Harmony Garden: The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716-1798) 0700715258, 9780700715251

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Harmony Garden The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716-1798)

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Harmony Garden The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716-1798) J. D.

Schmidt

i~ ~~o~1~;n~~:up LONDON AND NEW YORK

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

First published in 2003 by RoutiedgeCurzon Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 100l7, USA Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2003 ]. D. Schmidt Typeset in Sabon by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 13 978-0-700-71525-1 (hbk)

Contents

Endpapers: Harmony Garden Preface Chronology Glossary of Chinese literary terms The Thirteen Confucian Classics Abbreviations

VB

xv XVi XiX XXi

I BIOGRAPHY Chapter One The early years In Harmony Garden Chapter Two Chapter Three The later years II YUAN MEl'S Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six

LITERARY THEORY AND PRACTICE The principles of poetry The practice of poetry Evaluation

1 3 46 96

151 153 209 244

MAJOR STYLES AND THEMES Chapter Seven Song-dynasty verse and Yuan Mei's "normal" style Chapter Eight The historical style and the Qing re-examination of history Chapter Nine The political style and the Literary Inquisition Chapter Ten The didactic style Chapter Eleven Narrative poetry Chapter Twelve Eccentric verse and the Yangzhou artists Chapter Thirteen The exploration of nature

287

IV APPENDIX: A TOUR OF HARMONY GARDEN

529

V TRANSLATIONS

543

Bibliography Index

740

ill

289 338 368

393 415 452 496

712

v

Dedication

This book is warmly dedicated to the memory of Mrs. I-Min Pao Han ~ -~. Mrs. Han, a graduate of the Literature Department of Dongbei University, loved classical Chinese poetry throughout her life, and especially the verse of Yuan Mei. Mrs. Han was the mother of Mr. Howard H. D. Han -** 3l"Lt, Chairman of the Himalaya Foundation, which has so generously supported the publication of this work.

VI

Preface

Poetry in the classical language was always regarded as the most important literary form by Chinese critics before the twentieth century, but the verse of late imperial China, the age when Yuan Mei lived, is largely terra incognita. A few Chinese scholars, particularly the students of Prof. Qian Esun (Zhonglian) of Suzhou University, have published excellent articles and books on the classical poetry of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) during the last fifteen years or so, but very little of this scholarship has been noticed by Western (or even most Chinese) specialists, who tend to concentrate on the earlier periods of Chinese literary history. Ever since the 1911 revolution that overthrew the dynasty, the study of Qing verse has been impeded by a number of prejudices and misconceptions, which include (1) hostility to the culture of the period in general, for the most part inspired by Chinese opposition to its Manchu rulers, (2) a widely held belief that there is no original poetry after about the thirteenth century in China and that the mainstream of literature during the Qing dynasty is represented by the vernacular novel, (3) a concentration on Qing poetic theory (as opposed to poetry itself) on the part of the minority of scholars interested in the age's classical literature. One still confronts hostility to Qing culture in its totality among some Chinese scholars today, but most students of Chinese culture, both East and West, now forgive the rulers of the dynasty for their sin of having been non-Chinese "barbarians" and admire both its political and cultural accomplishments, the latter including boldly innovative philosophies, China's most outstanding vernacular novels, as well as some of its more original painting and calligraphy. The myth that classical Chinese poetry petrified at some point in the past has died very slowly. When I was still in university, one of my professors told me that no verse of worth had been written after the tenth century (he said that his teacher believed that the cut-off date was the third century, but he had been mistaken!); then further research of Chinese and Western scholars advanced the "demise" of classical poetry to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while in recent years a few patient researchers have been gradually pushing the date closer and closer to our present age. Vll

Preface

Most Qing critics thought they were living in an era of great classical poetry, and they would have been amazed by current prejudices against their dynasty's literature. Our knowledge of Qing verse is still quite sketchy, but I think that the following study will demonstrate that at least as far as the major genres of didactic (i.e. philosophical) and narrative poetry are concerned, the Qing dynasty was China's Golden Age. Although the development of political verse was somewhat hampered by the Literary Inquisitions of the eighteenth century, poetry on history flourished, too, largely due to new approaches to the study of China's past, including a strong skepticism about all received traditions. Even such a familiar form of lyrical verse as nature poetry underwent great changes during the Qing dynasty, a phenomenon that was closely linked to the Qing thinkers' rejection of neo-Confucian metaphysics, Daoism, and Buddhism in favor of a more rationalistic and quasi-scientific view of the world. Finally, Qing-dynasty eccentric verse represents a complete reintepretation of eighth-century literary innovations that had largely lain dormant for nearly a thousand years and that were closely linked to the exciting painting of the age, the subject of much interest among Western art scholars during the last few decades. It is true that Qing poets were still writing in a classical language that was farther and farther away from the vernacular and that they were using the same poetic forms current in the seventh century, but the style or content of their verse could hardly have been confused with that of poetry before their time. One reason for the current neglect of Qing verse in both China and the West is the view that the vernacular novel is the most important form of literature during the dynasty. This notion is largely a product of the 1920's, when Chinese scholars came under the influence of second- and third-hand accounts of now largely discredited nineteenth-century European literary theories, which stated that the spirit of each age is best expressed by a specific literary genre. Chinese scholars were eager to pigeon-hole all earlier literature according to such ideas, and the formulations they came up with entered school and university curricula at that time and are still adhered to at the present. Thus, most educated Chinese today will still tell you that if you wish to read poetry in the shi form, you should look at the works of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and that the vernacular novel is the only worthwhile literary form of the Qing period. Qing writers would have found this idea preposterous; although a fair amount of fiction criticism was written during their age, critics wrote many times more about classical poetry, and no one would have entertained the idea that fiction was more important than verse. The current interest in Qing-dynasty poetry criticism is laudable, but it has had an almost equally insidious effect on the study of poetry. Before I started working on this book, numerous (almost too numerous) studies of Yuan Mei's literary theory existed in Chinese and Japanese, but very Vlll

Preface

little had been written about his poetry. This situation has been partially rectified by a few good Chinese articles and even one book published in recent years (notably the contributions of Wang Yingzhi, a student of Qian Esun,) but it is still much easier to study the literary theory of Wang Shizhen, Zhao Yi, Weng Fanggang, and Shen Deqian in Chinese rather than read about their poetry. It would seem that quite a few scholars believe that once you understand an author's literary theory, you do not need to read his poetic creations! Qing-dynasty literary theory is, indeed, impressive in both quality and quantity, and I have taken great pains to explicate Yuan Mei's famous contributions in this area, but it would seem to me that the only sensible way to understand the literature of the Qing dynasty is to study the works themselves. Why do the current misunderstandings of Qing-dynasty verse continue to persist, even among many Chinese scholars? The lay public in China can be forgiven for their ignorance, since they are not responsible for the school curriculum to which they have been subjected; nor were they the authors of such man-made disasters as World War II and the Cultural Revolution, or even of the explosive growth of the new consumer culture, all of which have played a role in the decline of classical literary studies in China. Scholars might be considered more culpable, but anyone who proposes to study classical verse during the Qing dynasty confronts some formidable obstacles: (1) the dearth of good modern editions of poets' works or useful commentaries on the poems of the more difficult authors (a problem that is, however, being solved slowly by a few dedicated scholars and publishers in China) and (2) the huge mass of material bequeathed to us from the age of the Manchus. The collected works of at least seven thousand Qing poets survive, and poems by about another thirty thousand authors are found in anthologies. No single person could hope to study more than a small fraction of this literature in a lifetime, but the only way that our understanding of the period will improve measurably is through a careful and thorough study of its literary riches, a task that will take several generations of patient labor. At present there are very few monographs on even the major poets of the Qing dynasty; in fact, who the major poets are is still very much open to debate, because so little research has been done. Why have I chosen Yuan Mei for this monograph? I first hoped to write a general history of Qing poetry in English, but when I was confronted by such a huge mass of material, I realized that if I cast my nets too widely, I could never do much better than copy the received opinions of others, so I decided that I would at least attempt a thorough study of one important author. I do not claim that Yuan Mei is necessarily the greatest eighteenthcentury Chinese poet, because I have not read enough poetry of his age to make such a claim with a straight face, but at least I am reasonably certain that he was the most popular poet of his age, judging from the many IX

