compared to her husband, is by consensus of opinion the most moving part of the
whole story.
Soon, however, the parents found this out and asked her forgiveness for past
complaints against the thin meals. But old Mrs. Ts'ai soon died, and old Ts'ai himself
fdl ill. She nursed him through his illness, and when he, too, died, she cut off her hair
and sold it to defray part of the funeral expenses. With the help of her good friend
Chang, she built her fatherin- law's grave with her own hands. Tired and hungry, she
lay down on the ground beside the grave, and in her dream she saw that the God of
the Earth had taken pity on her and sent two spirits, the White Monkey and the Black
Tiger, to help her in the work. When she awoke she found, to her great joy and
surprise, that the grave had been finished, and she told the story to Chang.
Chang then advised her to set out to the capital in search of her husband. So she
painted a portrait of her husband, and disguising herself as a nun, she begged her way
to the capital, carrying a guitar. Going through all kinds of hardships, she finally
arrived at Loyang, and it happened there was a Buddhist celebration at a temple,
where she therefore went and hung her husband's picture in public. Ts'ai, the
bridegroom, happened to come to the temple to pray for his parents, and recognizing
his own picture had it taken home. Chao Wuniang appeared the next day at Ts'ai's
home as a nun, begging for alms. She was accepted by the prime minister's daughter,
who sweetly conspired with her to test her husband's heart. They were then happily
reunited, and the play ends with the two wives officially honoured by the Emperor
himself.
Such are the elements which make a popular play in China. The story has that element
of nobility which makes it popular with the Chinese as the society's doings are
popular with English newspaper readers. It has an official examination, which plays
such an important part in the changes of fortune in all Chinese stories. But more than
that it shows a faithful wife and devoted daughter, a pair of aged parents in need of
care, a true friend in trouble, a model madame who was not jealous of her rival, and
finally a high official somewhat in love with his own power and glory. These are
some of the elements in the Chinese drama on which the public are fed, the same
elements that make moving pictures like Way Down East and Over the Hill great
popular hits in China. They also show the Chinese as a profoundly emotional people,
with a weakness for sentimental plots.
X. THE NOVEL
Chinese novelists were afraid to let people know that they could condescend to such a thing as the writing of novels. Take the case of a comparatively recent work, Tehsao
Paoyen> written by Hsia Erhming in the eighteenth century. He wrote very original
essays and beautiful poetry, and many travel and biographical sketches like all
conventional scholars, now collected in Huanyilhsienchi. But he also wrote the
Tehsao Paqyen, and his authorship of this novel can be proved beyond a doubt
through poems and essays in his collected works. However, as late as the autumn of
1890 his dutiful great-grandson reprinted the Huanyuhsienchi in order to perpetuate
Hsia's name, but he dared not or would not, anyway did not, include the novel,
incontrovertibly Hsia's best work, in the list of his literary works. Only as late as 1917
did Dr. Hu Shih definitely establish and clarify the authorship of the Red Chamber
Dream as written by Ts'ao Hsiiehch' in, undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the
greatest master of Chinese prose (in pehhua). We still do not know who was the true
author ofCkinp' inmei (Gold-Vase-Plum), and we are still in doubt as to which of the
two alleged authors, Shih Nai-an or Lo Kuanchung, was the author of All Men Are
Brothers.
Characteristic of this attitude toward the novel are the beginning and ending of the
Red Chamber Dream. A Taoist monk found the story inscribed on a huge rock, which
was the extra one left behind by the legendary goddess Ntiwo when she was using
36,500 rocks to mend a huge crack in the sky, caused by a terrific fight of "Olympian"
giants. This rock was one hundred and twenty feet high and two hundred and forty
feet wide. The Taoist monk copied the story from the rock inscriptions, and when it
came to Ts'ao Hsiiehch' in's hands he worked at it for ten years and revised it five
times, dividing it into chapters, and he wrote a verse on it:
These pages tell of babbling nonsense,
A string of sad tears they conceal.
They all laugh at the author's folly;
But who could know its magic appeal?
At the end of the story, when one of the most tragic and deeply human dramas was
enacted, and the hero had become a monk and the soul which had given him
intelligence and capacity for love and suffering had returned to the rock as Niiwo left
it thousands of years ago, the same Taoist monk reappeared. This monk is said to have
copied the story again and one day he came to the author's study and put the
manuscripts in his care. Ts'ao Hstiehch' in replied, laughingly: "This is only babbling
nonsense. It is good for killing time with a few good friends after a wine-feast or
while chatting under the lamp- light. If you ask me how I happen to know the hero of
the story, and want all the details, you are taking it too seriously." Hearing what he
said, the monk threw the manuscripts down on his table and went away laughing,
tossing his head and mumbling as he went: "Really it contains only babbling nonsense.
Both the author himself and the man who copies it, as well as its readers, do not know
what is behind it all. This is only a literary pastime, written for pleasure and self-satisfaction." And it is said that, later on, someone wrote the following verse on
it:
When the story is sad and touching,
Then sadder is its tomfoolery.
But we are all in the same dream,
Do not sneer at its buffoonery.
But the tomfooliery, sad and touching as it was, was extremely good. Because such
literature was written for pleasure and self-satisfaction, its creation was determined by
a true creative impulse and not by love of money or fame. And because it was
ostracized literature in respectable circles, it escaped the banal influence of all
classical, conventional standards. So far from giving the author money or fame, the
authorship of a novel could endanger a scholar's personal safety.
