former example from Li Po, the art lies in the selection of an object in the foreground
to set it off against the objects in the distance, like clouds, cascades, hilltops and the
Milky Way, and then painting these together on a fiat surface. Thus Liu Yuhsi (772842)
wrote:
[For an] autumn scene: several dots of hills over the wall.
The picture technique here is perfect: the hilltops appearing as several "dots" over the
wall give one a stereoscopic sense of distance from the hills. In this sense, we can
understand Li Liweng (seventeenth century), when he says in one of his dramatic
works:
First we look at the hills in the painting,
Then we look at the painting in the hills.
The poet's eye is the painter's eye, and painting and poetry become one.
This affinity between painting and poetry is all the more natural and apparent when
we consider not only their similarity of technique, but also their similarity of themes,
and the fact that the title of a painting is often actually a line taken from some verse.
In any case, the painter after finishing his painting usually writes a verse at the top in
those vacant spaces characteristic of Chinese paintings. Of this, more later on when
we discuss painting proper. But this affinity is responsible for another point in
Chinese poetry, viz., the impressionistic technique. It is a technique which gives a
series of impressions, vivid and unforgettable, and leaves merely a flavour, an
indefinable feeling behind, which awakes the reader's senses but does not satisfy his
understanding. Chinese poetry is consummate in the art of sublimation, suggestion
and artistic restraint. The poet does not try to say all he has to say. His business is but
to evoke a picture, making a pen sketch by a few swift, clear strokes.
Hence arose the great school of pastoral poets, specializing in landscape paintings and
using the impressionistic technique. Such masters in pastoral poetry are T'ao
Yflq.nrmng (373-437)> Hsieh Lingyun (385-433?), Wang Wei (699-759) and Wei
Ingwu (740-*:. 830), but the technique is practically universal with Chinese poets. Of
Wang Wei (perhaps better known as Wang Mochieh) it is said that "there is poetry in
his painting and painting in his poetry," because Wang was a great painter himself.
His WangcKuanchi is nothing but a collection of pastoral landscapes. A poem like the
following can only be written by one inspired by the spirit of Chinese painting:
Amidst the mist- like autumn showers,
Shallow the stony rapids flow;
Its sprays besprinkle one another.
Up and down the egrets go.
桾he Liianchia Rapids.
And here we come to the problem of suggestion. Some modern Western painter has
attempted the impossible by trying to paint "the sound of sunshine going upstairs," but
the problem of artistic limitations has been partly overcome by Chinese painters by
the use of suggestion, really developed by the poetic art. One can actually paint
sounds and smell by the method of suggestion. A Chinese painter would paint the
sound of temple bells without showing the bells at all on the canvas, but possibly by
merely showing the top of a temple roof hidden among trees, and the effect of the
sound on men's faces. Interesting is the method of Chinese poets in suggesting smell,
which lends itself to pictorial handling. Thus a Chinese poet describing the fragrance
of the open country would write:
Coming back over flowers, fragrant are the
horse's hoofs.
Nothing would be easier than painting a flock of butterflies
flitting after the horse's hoofs, which is what a Chinese painter
actually did. By the same technique of suggestion, the poet
Liu Yiihsi wrote about the fragrance of a court lady:
In her new dress, she comes from her vermilion towers;
The light of spring floods the palace which Sorrow embowers.
To the court she comes, and on her carved jade hair-pin
Alights a dragon-fly, as she is counting the flowers.
The lines suggest to the reader the beauty and fragrance both of the carved jade
hair-pin and of the lady herself, a beauty and fragrance which deceived the dragon-fly.
From this impressionistic technique of suggestion arose that method of suggesting
thought and sentiments which we call symbolic thinking. The poet suggests ideas, not
by verbose statements but by evoking a mood which puts the reader in that train of
thought. Such thoughts are as indefinable as the scene which evokes them is clear and
vivid. Picturesque scenery is then used to suggest certain thoughts very much in the
same way as certain chords in the Wagnerian operas are used to suggest the entrance
of certain characters. Logically, there is little connection between the scenery and the
man's inner thoughts, but symbolically and emotionally, there is a connection. The
method, called hsing, or evocation, is as ancient as the Book of Poetry. In T'ang poetry,
for instance, the passing of a fallen dynasty is variously expressed by such symbolic
method, without mentioning the thoughts themselves. Thus Wei Chuang sang of the
past glories of Nanking in the following manner in his poem On a Painting of
Chinling:
The rain on the river is mist- like, and the grass on the banks is high.
The Six Dynasties passed like a dream, and forlorn's the birds* cry.
Most heartless of all are the willows of the palace walls,
Even now in a three-mile green, lurid resplendour they lie.
The scene of the three-mile- long willow-overgrown walk was enough to remind his
contemporaries of the past glories of Ch'en Houchu in his most glorious days, and the
mention of the "heartless willows" strikes a contrast between human vicissitudes and
nature's serenity. By the same technique, Po Ghtiyi (772-846) expressed his sadness
over the past glories of T'ang Minghuang and Yang Kweifei by merely drawing a
picture of white-haired, old imperial chambermaids gossiping in a deserted palace,
without of course going into the details of their discourse:
Here empty is the country palace, empty like a dream, In loneliness and quiet the red
imperial flowers gleam. Some white-haired, palace chambermaids are chatting.