Preface

references (both appreciative and hostile) to his work during his lifetime and immediately after. Yuan Mei himself would have denied the validity of the idea of a "greatest" poet anyway, and he was only interested in separating "good" poetry from "bad." That Yuan wrote much "good" poetry I do not doubt one bit, and I think I am safe in claiming that much of it is "great," too. In any case, a study of his verse is a starting point for any serious investigation of eighteenth-century Chinese literature, and I hope that this book will inspire others to follow it with more studies of Qing poetry. We really do not need any more general histories of Qing verse until more of the major poets of the dynasty have been examined in detail, for until our knowledge improves such works will only repeat earlier prejudices and misconceptions. Yuan Mei is the subject of one of the few studies of Qing-dynasty poetry published earlier in a Western language, Arthur Waley's witty and informative book of 1956. This is certainly one of the most entertaining works on classical Chinese poetry ever written, but Waley's account focuses almost exclusively on Yuan's biography and has only a little to say about such important topics as his philosophy or his literary theory. Waley's translations of Yuan's verse and prose in this book maintain the high standards for which he was justly famous, but, unfortunately, his interest in Yuan Mei's life caused him to ignore some of his subject's most creative poetry. Furthermore, knowledge of Qing literature was so limited in Waley's age (or at least he had so little contact with Chinese experts in the field, who consisted for the most part of old-style scholars left over from the Qing bureacracy) that he failed to provide much literary context for the reader who wishes to comprehend how Yuan Mei's work fits into the writing of his age or how Qing poetry fits into Chinese literature as a whole. My own interest in the latter problem has turned this book into an essay on Qing verse in general (within the limits of my knowledge,) for although my primary interest is to provide a fair and full portrait of Yuan Mei's contributions to Chinese literature, I feel that I have had to provide a good deal of background to show his uniqueness and the uniqueness of his Qingdynasty predecessors and contemporaries. For example, the small quantity of articles published in either Chinese or Western languages about Qing narrative verse has forced me to provide a short summary of narrative poetry (and theory) before that age and then discuss the contributions of the first major Qing narrative poet, Wu Weiye, before I can possibly make sense of Yuan Mei's own contributions in this area. Since this book contains the first substantial and representative selection of Yuan Mei's verse published in a Western language, it is necessary to say something about my selection criteria and translation methods. I have not selected poems I found uninteresting in the original, but I have attempted x

Preface

to translate a wide variety of works that represent all the major styles and themes explored by Yuan Mei. I believe that earlier translations have been too narrow in their selection criteria with the result that some of his best verse has been ignored by scholars. Not all of Yuan's poems are worth rendering into English, but a large number are, and I have obviously left out many excellent works, including some long pieces that proved particularly difficult to translate. I have not rendered any of his excellent prose-poetry into English, because although it is of high quality, traditional Chinese genre theory classifies it with his prose. A proper treatment of Yuan Mei's prose writings would require at least another monograph, and I have translated these only to the extent that they help us understand his life, literary criticism, or poetry. Generally speaking, I have tried to steer a course between literal and literate translations, tending to favor the second somewhat more. I see little point in creating pidgin English renderings of Yuan Mei's poems, for they will be of little interest to more than a handful of specialists (a small but vocal minority of whom demand that Chinese verse be translated with the deadly literalness one might expect from beginning students in a graduate seminar.) Whenever I judge that my translations have diverged a bit too far from the original, I have supplied more literal renderings. Sometimes I translate Yuan Mei's historical and literary allusions quite precisely, but frequently I paraphrase them, in the interest of readability, supplying a literal translation and explanation of his allusions in my notes. I encourage first-time, non-specialist readers to consult the notes to translations only when what they are reading does not make sense. I sincerely hope that at least some of the translations in this book convey the great beauty of Yuan Mei's originals. His verse does not challenge a translator as much as the works of some Qing-dynasty authors, but it is rarely easy to translate, and I hope that other scholars will forgive the mistakes that undoubtedly remain in my renderings. Let me conclude this discussion by mentioning certain conventions I have followed in the translations. Since many of the poems I study are longer than most earlier Chinese verse, I have broken many of them up into four-line units resembling the stanzas of Western poetry. There is no basis for this division in Chinese verse form or literary theory, the basic unit of classical poetry being the couplet, but my use of this convention is certainly easier on the reader's eyes and makes the poems simpler to follow. Chinese calculate their ages according to sui, and a person is one sui old when in the first year of life, so Chinese celebrate their fiftieth birthday when Westerners would celebrate their forty-ninth. Normally I convert Chinese sui to Western years, but I retain the Chinese age, if it seems intended to be approximate, or if a precise Western age would disturb the sense or beauty of a poem (e.g. substituting forty-nine for fifty in a birthday poem.) Xl

Preface

In both the translations of Yuan Mei's verse and in other parts of this book, I have retained the lunar calendar, and hence I speak of things happening in the first (lunar) month and so forth, giving Western dates in only a few instances. This practice may confuse some readers, but I have done this because of the close link between Chinese poetry and the cycle of the seasons and traditional festivals. Chinese New Year (i.e. the first of the first lunar month) normally falls in late January or early February of the Western calendar, so one can convert lunar dates to Western by adding approximately twenty-five to thirty-five days to the former. In the part of China where Yuan Mei spent most of his life, the sixth and seventh lunar months (roughly July and August) are hot and humid, while the eight, ninth, and tenth months (September, October, and November) are pleasantly cool. Snow falls occasionally during the eleventh, twelfth, and first months (December, January, and February,) the weather remaining quite chilly into the beginning of the third month (April.) It usually rains a good deal for at least a couple of weeks during the fourth and fifth months (May and June,) with the weather alternately hot and cool but usually very humid. For the most part, I convert Chinese weights and measures into the system still prevalent in the United States (the so-called "British" system,) because the metric units have not been with the English-speaking world long enough to sound poetic. I have left Ii, the principal measure of distance in ancient China (slightly more than one-third a mile) untranslated, since many Western readers have heard of this unit, and most attempts at conversion lead to unpoetic fractions of miles. For translations of official titles, I follow Hucker's handy dictionary, but when listing the dates when pre-Song scholars passed their jinshi examinations, I merely write that term in transliteration rather than rendering it as "Metropolitan Graduate." An examination of Hucker's entry about the term will show the reason why. I have appended a brief glossary of classical Chinese literary terms for those who have no background in the field, along with a short guide to the Thirteen Confucian Classics, constantly mentioned in Yuan Mei's writings, as well as a short chronological table. I have attempted to identify all names of persons mentioned in the translated passages, using a wide range of biographical and historical sources. These have been converted into their normal form (i.e. family name and ming,) even when the zi ("style") or hao ("courtesy name") of individuals have gained wide currency. When I have been unable to identify an individual, I have left his name in the form found in the original text and supplied Chinese characters following its pinyin spelling. Since most names appear as zi or hao in the original texts, I have had to make much use of Yang Tingfu's and Yang Tongfu's excellent dictionary for Qing-dynasty alternate names, but there is sometimes the possibility that I may have confused a few contemporaries who had the same zi or hao. XlI

Preface

I have used the pinyin spelling system for Chinese words and names throughout, because although I am just as aware of its shortcomings as others, it is now the official system used in China and in the Western media. Since most earlier scholarship on classical Chinese literature used (and some still uses) the Wade-Giles system, readers will notice a few descrepancies between Chinese names cited in the main body of this book and some of its Western-language references, but these should not present great difficulties. My sole intentional departure from pinyin spelling is the use of Shaanxi ~ ViI and Shanxi JJ ViI to represent the names of two provinces otherwise spelled identically in pinyin without tone markings. Manchu and Mongol names present special difficulties for students of Yuan Mei's age, but with the exception of the names of certain well-known figures from the older generation (e.g. Ortai) I have treated them as if they were Chinese names. By Yuan Mei's age sinicized Manchus and Mongols (e.g. Yin Jishan and Fa Shishan) were using their names much like Han Chinese, and in many cases they were already well on the way to forgetting their mother tongues. My Chinese software has forced me to write all Chinese (as well as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) names in traditional Chinese characters, so I apologize to scholars whose names may have been written incorrectly as a result of the conversion of the simplified Japanese and Chinese scripts to older forms. Many individuals have aided me during the long gestation period of this book. I have received considerable assistance from the most famous scholar of Qing poetry living in China today, Prof. Qian Esun, now nearing the age of ninety, and his two learned students, Professors Wang Yingzhi and Ma Yazhong. 1 Prof. Wang has published a larger number of books and articles about Yuan Mei than any earlier scholar, and practically every chapter of this work is indebted to his research. Prof. Chen Shaosong, who teaches at Nanjing Normal University, has also answered many questions about my translations and supplied me much useful information about Qing-dynasty narrative verse. I also constantly pestered Prof. Chen Yunji ~-* fG -t of Fudan University, Prof. Liu Cheng of Shanghai Normal University, and Prof. Liu Yongxiang of East China Normal University for help with difficulties I encountered. I am also grateful to Prof. Zhu Zejie of Hangzhou for mailing me a copy of his excellent but out-ofprint history of Qing poetry. I also want to thank my graduate students, particularly Lap Lam of Hong Kong, for the many valuable suggestions they made when we read some of Yuan Mei's more challenging poems in graduate seminars, and my colleague, Prof. Donald Baker, a noted Korean specialist, for his help with Korean names. A former teacher and colleague, Prof. Florence Chia-ying Yeh Chao, has also answered a number of difficult questions about translations. The mistakes that remain in my translations are the result of me ignoring the good advice of all these learned individuals. Xlll

Preface

My work would have been impossible without excellent library facilities, and I am grateful to the staff of the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia, especially Mr. Hsieh Yim, Chinese Bibliographer, and Ms. Linda Joe, Head, both retired now, and to the staffs of the Library of East China Normal University in Shanghai, the Library of Fudan University, the Shanghai Library, and the Nanjing Library, the four Chinese libraries where the majority of my research materials were gathered. This book would never have been finished without the assistance of the Committe for Cultural Planning, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China for the translation sections and of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for several research trips to China. The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada has provided generous publication support, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. However, I especially wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Howard Han, Chairman of the Himalaya Foundation in Taipei, who constantly encouraged me in my efforts and made it possible to publish a book of this size. Last of all, I must thank my wife Xia Wei for putting up with the many lost weekends and vacations that this work represents. At many times during the hot summers we spent in the Shanghai region, she must have wondered why she did not marry an expert on Icelandic literature. I thank her for seven years of happiness. Note 1 Chinese characters have been supplied only for the names of scholars whose works have not been cited in the bibliography.