At Kiangyin, the home of Shih Nai-an, the author of All Men Are Brothers, there is
still a legend about what Shih did in order to get himself out of trouble. In this legend,
Shih was credited with the gift of foreknowledge of events. He had written this novel,
and was living in retirement, having refused to serve the new Ming Dynasty. One day
the Emperor came with Liu Powen, Shih's classmate and now the Emperor's
right-hand man. Liu saw the manuscripts of this novel on his table, and recognizing
Shih's superior talent, Liu plotted for his ruin. It was a time when the security of the
new dynasty was not yet ensured, and Shih's novel, advocating as it did the common
"brotherhood of all men," including the robbers, contained rather dangerous thoughts.
So one day, on this basis, Liu petitioned the Emperor to have Shih summoned to the
capital for trial. When the warrant came, Shih knew that his manuscripts had been
stolen and realized that it would mean his death, so he borrowed five hundred tads
from a friend with which to bribe the boatman and asked the latter to make the voyage
as slowly as possible. Therefore on the way to Nanking he hurriedly composed a
fantastic supernatural novel, the Fengshenpangy1 in order to convince the Emperor of
his insanity. Under this cover of insanity, Shih saved his own life.
Thus surreptitiously the novel grew, like a wayward flower, casting its glance on the
lonely wayfarer in a sheer effort to please. Like the wayward flower, too, impressively
growing on the surface of a barren rock, it grew without cultivation, and it gave
without expecting return, from a sheer inner creative impulse. Sometimes such a
flower gives only a single blossom in a quarter of a century, but how that blossom
shines! That blossom seems to be the justification for its existence; it has drained its
life-blood and having blossomed, the flower dies. Such is the origin of all good tales
and all good novels. So did Cervantes write, and so did Boccaccio, out of the sheer
delight of creation. Money had nothing to do with it Even in modern times, where
there are royalties and copyright protection, money is purely an accident. No amount
of money can make an uncreative mind tell a good story. A secure living made the writing by our creative minds possible, but a secure living never created anything.
Money sent Charles Dickens on his American tour, but money could not produce a
David Copperfield. Our great story-tellers, like Defoe and Fielding and SMh Nai-an
and Ts'ao Hsuehch' in, wrote because they had a story to tell and because they were
born story-tellers. Nature seemed to have placed Ts'ao Hstiehch' in in a fabulously
luxurious home surrounding and then blasted this life all into nothingness, so that in
his old age, as a bankrupt scholar and in his decrepit hut, he could recall it all like an
awakened dreamer, and having relived that dream in his imagination, he felt
compelled to put it down as he relived it, and we call it literature.
1 The authorship of this novel is really
I regard the Red Chamber Dream as one of the world's masterpieces- Its
character-drawing, its deep and rich humanity, its perfect finish of style and its story
entitle it to that. Its characters live, more real and more familiar to us than our living
friends, and each speaks an accent which we can recognize. Above all, it has what we
call a great story:
A fabulously beautiful Chinese house-garden; a great official family, with four
daughters and a son growing up and some beautiful female cousins of the same age,
living a life of continual raillery and bantering laughter; a number of extremely
charming and clever maid-servants, some of the plotting, intriguing type and some
quick-tempered but true, and some secretly in love with the master; a few faithless
servants' wives involved in little family jealousies and scandals; a father for ever
absent from home on official service and two or three daughters- in-law managing the
complicated routine of the whole household with order and precision, the ablest, most
gifted, most garrulous and most beloved of all, Fengchieh, being entirely illiterate; the
"hero," Paoyii, a boy in puberty, with a fair intelligence and a great love of female
company, sent, as we axe made to understand, by God to go through this
phantasmagoria of love and suffering, overprotected lie the sole heir of all great
families in China, doted on by his grandmother, the highest authority of the household,
but extremely afraid of his father, completely admired by all his female cousins and
catered for by his maid-servants, who attended to his bath and sat in watch over him
at night; his love for Taiyu, his orphan cousin staying in their house, who was
suffering from consumption and was fed on birds'-nest soup, easily outshining the rest
in beauty and poetry, but a little too clever to be happy like the more stupid ones,
opening her love to Paoyii with the purity and intensity of a young maiden's heart;
another female cousin, Paots'a, also in love with Paoyii, but plumper and more
practical-minded and considered a better wife by the elders; the final deception,
arrangements for the wedding to Paots'a by the mothers without Paoyti's or Taiyu's
knowledge, Taiyli not hearing of it until shortly before the wedding, which made her
laugh hysterically and sent her to her death, and Paoyti not hearing of it till the
wedding night; Paoyii's discovery of the deception by his own parents, his becoming
half- idiotic and losing his mind, and finally his becoming a monk.
All of this is depicted against the rise and fall of a great family, the crescendo of piling
family misfortunes extending over the last third of the story, taking one's breath away
like the Fall of the House of Usher. Its heyday of pleasure was passed; bankruptcy
hung in the air; instead of a wine- feast under the mid-autumn moon, we hear ghosts
wailing in the silent courtyard; the beautiful girls grew up and married off into
different homes with different luck; Paoyii's personal maid-servants were sent away
and married, and the most devoted one, Ch' ingwen, died chaste and true. The
phantasmagoria vanished.
If, as some Chinese critics say, the Red Chamber Dream could ruin a country, it
should have ruined China long ago. Taiyti and Paots'a have become the nation's
sweethearts, and a number of other types are there, too: the impetuous Ch' ingwen, the
feminine Hsijen, the romantic Hsiangytin, the womanly T'anch'un, the garrulous
Fengchieh, the talented Miaoyti, all there for one to settle one's choice upon, each
