used in songs of the same act, several singers could sing in alternation or in unison in
the same act, and the tunes themselves were different from those used in the northern
dramas, being of the type which gives long modulations over single syllables.
Of such dramas, the Western Chamber (Hsihsiang) and Autumn in the Han Palace
(HankungcKiu, portraying the story of the exiled imperial concubine Ghao Ghiin),
may be taken as representative of the northern dramas, while the Moon Pavilion
(Paiyuehfing) and the Romance of the Guitar (P*ip*ackf) may be taken as
representative of the southern dramas. The Western Chamber, although consisting of
twenty acts, was strictly in the nature of a dramatic sequence of five plays, with four
acts in each.
There is one difference between Chinese and Western opera. While in the West the
opera is the privilege of the classes, very often attended for its social glitter and out of
an "opera complex" rather than for real musical appreciation, so far as the occupants
of the "golden horseshoe95 are concerned, the Chinese operas are the mental food of
the poor. Deeper than any other literary art, the operas have gone down to the hearts
of the people. Imagine a people whose masses know the airs of Tannhduser and Tristan und Isolde and Pinafore by heart, gaily singing them in the streets and at all
odd moments, and you have a picture of the relation between Chinese operas and the
Chinese masses. There is a type of mania in China, unknown in the West, called hsimi
or "opera mania," and one may often see a maniac of the lower class, with dishevelled
hair and clad in tatters, singing the airs of K*ungcKengchi and acting the part of the
great Chuko Liang in the streets of old Peking.
Foreign visitors at Chinese theatres are often struck by the excruciating noise
emanating from the gongs and drums in military plays and the equally nerve-racking
falsetto of male singers, while the Chinese evidently cannot live without them. This
must, on the whole, be credited to Chinese nerves, although the theory seems to be
counter-evidenced by the apparent comfort with which Americans tolerate squeaks
from the saxophone and other sound-madness from the jazz band which set any
Chinese gentleman's nerves on end. It is possibly all a question of adaptation. But the
origin of the drums and gongs and the falsetto can only be understood in the light of
Chinese theatre surroundings.
The Chinese theatre of the better type was built in a yard like the Elizabethan theatre.
In most cases, however, the stages consisted of temporary wooden racks, built high
above the ground ia the open, or sometimes right across a thoroughfare, to be taken
down immediately after the occasion. The theatre was therefore in the open and the
actors had to compete with the peddlers' cries, the barbers* tuning forks, the
maltsugar sellers' small gongs, the shouting of men, women and children and the
barking of dogs. Above such a din, only a thin falsetto keyed in a high pitch could
have been heard, as anybody may verify for himself. The gongs and drums were also
used as a means of attracting attention; they always preceded the plays and could be
heard a mile away, thus serving the purpose of street posters for the movies. When
staged in a modern theatre building, the volume of noise thus produced is truly terrific,
but somehow the Chinese have adapted themselves to it, as the Americans have
adapted themselves to jazz. They want noise and they want life to get a "kick" out of
it. Time will erase all this, and Chinese theatrical shows will eventually be tamed and
"civilized" when they are housed in modern theatre buildings.
From a purely literary point of view, Chinese dramatic works contain a type of poetry
which far surpasses the T'ang lyrics in power and beauty. It is my firm belief that,
lovely as the T'ang poetry is, we have to go to the dramas and the odd dramatic songs
(hsiaotiao} to find some of China's greatest poetry. For classical poetry moves more
or less along certain traditional patterns of thought and style. It has a cultivated,
super-refined technique, but it lacks grandeur and power and richness. The feeling one
gets on turning from classical poetry to poetry in the dramas (and Chinese dramas are
essentially regarded, as has been pointed out, as a collection of poems) is like turning
from an exquisite plum branch in a vase to one's ontside garden, so much superior in
freshness, richness and variety.
Chinese lyrics are dainty, but never long and never very powerful. By their very
terseness, narrative and descriptive passages are necessarily limited in character. In
the dramas the scope and style of poetry are different. Words are used which would
have been scoffed at by the court critics as vulgar. Images arise, and dramatic
situations are presented which call for a wider range of literary power and which
dearly would lie outside the province of the lyric. Human emotions reach a he ight
unattainable by the exquisite quatrains or eight lines. The language itself, which is the
pehhua, being free from the classical bondage, achieves a freedom, naturalness and
virility entirely undreamed of before. It is a language taken raw from the people's
mouths, and shaped into beauty by writers who felt themselves free of the classical
standards and who relied solely on their artistic sense of sound and rhythm. Some
masters of the Yuan drama used a T^W patois with an inimitable beauty of its own,
which defies all translation either into modern Chinese or into any foreign language. It
can only be suggested in the following:
Muzzy, dizzy, lackadaisical, I'm squatting smug-smugly on
an earthen divan.
Clatter, patter, the old p'op'o is shaking her coarse-great-big
grain-pan.
Lousy, slouchy lies the donkey under the willow, his legs
sprawling,
Lapping, patting, that coolie's hand on the donkey's neck is
pawing.
Oh, wake up a while!
Oh, wake up a while!
Time like a bullet past a window is flying!
桵a Chihyuan: Huangliangmeng.
(
Writers of dramatic poetry had to conform to the exigencies of the operatic airs, but
the lines were longer, the insertion of extra syllables was allowed and the rhythm was
broader and more suitable to the vernacular language in which it was written. The
liberation of metre achieved in the Sung tgu originating in songs and set to these airs,
already provided for a metre of irregular lengths, obeying the rhythm of the spoken
rather than the written language. This metre was still more emancipated in the dramas.