XIV

Chronology

Legendary sage kings Xia -l. Shang -;!If Western Zhou ~ %l Eastern Zhou %l

(before 2205 B.C.) (traditional dates, 2205-1766 B.C.) (traditional dates, 1766-1122 B.C.) (1122-770 B.C.) (770-256 B.C.) (Spring and Autumn Period 770-476 B.C.) (Warring States 475-221 B.C.) (221-206 B.C.) (206 B.C.-A.D. 9) (A.D. 25-220) (220-265) (265-317) (317-420)

*-

Qin ~ Western Han ~ it Eastern Han it Three Kingdoms ;.. il Western Jin ~ ~ Eastern Jin it Period of Division or Northern 31:.-*JJ and Southern Dynasties Sui ~ Tang Jf Five Dynasties 1i. R

*-

*-

m

(420-581) (581-618) (618-907) (907-960) (in the north, the south split into minor states) (960-1127) (1127-1279) (916-1125) (1115-1234) (in the north) (1271-1368) (1368-1644) (1644-1911)

Northern Song 31:. ~ Southern Song m~ Liao it Jin ~ Yuan ;it Ming II}] Qing

*

xv

Glossary of Chinese literary terms

ancient-style poetry (gushi -f; -ttl a form written in large quantities during all periods since the Han dynasty, which usually has rhymes on the final words of even-numbered lines and with either penta syllabic or heptasyllabic lines throughout but lacks the parallel structure and tonal restrictions of regulated poetry. ancient-style prose (guwen -f;~) a relatively free style of prose writing without the parallelism and rhymes of parallel prose.

ci

-t~

a form of poetry that first became popular during the late Tang dynasty, written as the lyrics for set musical tunes and with tight restrictions for the length of each line and the tones of words. eight-legged prose (baguwen j\.'}Jt~ or shiwen at~) a form primarily used in the civil service examinations during the Ming and Qing dynasties, characterized by a rigid division into eight sections and usually restricted to discussions of canonical Confucian texts, particularly the Four Books. heptasyllabic (qiyan -l::-t) poetry with seven syllables per line. hexasyllabic (liuyan /\ i) poetry with six syllables per line, quite unusual in shi poetry. level tone the first tone in ancient Chinese, corresponding roughly to the first two tones of modern Mandarin, except when they are derived from ancient Chinese words with final p, t, or k (so-called "entering-tone" words.) Speakers of standard Beijing Mandarin cannot distinguish entering-tone words without consulting a dictionary. Music Bureau poetry (yuefushi ~J1ht) a style of verse that arose during the Western Han dynasty, first created to be sung to popular tunes, and hence usually much less regular in meter XVi

Glossary of Chinese literary terms

than pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic shi poetry; this also includes later imitations of such verse. oblique tone a class of tones comprising the second (shang J:.., "rising,") third (qu -k, "leaving,") and fourth (ru A, "entering") tones of ancient Chinese, roughly equivalent to the third and fourth tones of modern Mandarin, except that some ancient fourth tones are expressed as Mandarin tones one to four. parallel The two lines of a couplet are said to be parallel when they match grammatically word by word. An example of such parallelism in a couplet from an early poem by Yuan Mei is: "This mountain district town is deserted, and shops close early;/Watch tower lamps seem distant, as my boat moors late." (" Shanxian cheng huang guandian zao;/Shulou deng yuan bochuan chi." J.J ~J~JrtMJ ff,.!f-I ~it-*lt~~,fJil,) a literal translation of which is: "Mountain district town deserted, close shops early;/Watch tower lamps distant, moor boats late." Here the noun "mountain" (shan) is parallel to the noun "watch" (shu;) the noun "district" (xian) is parallel to the noun "tower" (lou;) the noun "town" (cheng) is parallel to the noun "lamp" (deng;) the predicate adjective "deserted" (huang) is parallel to the predicate adjective "far" (yuan;) the verb "close" (guan) is parallel to the verb "moor" (bo;) the noun "shop" (dian) is parallel to the noun "boat" (chuan;) and the adjective "early" (zao) is parallel to the adjective "late" (chi.) The parallelism between words in couplets often involves more than grammatical concerns; e.g. "early" and "late" are opposite in meaning. See the complete poem translated on p. 545. parallel prose (piantiwen .lJit tt.:t.) a form of prose favoring pairs of sentences arranged parallel structure and frequently using rhyme.

III

grammatically

penta syllabic (wuyan .1i.-t) poetry with five syllables per line. prose-poem (fu M,) a highly irregular form of poetry mid-way between shi and prose and generally characterized by detailed description of objects and scenes. qu

1ifJ

a form of poetry first popular during the Yuan dynasty, written trJ preset tunes like ci but with even greater freedom to interpolate extra ph'tJ!~1l (1682-1763).100 In spite of his many official duties, Yuan was beginning to take the writing of poetry ever more seriously, and his first poem about poetry (see complete translation on page 180), dating from 1741, states: "In the end I conclude that a poet's poems/Result from much grinding, are literally cut from his guts!" Yuan continued to write highly allusive historical verse of the sort favored by court scholars eager to show off their learning, but he was slowly developing the superficially simple but witty verse that would become his hallmark in later years. His Manchu studies continued throughout 1741, but in 1742, the unimaginable happened; the brilliant, young scholar, who had displayed so much promise as a prose writer and poet, failed his Manchu examinations and was immediately demoted to become District Magistrate (Xianling ~~) of Lishui ij/t JJR, "Yuan Mei shixuan qianyan" it#:. #:iJf iW-t, Zhejiang shifan daxue xuebao fzhexue shehui kexuebanJ *0:~rp~k,*,*~[{r,* ~±.t-#'*JI&..] 4 [1987,]42-50;) Wang Mingchao J..~:A! ed., Yuan Mei shixuan it#:. #:iJf, Harbin, 1987; and Wang Yingzhi J.."* ,t, Yuan Mei shixuan it#:. #:iJf, Zhengzhou, 1993. An introduction to Wang Yingzhi's selection is to be found in Wu Diaogong !t"t}!] -0-, "Yuan Mei shixuanxu" it#:. ~t:iJfJf, SZDX 1 (1990,) 53-4. Please see the note at the beginning of the translation section for the method used for citing these modern commentaries in the notes below. For an unannotated selection of Yuan's poetry with extensive critical comments, see the most extensive and useful large anthology of Qing poetry to date, Qian Esun (Zhonglian) ~t-~ (1t~,) Qingshi jishi ihHc."f (hereafter abbreviated QSJS,) Nanjing, 1989, 5078-99. Some of the poems not originally included in the collected works were gathered together in Jiang Dunfu M:tt-t! ed., Suiyuan jiwai shi I'itIIl ~7Ht, Dadong shuju k~ -t $], Shanghai, 1915, 2 ceo See the genealogy proposed in Gu Yuanxiang, 19 and supported by textual references in Si Zhong'ao, 1-3. That Yuan Xiangchun belongs to the third generation in the family before Yuan Mei is supported by the names of two brothers, Yuan Xiangkun $-~:If and Yuan Xiangbei $-~.:II:., who are clearly said to be grandsons of Yuan Maoying. See Feng Kexiu, 31.Liezhuan 8.Guochao Il-*jj 1.81. The brothers and male cousins of Yuan Xiangchun and his descent are clearly indicated in Yuan Zhaochi, 3.8a. See the discussion of "human nature and feelings" on page 181. "Human nature" and "nature" (in the sense of the natural world around us) are distinct words in Chinese, and so I have usually qualified the term "nature" with the word "human" when used in the first sense. Yuan Mei, Zi buyu -f::r- ~t, 17.320, in YMQJ, vol. 4. Because of this, Yuan Mei is supposed to have had a great hatred for Lame Li. See SYYS, 35. One of Yuan Qi's poems in the ci form is preserved in Yuan Zhaochi, 25.17b. It was written at the age of forty-nine, when he was serving as an advisor in Gongxian JP:.~, Henan province. Our primary source of information about the life of Yuan Mei's mother is the biography he wrote for her, found in Yuan Mei, Xiaocang shanfang wenji 'J'~J.,&3:~ (hereafter abbreviated Wenji,) 27.477-9, in YMQJ, vol. 2. There is a commentary with modern Chinese translation of selections from Wenji, in Yuan Qiming $-$( aA ed. and tr., Yuan Mei wenxuan yi it#:. 3::iJf ~f, Beijing, 1989. Two other useful but rather sparse commentaries on some of Yuan Mei's ed., Yuan Mei better prose writing are found in Cheng Shaozong ;?l(.r.g wenxuan $-#:.3::iJf, Shanghai, 1947 and Gao Luming ~~aJJ ed., Yuan Mei wenxuan $- #:.3::iJf, Beijing, 1997. Yuan Mei inherited his father's interest in legal matters and wrote a long letter about the man's legal theories to be found in Wenji, 15.248-52. Wenji, 27.477. This contradicts what Waley says: "About his mother we hear very little." See W, 11. Wenji, 27.477. Wenji, 27.477-8. Wenji, 27.478. Shihua, 12.44.393. This passage is drawn from the inscription of the tomb tablet which Yuan Mei wrote for his aunt, the principal source of information about her life. Wenji, 5.90.