Chatting about the dead and gone Hsuanchuang regime.
In the same way Liu Yiihsi sang about the decay of the Blackgown Alley, which once
was the home of the great Wang and Hsieh families:
Now by the Red-sparrow Bridge wild grasses are growing,
And on the Blackgown Alley the ev'ning sun is glowing,
And the swallows which once graced the Wang and Hsieh halls,
Now feed in common people's homes 梬 ithout their knowing.
The last and most important point is the investment of natural objects with human
actions, qualities and emotions, not by direct personification but by cunning
metaphors, like "idle flowers," "the sad wind," "the chafing sparrow," etc. The
metaphors in themselves are nothing: the poetry consists in the poet spreading his
emotion over the scenery and compelling it by the force of his emotion to live and
share his own joys and sorrows. This is clearest in the above example, where the
three-mile- long gay and green willows are referred to as "heartless" because they did
not, as they ought to, remember Ch'en Houchu and share the poet's feeling of poignant
regret.
Once when I was travelling with a poet friend, our bus passed a small secluded
hillside, with just a single cottage, with all doors closed and a solitary peach tree in
full blossom standing idly in front, apparently wasting its fragrant glory on a deserted
valley. I still remember the last two lines of the quatrain which my friend sketched in
his notebook:
The farmer couple to the fields have gone,
And dead-bored are the flowers outside its doors.
What is achieved, then, is a poetic feeling for the peach tree, supposed to be capable
of being "bored" to death, which borders on pantheism. The same technique, or rather
attitude, is extremely common in all good Chinese poetry. So, for instance, did Li Po
begin one of his best poems:
Late at twilight I passed the verdant hills,
And the mountain moon followed me horn
Or, in one of his best-known poems, Drinking Alone under the
Moon;
A pot of wine amidst the flowers.
Alone I drink sans company.
The moon I invite as drinking friend,
And with my shadow we are three.
The moon, I see, she does not drink,
My shadow only follows me:
I' ll keep them company a while,
For spring's the time for gayety.
I sing: the moon she swings her head;
I dance: my shadow swells and sways*
We sport together while awake,
While drunk, we all go our own ways.
An eternal, speechless trio then,
Till in the clouds we meet again!
This is more than a metaphor: it is a poetic faith of union with
nature, which makes life itself pulsate with human emotions.
The expression of this pantheism or fellowship with nature is best illustrated in Tu
Fu's Quatrains on Sundry Moods, showing successively a humanizing of nature, a
tender feeling for its mishaps, a sheer delight in its contact, and finally a complete
union with it. So goes the first stanza:
I see the traveller's unwaking sorrow.
The vagabond spring's come in a clatter. Too profusely rich are the flowers,
Too garrulous the parrots* chatter.
The words "vagabond," "garrulous," and "chatter" here indirectly invest the spring
and the parrots with a human quality. Then he lodges a complaint against the brutal
winds of last night, which "bullied" the peach and pear trees in bis yard:
My hand-planted pear trees are not orphans!
The old man's low walls are like their house!
But the spring wind thought fit to bully them,
Last night it broke some of their boughs!
This tender feeling for the trees is repeated in the last stanza:
Weak and tender is the willow next door.
Like a fifteen-year-old maiden's waist.
Who would have thought this morning that it happened,
The wind did break its longest bough, its best!
Once more, the willows dancing gaily before the wind are referred to as abandonee,
and the peach blossoms which carelessly drop and float on the water wherever it
might cany them are regarded as women of fickle character in the fifth stanza:
I deeply rue the passing of spring,
And on a cane I pace the scented isle.
Before the winds dance the wanton willows,
And on the water the petulous petals smile.
This pantheistic outlook sometimes loses itself in a sheer delight in contact with
worms and flying insects as in the third stanza. But we may take an example from a
Sung poet, Yeh Li, who wrote on A Scene in Late Spring:
Pair by pair, little swallows on the bookshelves hop. Dot by dot, little petals on the ink-slab drop.
Reading the Book of Changes I sit near a window,
Forgetful how much longer spring will with us stop.
This subjectivity of outlook, coupled with an infinitely tender feeling for the birds and
animals, enables Tu Fu to speak of the "clenching fists" of white egrets rest ing on the
sand-bank, and of the "striking fins" of jumping fish near his boat. And here we see
the most interesting point in Chinese poetry梩 he Einfuhlung. The use of the word
"fists" for the egrets3 claws is then not merely a literary metaphor, for the poet has so
identified himself with them that he probably feels the clenching himself and wishes
his readers to share this emotional insight with him. Here we do not see the scientist's
minute observation of details, but rather the poet's keenness which comes from love,
as sharp as a lover's eyes, and as unfailing and correct as a mother's intuition. This
Einfuhlung, this sharing of human emotions with the universe, this poetic
transformation of dead objects which makes the moss "mount" one's doorstep and the
colour of grass "enter" one's windowscreen, this poetic illusion, for illusion it is, is felt
so intuitively and so constantly that it seems to constitute the very essence of Chinese
poetry. An analogy ceases to be an analogy, but becomes a poetic truth. A man must
be indeed more or less intoxicated with nature to write the following lines (by Ch'en
Ngo) about the lotus flower, suggestive of Heine:
Lightly dips her green bonnet,