As an approximate example of this irregular metre, I give here an English rendering
of passages in the Western Chamber (a masterpiece of the first order in Chinese
literature), which describe the beauty of Inging, the heroine:
Before she spoke, she had reddened,
Like a cherry ripe-broken,
Like a statue white, molten;
In a moment,
She'd have spoken
A string of notes sweet and golden.
When she turned sideways, her beauty was described in the
following manner:
Sideways inclining,
Her jade hair-pin declining,
Brows d la palace like the new moon reclining,
Into her black velvet temples resigning.
When she moved it was described:
Now she moves her steps, cunning, pretty,
Her waist soft like a southern ditty,
So gracefully slender,
So helplessly tender,
Like weeping willows before a zephyr giddy.
It is interesting to note here that rhythm as understood in Chinese dramatic poetry and
in Chinese music is different from the regular rhythm in Western poetry and music.
There is no reason why the two fundamental metres of twos and threes should not be
used in some kind of regular combination in English poetry. This has been done with
great success in the Sung t and Yiian dramas, producing a more modulated rhythm
than the straight use of twos or threes throughout the line. The idea is worth
experiment by some qualified English poets.
Through its immense popularity the theatre has achieved a place in the national
Chinese life very nearly corresponding to its logical place in an ideal republic. Apart
from teaching the people an intense love of music, it has taught the Chinese people,
over ninety per cent of whom are illiterate, a knowledge 3f history truly amazing,
crystallizing, as it were, the folklore and entire historical and literary tradition in plays
of charactersthat have captured the heart and imagination of the common men and
women. Thus any amah has a livelier conception than I have of many historical
heroes like Kuan Yii, Liu Pei, Ts'ao Ts'ao, Hsueh Jenkwei, Hsiieh Tingshan and Yang
Kweifei from her intimate knowledge of Chinese plays, as I was prevented from
attending the theatres in my childhood through my missionary education, and had to
learn it all piecemeal from the cold pages of history books. Before my teens I knew
Joshua's trumpets blew down the walls of Jericho, but I did not know until I was about
thirty that when Mengchiangnii cried over the bones of her husband who had died
building the Great Wall in conscript labour, the torrent of her tears washed away a
section of the Great Wall. This is a type of ignorance that cannot be found among the
illiterate Chinese.
But the theatre, besides popularizing history and music among the people, has an
equally important cultural function in providing the people with all their moral
notions of good and evil. Practically all the standardized Chinese notions of loyal
ministers and filial sons and brave warriors and faithful wives and chaste maidens and
intriguing maid-servants af e reflected in the current Chinese plays. Represented in
the form of stories with human characters, whom they hate or love as the case may be,
they sink deep into their moral consciousness. Ts'ao Ts'ao's hypocrisy, Min Tzu's filial piety, Wenchiin's romance, Inging's passion, Yang Kweifei's pampered tastes, Ch' in
Kwei's treason, Yen Sung's greed and cruelty, Chuko Liang's strategy, Chang Fei's
quick temper, and Mulien's religious sanctity梩 hey all .become associated in the
Chinese minds with their ethical tradition and become their concrete conceptions of
good and evil conduct.
The story of the Romance of the Guitar (P' ip'achi] is given here to show the type of
moral influence of the theatre in general on the Chinese public and as an example of
the kind of story, with a direct appeal to domestic loyalty, that has captured the
popular fancy. It is distinguished neither for dramatic unity in the modern sense, being
composed of forty-two acts and the action extending over years, nor for delicacy of
imagination which is better shown in The Peony Pavilion (Moutanfing), nor for poetic
beauty which is better shown in the Western Chamber (Hsihsiang), nor for grandeur
of passion as in The Hall of Longevity (CKangshmgtien}. But the Romance of the
Guitar nevertheless holds its own in popularity by its sheer appeal to the beauty of
domestic love and loyalty, which always finds a warm place in the Chinese heart. Its
influence is more truly typical.
There was a talented scholar of the Han Dynasty whose name was Ts'ai Yung.
Because his parents were old, he forsook all ambitions for a political career and was
content to stay with his parents at home. He had just married a girl, Chao Wuniang,
and the play opens with a scene of their happy family feast in their garden in spring.
There was, however, an imperial edict calling for literary talents in the country, and
the magistrate had reported Ts'ai's name to the court. This meant a trip to the capital
and long years of absence, and there was a struggle between loyalty to the Emperor
and filial piety and wedded love. His old father, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, urged him
to go, while his mother, with her sounder common sense, opposed. Ts'ai finally had to
go, leaving his aged parents in the care of his young bride and a good friend by the
name of Chang.
Ts'ai was successful in his examinations, coming out as the first scholar of the land.
Then trouble began. For the prime minister Niu had an only daughter, a beautiful and
talented girl, whom he loved more than anything else on earth. Ts'ai was forced into
marriage with her against his wish, and on their wedding night, with all worldly glory
before him, his happiness was marred by the thought of Ghao Wuniang. The ministers
daughter found out the truth and planned with her husband to ask permission to go
home and see their parents, but her father was greatly angered and would not hear of
it.
In the meanwhile the conditions at home were going from bad to worse. Chao
Wuniang was the only one supporting the family by her handiwork, and there came a
famine. Luckily there was famine relief from the public grainage, and Ghao received
her share. On her way home, however, she was robbed of her rice, and was going to
jump into an old well when she thought of her responsibility toward the old people and desisted. Then she went to see Chang, Ts'ai's friend, to borrow a handful of rice to
feed her parents with, while she herself ate the husks in secret. The passage where she
sings about the husks, comparing them to herself, parted from the rice which was