*

17 18 19 20 21 22

32

The early years 23 Literally, "pear and jujube [wood,]" both of which were used in carving printing blocks. 24 Literally, "skirts opening at the side" or chaqun :fx:ff, commonly known in the West under its Cantonese name cheongsam k~, Mandarin qipao iJ\.;ii!,. 25 10.231. 26 See the discussion in Fu Yuheng, Yuan Mei nianpu, 5-6. In later years Yuan Mei wrote a poem about the affair after seeing her tomb. 26.634-5. There is a fictionalized account of this aunt's tragic death in Zi buyu, 15.288-9. 27 Wenji, 22.379. 28 Shihua, 2.73.61. Yuan also quotes some lines from his maternal grandfather in Shihua, 15.47.505. 29 The name of her collected works is Xiumo shiji f.ii.{. it~, but I have not been able to find a copy of this book either in China or North America. 30 Lu ]ian's birthdate has been determined by referring to Shihua, 10.35.329, where it is stated that he was the same age as Yuan Mei's male cousin, Yuan Shu. Lu's poems, in two chapters, are contained in Yuan Mei ed., Meijun shiji iJll;tit~, in YMQJ, vol. 7. The very first poem of the work is addressed to Yuan Mei. See Ibid., shang 1:... 1. 31 Yang Honglie, 13, gives Yuan ]i's birth year as 1719, but I am not sure about Yang's evidence for this date. Yuan Mei wrote a brief biography of Yuan]i found in Wenji, 7.132-3. Her poems and the works of Yuan Shu are found in Yuan Mei ed., Yuanjia sanmei hegao :it~"::'~~;f~ (hereafter abbreviated Y]SM,) in YMQJ, vol. 7. The name of Yuan Shu's husband, for whom there does not seem to be any biographical information outside of Yuan Mei's writings, was Han Yong'en .n7jfP and Ma Xun ,~iill ed., Zhexi liujia shichao *~ i> it ~J, Ziweishanguan kanben 1f.' -ti. J.J ,t fIJ;f.-, 1827, 5.1. For a biography of Huang Tinggui, a Chinese Bannerman noted for his bloody suppression of Miao revolts in southwestern China, see Hummel, 349-50. Yuan Mei's memorial does not seem to survive. Miss Jin 1:" (1735-91) bore him a daughter, who died in infancy, and another daughter Yuangu 1mM;, who lived to adulthood. Miss Jin came to the household from Suzhou in 1752. See SYYS, 100. Jiang seems to have got her death date wrong. See note 51 to Chapter 3. Literally, "I was writing the poem 'Homecoming,' " allusion to a famous work by Tao Qian. See Tao Qian, 5.54a-55a. This has been translated in Hightower, 268-70. Wenji, 12.205-6. Another important document about Yuan Mei's return to Harmony Garden is his prose-poem entitled "The Green Mountain Invites the Master," composed two years earlier. See Wenji, 1.3-4.

*

w:

28

29 30

80

In Harmony Garden 31 Shihua, 821. Pi, 821. There is partial confirmation of a problem with robbers in Yuan Mei's "Third Record of Harmony Garden," where he writes about the fact that his garden has no wall and comments: "I was favored by the bandits' compassion," i.e. he could do without a wall because the local bandits were not so bad. See Wenji, 12.206. However, one biographer says that during his lifetime, Yuan Mei never lost a single item to thieves while living in Harmony Garden. See SYYS, 98. Supernatural phenomena in the park fell into two categories, ordinary ghosts, (SYYS, 97) and fox fairies, which appeared either in the form of imposing old men or seductive young ladies (SYSJ, xia r, 2a and SYYS, 97.) 32 Xiao Song. it (d. 749) served under the emperor Xuanzong. See Ouyang Xiu ~1'¥i1~and Song Qi *-;f~, Xin Tangshu ~;g.t, Beijing, 1975, 101.26.3954. 33 Wenji, 16.269. 34 SYSJ, xia r, 2a. 35 SYYS, 88. 36 SYSJ, shang 1:., 5b. 37 Ibid., xia r, 4b. 38 The figures given by Yuan Zuzhi would not apply to earlier years, because the edition he mentions was not printed until late in Yuan Mei's life, and it is likely that sales increased after his death. However, Yuan did print earlier editions of his poems, and it is probable that he made income from these, too. 39 See his comments in Shihua, 3.16.609. Printers even pirated the works of his male friend Liu Zhipeng, for whom see the discussion on page 102. 40 Wenji, ii. 41 Wenji, iii. Another source for the "Will" is SYSJ, shang 1:., 5a. 42 Pi,828. 43 However, the actual publication costs, quite considerable, were defrayed by Bi Yuan (see page 159) and one Sun Weizu ~1'tt~1r.. Yuan Mei notes that he included many poems by Bi, but that Sun died before the publication of his poetry talks, a fact that belies the charges of Pi's author that Yuan used the publication of poetry in the work to earn money, at least with regard to Sun. He did, however, ask Sun's family for a manuscript of his surviving poems and quoted a few lines in this entry. See Shihua buyi, 4.56.649. I am not certain about the identity of Sun Weizu, for there is no biography for him in any of the standard Qing-dynasty sources, and he is not mentioned as having received a Metropolitan Graduate degree or occupying any high positions. Yuan Mei merely uses the loose title Sima ~,~ to refer to him. 44 Although Yuan Mei earned a considerable amount of money composing such works, he set very high standards for his writing, as we can see from a letter in Chidu, 6.125-6, "Yu Weng Dongru" *'~ ~-j(I1. 45 The preface to one late poem refers to him discovering more than ninety early prose works that he had failed to include in his collected prose, and much more must have been lost over the years. 36.1034. 46 Liu Yuxi i1.fJ i¥J (772-842) was a famous Tang statesman and poet. See ICTCL, 592-3. For the original poem, addressed to Bai Juyi, see Cao Yin t'li. ed., Quantang shi ~;g. "it, Beijing, 1960, 11.360.04067.11, "Letian jianshi shang Weizhi Dunshi Huishu san junzi jie you shenfen yin cheng shishi yiji" .k~~§.~a*.~~.~W~.~~A~*~~

47 Shihua buyi, 9.58.788. 48 When they referred to income from such work, they usually did so in jest, as in the Northern Song master Wang Yucheng's .I..fJ 11ft (954-1001) poem "Cold Food Festival" ("Hanshi" ~1~f±it,Hangzhoudaxuexuebao :f.it1'N k~~,*1i 16.1 (March, 1986,) 19-25, 34. Wenji, 5.102. This passage occurs in the epitaph that Yuan Mei wrote for Jiang Shiquan's mother. The expression translated "devious" here is danfu Jf-;ft, which is probably short for danfu zhi shu Jf-;flzA# (literally, "arts or policies of the simple and complex," a reference to the Byzantine statecraft of the Warring States Period, specifically the so-called Vertical and Horizontal Alliances. Wenji, 25.443. Wenji, 28.490. Huang Tingjian -'If!li ~ (1045-1105) is a famous poet of the Northern Song, noted for the difficulty of his allusions. See ICTCL, 447-8. For the Southern Song poet Yang Wanli ~~ Jl. (1127-1206,) see the discussion on page 228. Shihua, 8.92.272. For a discussion of the Confucian term wenrou dunhou iJl*ttll ("gentle and soft, honest and sincere,") a favorite of Yuan Mei's chief literary rival, Shen Deqian, see page 264. Jiang Shiquan ~f ± it, Zhongyatang wenji ,1!:, *ft 1: X #t, "Zhong Shuwu shixu" 4t.k;J%#,If, 1.2013, in Jiang Shiquan, Zhongyatang ji jiaojian. For a study of Jiang Shiquan's literary theory, see Zhao Jianxin ~ Jt;ffr, "Jiang Shiquan wenxue sixiang zhitan" ± it X ~ ,~ ~.:J:& ~, Lanzhou daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban) ~ 1'1'] k ~~:fIi (;f±1t#~!I&J 3 (1987,) 50-54. Refer also to Shao Haiqing, "Yuan Mei he Jiang Shiquan," cited just above. An example of Jiang's Confucian-inspired social verse is the series "Jingshi yuefuci shiliushou" -;Y;-t.r ~Jf.H~-j- *il in Jiang Shiquan, Zhongyatang shiji, 8.702-716, in Zhongyatang ji jiaojian. There is an annotated edition of five of the poems in Wu Changgeng, Jiang Shiquan shixuan, 81-9.

*

*' * .-,

184

185 186

187 188 189

190

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93

Biography 191 Jiang Shiquan, Zhongyatang wenji, "Bian Suiyuan yiji xu" :il~ Iil:it ~Jf, 1.2002, in Zhongyatang ji jiaojian. See also his couplet praising the xingling theory, quoted in Zhang Weiping, 37.6b.022-252. 192 Although Yuan was born in the third lunar month, it was the custom to celebrate birthdays on or close to the New Year's Festival, when one was considered to be in the next year (sui ~) of his or her life. 193 Zhu Maichen ;jt:i!#t:i!#t H}] 5t ~ $iWf .$w)J, Wuhan, 1987. A study of their literary theory is found in Yuan Zhenyu ~1t. ~ and Liu Mingjin ~~ H}] 4-, Mingdai juan a}] f\ J.f., 513-33, in Zhongguo wenxue piping tongshi 'f il i: ~*l:.1fi! it, Shanghai, 1996, vol. 5. Another critic who linked Yuan with the Gong'an ~~ School of Yuan Hongdao and the Jingling School was the Gaolan -*-il!!! scholar Zhu Kejing *,Jt *- (fl. late nineteenth c.) See Zhu Kejing *,Jt *-, Ming'an zashi ~~*-fi~, Guangxu (1875-1908) period, 4.5b-6a. Wang Xianqian ed., Pingjiao yinzhu xu guwenci leizuan, vol. 6, 17.llb. However, note the negative statement in note 146 just above. Wang Chang, Huhai shizhuan, 7.7b. Wang Xianqian, Pingjiao yinzhu xu guwenci leizuan, 17.llb. Sun Xingyan ~}l1it, Pingjinguan wengao -tifiii:;ff.j, xia -p. 48, in CSJc. Sun also rejected Zhang Xuecheng's charges of vulgarity and frivolity: "The world says that trifling erotic poetry [by contemporaries] is in imitation of the work of Yuan Mei, but these works are not worthy imitations of Yuan." See Sun Xingyan, xia -p. 48. Another man who disagreed with attacks on Yuan Mei's scholarship was Guo Lin ~. (1767-1831,) a noted poet, prose writer, and painter of bamboos, who was a protege of Yao Nai: "[Yuan Mei] never told people not to read books. I personally saw the books stacked on his shelves,

149

Biography all of which he had gone through and made notes on at least once. He was particularly familiar with the Anthology of Literature and the Essence of Tang Literature, both of which he had marked with his red and black ink several tens of times." Anthology of Literature (Wenxuan i:i!) is the most widely read and cited selection of Chinese prose and poetic literature, compiled before 531. There is an ongoing translation of the entire work in David R. Knechtges, Wen xuan or selections of refined literature, Princeton, 1982-, 3 vol. The Essence of Tang literature or Tangwen cui Jt i:*-, one of the earliest anthologies of Tang prose and poetry, was compiled by Yao Xuan -Jdtii (968-1020.) See ICTCL, 759. Guo Lin f~$i\\, Lingfenguan shihua ~ ~#$, manuscript copy in the collection of Fudan University, Shanghai, nineteenth century, 8Aa. For Guo Lin's biography, see QSG, 485.272.13402. 238 For Hang Shijun, see Hummel, 276-7. 239 Wenji, v. 240 Liang Qichao irEffi:.;l!, Qingdai xueshu gailun 7t1\ .f#rm. "ii 1;-, Shanghai, 1932, 169. Liang Qichao was from Guangdong province, and perhaps his view of Yuan Mei was colored by the stories about Li Jian, another famous Guangdong scholar, refusing to see the poet. On the same page, Liang compares the poetry of Li Jian very favorably to Yuan Mei and most other Qing poets, perhaps an instance of local chauvinism. 241 Hu Shi i;fJ it, Zhang Shizhai nianpu huibian -f-f .-t"*-t~, Taipei, 1975, 176. 242 Zhu Ziqing mit, Shiyanzhi bian it 1: ,t11f, Beijing, 1957, 39. 243 Guo Moruo ~)*-*, "Tan Suiyuan Shihua zhaji" -tt~ 1il#$-1L 1(" Renminribao A-R El '*It, February 28-June 28, 1962. This was later printed as a book in Guo Moruo f~i*-*, Du Suiyuan Shihua zhaji iif.illil"it$ ;j:L1G, Beijing, 1962. The sentence quoted is from Ibid., i. 244 For a study of Qian Zhongshu, see Theodore Huters, Qian Zhongshu, Boston, 1982, especially 60-4 for Qian's critique of Yuan Mei. 245 Zhang Jiliang 5tf~;Jt (1799-1843) was a critic and scholar. Qian Zhongshu quotes a colophon (?) "Liu Mengtu shigao shu" 11J it.i;tj+~" from Zhang's Wenji i:;l, Chapter Four (Juansi J.fr 1l!'l ,) as his source, but I have not had access to this book. For more on Zhang Jiliang's literary ideals, see Huang Lin, 65-75. For Weng Fanggang, see the discussion on page 267. 246 For Zhu Yun, see note 209 to Chapter 2. Qian Zhongshu, 208-9. 247 Ibid., 205. 248 There is a study of Yuan Zhen's poetry in Angela Jung Palandri, Yuan Chen, Boston, 1977. See especially the chapters "The literary innovator" and "The 'poetic genius,''' 44-144. See also ICTCL, 949-51. 249 A good example of the changing opinions about Yuan Mei is found in the writings of Qian Esun. Prof. Qian told me that he originally disliked Yuan Mei's poetry, but he has recently published an article revising some of his earlier criticisms. See Qian Esun ilt~~ and Yan Ming ilR}], "Yuan Mei xinlun" ~R#"iii1;-, Wenxue yichan i:.f:i!it 2 (1994,) 92-9. This should be compared with his earlier views, largely a reflection of pre-twentieth century negative criticism in Qian Esun, "Zhepai shilun," 62.

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PART II

Yuan Mei's Literary Theory and Practice

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CHAPTER FOUR

The principles of poetry

Yuan Mei's poetry talks

F

ROM THE SONG dynasty onward, it became the fashion for poets and critics to write critical works called "poetry talks" (shihua 1~1!,) highly informal compositions with numerous short sections, each consisting of lines of poetry followed (or preceded) by the author's prose comments. 1 Ouyang Xiu ~~11} (1007-72) originated this form in about 1070 with his Poetry Talks of Mr. One-Six (Liuyi shihua i\ -1~1!,) and it was continued and enriched by such authors as Yang Wanli, Jiang Kui 4i: (ca. 1155-1221), and Yan Yu (fl. 1180-1235) during the Southern Song period. 2 The writing of poetry talks continued during the Ming dynasty but reached its height in the Qing dynasty, and both Yuan Mei and his friend Zhao Yi are noted for leaving behind major bodies of critical writings in the form. 3 Although he was one of the most famous authors of poetry talks, Yuan Mei frequently voices dissatisfaction with earlier works in the form, particularly those from the Song dynasty, which he felt had a tendency to pedantry:

"5FJ

The Tang poem goes: Outside of Suzhou city is the Cold Mountain Temple; At midnight a bell's sound reaches the traveler's boat. 4 This poem [i.e. couplet] is excellent, but Ouyang Xiu made fun of the fact that there would have been no sound of bells in the middle of the night. s Throughout the ages, [other] writers of poetry talks have given examples of bells sounding at midnight to prove that [the bell] was real. Discussing poetry this way only stifles human nature and inspiration. 6 Ouyang Xiu had created the poetry talk form, but Yuan Mei felt that his narrow-minded criticism of this beautiful couplet and later critics' attempts to refute him with equally uninspired pedantry contributed little to an intelligent understanding of the two lines' literary qualities. 7 153

Yuan Mei's Literary Theory and Practice

However, in Yuan's view, excessive attention to minor details was only one of the many faults of Song-dynasty poetry talks:

Inscribed on some Song dynasty poetry talks Although there are no more sage kings in this world, What ruler doesn't wear the robes of an emperor?8 Still someone who yearns to eat calamus all day Is not necessarily another King Wen of Zhou. 9 And is the reason for Confucius being thought a sage, That he didn't avoid eating food spiced with ginger?10 When I read these poetry talks of Song-dynasty critics, I feel like vomiting from the depths of my bowels. They support the parties of Han Yu or Du Fu, And get terribly puffed up about meaningless trivia. They resemble a person with powerful connections, Who uses them to mistreat his respected elders. They're like men who occupy Mounts Tai and Hua, And refuse to take excursions to the Xiaoxiang region. A real man values standing apart from others; He draws his strength from his individual spirit. Don't just discuss the pros and cons of the ancients; Have some ideas of your own in that head of yours. Would you be a little colt quivering beneath his cart shafts, And bow your head low before the gate of some teacher?ll Such critics (and Yuan Mei means more than just Song critics here) suffer from Ouyang Xiu's pedantry, but this is only symptomatic of a more general emphasis on external appearances (their unjustified wearing of imperial robes, and their superficial consumption of calamus and avoidance of ginger, in imitation of King Wen and Confucius,) which causes them to ignore the true essence of literature. Such writers talk endlessly about the virtues of ancient authors such as Du Fu or Han Yu, sometimes using their attachment to the classics to "mistreat" talented contemporaries and never having an original thought in their lives. In common with the neo-Confucian "sages," whom Yuan Mei despised so much, they frequently occupy the "exalted" moral peaks of Mounts Tai and Hua, only to ignore the bewitching beauties of the Xiaoxiang river valleys, which are too "commonplace" for their high and mighty minds. In spite of his objections to earlier poetry talks, Yuan Mei cultivated the form with amazing industry. His collection of poetry talks was the most massive work in the form ever published, appearing in two sections, the Poetry Talks of Harmony Garden (Suiyuan shihua r.il.1il ttw.) in sixteen chapters, penned between the ages of sixty-nine and seventy-two and 154

The principles of poetry

published from 1789-91 and a Supplement (Buyi #li!) in ten chapters written between the ages seventy-four and eighty-one and published at the earliest in 1797, the combined text of the two books stretching to over eight hundred pages in one modern edition or approximately 570,000 Chinese characters. 12 In common with earlier poetry talks, Yuan's work consists entirely of short passages, sometimes no more than a few lines long and rarely more than a page, arranged in no particular orderY Each section contains at least one quotation of verse, sometimes many, either following or preceding Yuan Mei's prose comments. Yuan occasionally quotes from his own verse, but most of the passages are taken from the poetry of other contemporary authors, many of whose collected works are lost to us now. Frequently, Yuan Mei says little more than that he admires or dislikes a particular passage, but just as commonly he praises or criticizes an author for some specific qualities. Some of the passages are about rather technical problems of versification or diction, and more extended passages about his literary theory or explanations of his poetic practice are comparatively rare. We do not find a systematic development of his literary theory sustained for more than a few paragraphs, and we can reconstruct it only after perusing the work as a whole, together with his other critical writings. Some readers may be disappointed by the narrowness of Yuan Mei's literary vision in the poetry talks, particularly when he strays from his own specialty, poetry in the shi form. For example, although he was a good friend of Jiang Shiquan, Yuan confessed that he never understood the beauty of Jiang's dramas, and after Jiang forced him to read one of his plays, he could only find two lines that he admired, largely because of their resemblance to shi verse. 14 Similarly, he merely mentions two plays by the great early Qing dramatist Hong Sheng i*Jf- (1645-1704) but has nothing to say about them, instead praising Hong's little-read shi poetryY Yuan's discussion of the vernacular novel is even more disappointing; in one passage he points out that the famous literary critic Jin Renrui ~ A~ (1610-61,) whom "everyone despises for writing fiction criticism," composed surprisingly elegant classical verse. 16 Even more laughable are Yuan Mei's comments regarding eighteenth-century China's most lauded novel, Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng ~..r.;ft~.)17 We may forgive him for getting its author Cao Zhan's ancestry wrong, a question that has belabored many twentieth-century scholars, but any modern Chinese reader would be flabbergasted by his statement that its leading female character Lin Daiyu ~*-:t' J'.,. ("Black Jade") was a prostitute, an error that prompted Guo Moruo to storm, "It seems that Yuan Mei never read Dream of the Red Chamber!,,18 One might reply that poetry talks need not discuss drama or the novel, but as some critics have been eager to point out, many passages in his book have little to do with poetry itself, for Yuan Mei jotted down any 155

Yuan Mei's Literary Theory and Practice

unusual story that interested him, as long as it was linked to some poetic work however tenuously. Thus, to explain a few lines by Su Shi using the expression "heaven's eye" (tianyan Jt fttl,) Yuan recounts the following story of a "supernatural" phenomenon witnessed by his friend: There are traditions about Heaven opening his eye, but I have never seen this happen. Zhang Xiaopo from Pinghu was walking in his courtyard one morning, when there was not a patch of clouds, and suddenly he heard a crack made by a seam opening in the skyY It was broad in the center and narrow at the ends, with the shape of a big ship, and at the broad spot there was a shiny round eye, sparkling with rays of light somewhat like lightning. The eye was fuzzy on one side, where it resembled a human's eyelashes. After a long time [the hole] closed. 20 This is but one of many anecdotes displaying Yuan Mei's fascination with the supernatural in his poetry talks, with their many stories about poems "authored" by female ghosts, accounts of alchemical practices, or descriptions of planchette poetry transmitted from the spirit world by magicians, topics hardly calculated to win approval from Confucian rationalists of the age. 21 Quite a few of the anecdotes that have little to do with literature, do, however, shed light on the more intimate details of Yuan Mei's life: I was drifting in my boat at Hengtang, where there was a boat lady called Ruixian who had always prided herself on her dignity. She would talk to you through the window but was unwilling to enter your boat cabin and serve you while you drank wine. 22 She was particularly conversant with literature and art. Some travelers gave large sums of money, but she would not accept anything. 23 After a while the moon came out, and Ruixian brought a fan, asking me to inscribe it with a poem. I playfully wrote: I drift at Hengtang in the evening, my wine like the Huai River; For ten Ii the peach blossoms are blooming on all sides. I only regret that the moon on my mast's brocade sail Refuses to descend into my cabin late at night. With one laugh, Ruixian entered my cabin!24 We may find this story amusing today, but it is the sort of anecdote that offended later Chinese critics so much and partially explains the fulminations of Zhang Xuecheng and his supporters. Still it sheds light on Yuan Mei's private life and is particularly interesting as testimony to the widespread knowledge of classical verse among the lower classes during the eighteenth century.

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The principles of poetry

In fact, women of all classes playa particularly important role in Yuan poetry talks, and although most of his comments about women are concerned with their literary activities, he frequently includes stories of more general interest: A young lady surnamed Gao from Renhe had sexual relations with a neighbor surnamed He. She was already engaged to someone else, and when it came time for her to go to her groom's house, she tricked He into leaving the house and hanged herself on a rafter. When he returned, He saw her [corpse] and was so sad that he hanged himself with the same rope. The families of both despised their children for being so unfilial and would not arrange their funerals, so the District Magistrate Tang Renzhi, a refined gentleman, contributed some funds, bought a coffin, and buried them together. 25 This passage concludes with poems about Miss Gao's tragic death and was a quite laudable appeal for toleration in such matters, but it, too, would not have won Yuan any friends in conservative circles. 26 In addition to containing a large collection of critical comments and miscellaneous anecdotes about poetry, Yuan Mei's work comprises an extensive anthology of eighteenth-century verse (or at least lines of verse, since it rarely includes complete poems.)27 In Yuan Mei's opinion, writers like him had a heavy responsibility to help preserve lines from poets whose works would otherwise be consigned to oblivion: Li Fu said: "Those who gather surviving collections or scattered verses and save them for others are greater in virtue than men who bury white bones exposed in the open or who nurse infant babies deserted by the roadside. ,,28 How profound and poignant are his words!29 Some of Yuan Mei's contemporaries attacked his poetry talks for including the works of too many poets, but Yuan had the following response for them: Someone reprimanded me for including too much in my poetry talks. I told him: "I once studied the teachings of Fang Xiaoru, reading a hand-written essay by him entitled 'Allegory of a Stream, Presented to Yu Xun,' which says:30 'The fault of scholars to be avoided most is considering oneself higher than others and being excessively narrow. Anyone who considers himself higher than others is like a precipitous cliff towering into the sky; when the timely rains pass over it, the water flows off it too quickly, and it cannot partake of the moisture. A person who is too narrow is like a pot or jar that receives water but is able to contain only a cup or a pint and overflows when its volume is surpassed. Is not the man who is skilled at learning like the sea, which does not dry up even after nine years of drought, and which never fills up, though it receives [water from the] rivers of the eight continents?' ,,31

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Fang Xiaoru was talking about the ideal Confucian man of learning here, but what he said could be applied to ordinary scholars, and more specifically anthologists, who must have an open mind about what to include in their collections. 32 Yuan Mei himself had thought carefully about the compilation of literary anthologies, and his musings on the subject are well worth translating in full, because they are at such great variance with the narrower approaches of some of his contemporaries: Anthologists who make selections of the verse of modern poets have seven faults, not to speak of those who use these [anthologies] to gain profit or to spread their own fame. (1) The works of each poet are imbued with his individual spirit, and you must read all of them thoroughly before you can decide what to accept or reject. If you select one or two poems that ought not be selected, it is the same as looking at an object through a bamboo tube or measuring the sea with a calabash, which is shortcoming number one. (2) The three hundred poems anthologized in the Classic of Poetry include everything: the virtuous, the licentious, the proper, and the improper. However, if you use the limited views of a single person to evaluate the greatness of a host of talents, if before thoroughly examining the sources of the various schools [of poetry,] you employ your own experience as the pattern and cut the feet of others to fit your own shoes, that is shortcoming number two. (3) If you draw a boundary between Tang and Song, embrace Du Fu and exalt Han Yu, and rely on such great authors, not distinguishing the false from the true and not collecting the essence [of verse,] that is fault number three. (4) If you constantly praise the Confucian ideas of the Three Bonds and the Five Eternal Virtues and use them to attack or laud others, thinking that you should record nothing that is [politically] "irrelevant," not knowing that [love poems about] presenting tree peony and picking orchid are not "relevant" but that the Sage still did not exclude them [from the Classic of Poetry,] or if, like the Song-dynasty Confucians, you reproach the inclusion of Cai Yan in the Biographies of Model Women, thinking, like them, that the Seventeen Histories should have nothing but [virtuous men such as] Long Feng and Bi Gan, (pedants' rules that make one want to vomit!) that is fault number four. 33 (5) If you select greedily on a large scale and think that each province or each district must be represented by several men, so that you force yourself to scrounge about, being too lenient and including too much, that is fault number five. (6) If by chance your talent is greatly inferior to the authors [you choose,] and you recklessly "improve" their works, transforming their gold into your iron, that is fault number six. (7) If you submit to your personal

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The principles of poetry

friends and listen to other people's requests [to be included in your anthology,] that is fault number seven. Now when I wrote my poetry talks, even I was not exempt from the last fault!34 A number of the ideas in this passage (particularly the criticism of faults 1-4) refer to general differences in literary theory and practice between Yuan Mei and his contemporaries (particularly Shen Deqian) and will be discussed below. Yuan's attack on fault number five is probably aimed at anthologists like Li E),%~ (1692-1752) and Ma Yueguan .~ 'r::JJi (16881755,) who in their Recorded Occasions of Song Poetry (Songshi jishi *-tt ~(;*) selected such a large quantity of poets and poetry that the work is now used mainly for its biographical information and would only confuse someone trying to obtain a general picture of Song-dynasty verse from it.35 Yuan admits his own failure in avoiding fault number seven, and at least one contemporary took him to task for this, particularly for his passages on the poetry of Bi Yuan .f);it (1730-97) and his concubine Zhou Yuezun J!) JJ-f: Poetry talks of this sort are just like dogs or horses [acting in the service of] wealthy and powerful people. Bi Yuan's ancestors were immensely wealthy cotton merchants, and Bi got his Provincial Graduate degree during the Qianlong period by recommendation ... Madame Bi's poems were no good and there is nothing worth recording, so why did Yuan select them?36 Yuan Mei may have been guilty of some of the crimes attributed to him by this author, but Bi and Zhou were skilled if not great poets, and there is nothing very strange about him including their work in such a massive collection. 37 Bi Yuan may have obtained his Provincial Graduate degree by a method not accepted by all scholars, but he still is known as a very competent historian and scholar, most famous for his learned sequel to Sima Guang's ,3J.~ JG (1019-86) vast historical work, the Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror to Aid Government (Xu zizhi tongjian ~1f)f;i!.I-.)38 Finally, we should not forget that Bi Yuan had defrayed many of Yuan's publication expenses, and only an ingrate would have left him out entirely.39 As the most popular poet and critic of his age, Yuan Mei was under considerable pressure to include works by his numerous friends, but he was able to refuse many of them with the following argument: After I started writing my poetry talks, people sent poems from everywhere and asked me to include them; they have come as thick as clouds. However, these people do not understand that poetry talks are not just an anthology of poetry. An anthology merely has to select the best poems, and that is that. Poetry talks must first have 159

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talk, which is followed by poetry. Thousands, no, tens of thousands of people have sent poems, but I am the only person who puts in the talk. Rummaging around in my frail brain for [so many] ideas is a bit hard on me, is it not?40 A more serious charge against Yuan Mei is that he received bribes to include the works of certain authors. In our discussion of Yuan Mei's sources of income, we read that a contemporary accused him of accepting fees for publishing the poems of others in the work, and his friend Zhao Yi is also supposed to have jested that "If someone gives him a hundred ounces of silver, he will publish [their poems] in his poetry talks and extol them.,,41 However, Yuan Mei himself states that he did refuse the requests of very powerful men to have their poems included in his poetry talks, so it is very difficult to prove the truth of such remarks. 42 In any case, such charges should be understood against the background of established literary and social practices of the age, for although most Chinese writers and artists still held steadfastly to the "amateur" ideal sanctified by tradition, many of them were paid for their works in one form or other, it being very difficult to distinguish "presents" offered in appreciation for one's accomplishments from out and out bribes. 43 Much more typical of Yuan Mei's practice is the following story: My cousin Xiaoqiu's husband Zhang Shihuai was only twenty when he died of consumption. 44 When his disease had reached its final crisis, he grabbed Xiaoqiu by the hand and said: "Arrange my poetry manuscripts for me and choose several lines to have printed in Mr. Yuan Mei's poetry talks. Even if I die, I will still live on." I loved his ambition and was saddened by his fate. [Yuan selected lines from three of his poems, as well as a dirge for him written by his wife.]45 For Yuan Mei's contemporaries, entry into his poetry talks was a guarantee of immortality, and Yuan was dedicated to Li Fu's ideals of preserving as much good verse as possible for the enjoyment and edification of posterity. Yuan Mei's collection of poetry talks was one of the most popular books of the eighteenth century and continues to be read widely, but it has understandably received mixed reviews from "serious" scholars. Zhang Xuecheng wrote a series of twelve quatrains that he inscribed on the work, of which the following is typical: It slandered poetry and poets, leading later generations astray; This madman caused everybody to speak of erotic feelings. The many bees and butterflies on blooming trees blown by the spring wind Are all creations of Harmony Garden's evil sorcery.46

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Zhang has nothing specific to say about Yuan Mei's literary theories here but storms against passages of the sort quoted earlier in this chapter, a view that was repeated many times over the centuries, as in the comments of the nineteenth-century scholar Liang Zhangju 4e. (1775-1849):

**

[The poetry talks] record [the poetry of] high officials and young maidens in the women's quarters, and the principal idea [of the book] is to promote romance. It is singularly unworthy of consideration. 47 Here Liang agrees with the contemporary who attacked Yuan Mei's praise of poetry by rich and powerful individuals such as Bi Yuan, some of whom were incidentally major poets, but he seems even more repelled by Yuan Mei's promotion of women's poetry, an activity that has garnered him much praise in the twentieth century. Neither Zhang Xuecheng's nor Liang Zhangju's criticisms would carry much weight at present, and a more balanced evaluation is found in the writings of Qian Zhongshu, who may have disliked Yuan Mei's poetry but who regarded his poetry talks as "not just medicine for his own times but also useful for correcting the errors of later ages. ,,48 It might even be more accurate to suggest that some of the apparent "faults" of Yuan Mei's poetry talks are possibly among their greatest virtues, for although the modern critic is sometimes exasperated by all the detail one has to wade through to extract the "nuggets" of Yuan's literary theory, the work should not be viewed as just a book on literary theory or even an anthology of eighteenthcentury verse but rather a vast panorama of eighteenth-century literature, providing us one of the richest records we have of a literary life-style, which has vanished forever. Other sources Yuan Mei's collection of poetry talks is by no means our only source for studying his literary theory and practice, and we must be careful not to assume that everything we find in the book represents Yuan Mei's views throughout his life, since the work is a product of his old age. 49 Another important and much earlier work to which we shall be referring frequently in the discussion below is the set of thirty-two poems entitled Continuation of the Moods of Poetry, ostensibly written in imitation of Sikong Tu and already mentioned in Chapter Two. 50 Similar to Sikong Tu, Yuan Mei discusses his literary ideals in six-line tetrasyllabic poems, all of which are preceded by rather mysterious-sounding titles of two Chinese characters. In spite of Yuan Mei's use of Sikong Tu's form and similar-sounding titles, his approach is actually quite different, as he indicates in his short preface to the work:

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I love Sikong Tu's Moods of Poetry but regret that he only promoted the realm of the "miraculous" and did not write about the labor of writing, so I composed some poems as a continuation [to his work.] As Lu Yun said: "Although the 'miracle' [of great poetry] seems effortless, it is difficult to explain it in words. ,,51 Whatever I am able to express with language is found below in its entirety.52 Sikong Tu actually does consider some of the practical problems of writing mentioned here by Yuan Mei, but it is true that his work tends to the mystical and obscure, and Yuan Mei's poems are really quite different. One Wang Feie .l.JW. r.~ (fl. nineteenth c.,) who wrote a preface to the work, said that "Yuan Mei has expressed ideas unexpressed by earlier men," and the critic and poetry publisher Ye Tingguan "fJ!Ji (1791-after 1862) noted that Yuan Mei had "copied the old name of Sikong Tu's book," but had written quite a different book. 53 Some of Yuan's poems suffer from the same vagueness of terminology found in Sikong Tu's works, but they are among the more concentrated statements of Yuan Mei's literary ideals and will be cited frequently in the following discussion. Next in importance to the poems in imitation of Sikong Tu is Yuan Mei's series of thirty-eight poems modeled on the critical works of Yuan Haowen, mentioned already in Chapter Three. Yuan Mei's approach to literature was quite different from Yuan Haowen's, for in spite of certain superficial resemblances to the Jin-dynasty poet's series, this group of poems ignores the authors of antiquity to focus on Yuan Mei's contemporaries or immediate predecessors, as he tells us in his preface: 54 Yuan Haowen's poems discussing poetry were mostly about ancient authors rather than modern ones, but mine are the opposite, because [many are about] friends whom I miss. Those whom I have not read yet or whom I have read but about whom I do not have special opinions have all been omitted. 55 We shall not cite this series in the present chapter, but it will be of use in our discussion of Yuan Mei's evaluation of other authors in Chapter Six. There is also a great abundance of material about literary theory and practice scattered about in Yuan Mei's collected verse, as well as in the prose prefaces he wrote for the poetry collections of contemporaries, his prose essays on literature, and his numerous letters to friends and adversaries, the most famous being two letters sent to his primary rival, Shen Deqian. Sometimes these works provide a more sustained and logically developed picture of individual aspects of Yuan Mei's literary theory than what we find in either his poetry talks or his poems in imitation of Sikong Tu, and we shall make much use of them. 56 162

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The function of poetry Now that we have summarized the various sources for a study of Yuan Mei's literary theory, let us move on to a discussion of one of the central issues in critical writings of his age, namely, the function of poetry. Throughout the course of Chinese history, most critics agreed (at least in public) that the primary purpose of literature was to promote Confucian values, a concept that is succinctly expressed in the hoary dictum that "Literature is a vehicle for the [Confucian] Way [Wen yi zaidao j:I':.{ ~i!."F7 From the earliest times, however, the contradiction between this Confucian ideal and much literary practice was evident, for although most writers and critics paid lip service to it, they often wrote poetry that had no obvious ethical or moral content. Furthermore, even if the content of their verse was totally in harmony with the sayings of the Sage, there were still certain purely literary questions that could not be avoided. For example, what role did such morally neutral concerns as rhetoric and diction play in a Confucian view of literature? Was style important for a writer? What was one to make of authors who seemed to flout Confucian practices and morality? Were they to be rejected out of hand? Like all poets of his age, Yuan Mei was not completely unsympathetic to the earlier ethical and political values of traditional Confucian literary theory, and sometimes he seems to adopt the ancient view that poetry can aid the scholar in the process of self-cultivation by controlling such undesirable emotions as anger: Nothing stops anger better than poetry; Singing poems is pleasing to the feelings 58 Yuan Mei also acknowledges that poetry can have a good moral influence on some people: The Sage said that "poetry can inspire," because it moves people most easily.59 A certain friend of Wang Mengduan took a concubine in the capital and forgot his wife. 60 Wang sent him a poem which reads: The new branch of flowers conquers the old branch of flowers; From now on you think no more about your separation. Don't you know, this evening, by the Qinhuai River, A woman faces the moon counting the days until your return? The man wept and went home together with his concubine. 61 Nowadays we might expect the man to return to his wife without the concubine in tow, but during Yuan Mei's age his course of action was considered quite proper.

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The moral effect of the poem on this man is evident, but there is a powerful emotional side to his moral response, and it is much commoner for Yuan Mei to stress the emotional aspects of poetic creation: Poetry is the nature and feelings of humans. If you get poetry from inside yourself, that is sufficient. If a poem's language moves the heart, its color grabs the eye, its flavor suits the mouth, and its sound pleases the ear, then it is a good poem. Confucius said: "If you do not study poetry, you have nothing to talk about." He also said: "Poetry can inspire.,,62 Each of these statements resonates with the other. Only if its language is skilled and marvelous, can a poem arouse feelings and inspire someone. 63 Although Yuan Mei quotes from the Analects of Confucius and uses the same statement about poetry that he interpreted morally in the passage just before this one, there is no hint of the Sage's ethical and political concerns in these sentences, with their emphasis upon literature's appeal to the physical senses. Yuan Mei's statement that poetry is that which "arouses feelings" suggests that it is not uncommon for such human emotions to overpower the orderly reason dear to the Confucians, or as he says in another place, "Feelings are like thunder and clouds, filling the sky and cramming the earth, with no way to hold them in, even by force.,,64 Poetry's appeal is largely sensual for Yuan Mei, and in other passages, he quite specifically plays down moral considerations: Wan Yingxin said: "Confucius' three words 'inspired by poetry' get at the marrow of poetry.,,65 No matter whether it is chaste or licentious, proper or improper, if poetry does not arouse the reader, it is not good poetry. 66 That is to say, the moral effects of literature are secondary to its emotional effects. Even licentious or improper poetry can be good poetry, if it manages to arouse the reader. Yuan Mei's disdain for moral theories of literature, so popular during his age and earlier, is exhibited even in his discussion of canonical Confucian texts such as the Classic of Poetry: The beauty of the [poems in the] "Airs of the States" [of the Classic of Poetry] has nothing to do with the moral qualities [renpin A.£] [of their authors.]67 Ever since the late Zhou dynasty, Chinese scholars, including Confucius and Mencius themselves, had been reading the poems of the Classic of Poetry as subtle moral and political allegories, although many of the poems in the anthology, particularly those in the "Airs of the States" ("Guofeng" ~)i\,) section, seem nothing more than ordinary (and sometimes even indecent) love songs. 68 Yuan Mei did not totally reject the traditional reading of the

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texts, but his idea that the value of this classic had nothing to do with the moral qualities of its authors was quite revolutionary. For Yuan Mei, the reason that the Confucian classics had been transmitted to posterity was not because they served as a vehicle for Confucian principles, but rather as a result of their stylistic excellence: The Six Classics were not transmitted because of their ideas [literally, Dao.]69 The Six Classics were transmitted because of their writing ... It was necessary to make people of the whole world esteem and delight in it before the Dao could be greatly illuminated. If [the Classics'] language had not been skilled, people would have been put to sleep upon hearing it, and it would have been insufficient to illuminate the Dao, but rather just perfect for obscuring the Dao. Therefore, it is proper if a literatus does not expound on the classics, but it is not acceptable if one who expounds on the classics does not know how to write well. 70 Of course, Yuan Mei is not attempting to overturn Confucian morality in this passage but is merely making the point that if the authors of the Confucian classics had not been such great stylists, no one would have bothered to read their writings, and their moral and political messages would have been lost to posterity. Yuan Mei does not think that this primacy of style was accidental, and he quotes from no less of an authority than Confucius to prove his point: Confucius said: "Feelings should be sincere, but words should be clever.,,71 When the Sage was polishing his language, he did not avoid clever words ... He not only sought cleverness but also strove to have people love [his writing. f2 The Sage does not seem to have been discussing poetry in the passage Yuan quotes, but he used it again and again to justify the independence of literature from Confucian moral concerns. The neo-Confucians had attempted to subvert literature and make it entirely their own through the propagation of the "literature as a vehicle of the Way" theory, but in Yuan's view of things, the poet was quite distinct from the neo-Confucian sage, and when he was eighty years old, Yuan wrote: Now if I were to tell the mass of people that Mr. Yuan is a writer, even the people walking in the street would not deny this, but if I were to tell them that I am a [neo-Confucian] philosopher of principle [/i,] they would cover their mouths and laugh ... The Four Categories of Sagehood [were promulgated to] teach people according to their talents, and everything else need not be sacrificed for [the category of] Virtue, which is one reason that the Sage's Way is so great?3 However, the Song neo-Confucians obstinately bundled Politics, Literature, and

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Speech into a single parcel, forcibly subsuming all under the single category of Virtue, which is the reason why the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi are so petty ... 74 Neo-Confucian philosophers like Shao Yong ~ ~ (1011-77) or Zhu Xi wrote important poetry, but Yuan Mei was convinced that ever since the Song dynasty, the Confucian tradition had been opposed to true literary creation?5 Yuan Mei never openly opposed Confucian values and alludes to the Confucian classics continuously in his own writings, but he had no use for poetry based entirely on those works: Recently a great master taught people to write poetry by first studying the [Confucian] classics exhaustively and reading the commentaries on them before they were were even allowed to move their writing brushes, after which their poetry would [supposedly] be worthy of being transmitted [to posterity.] When I heard this, I laughed and said: "Let us not speak of the [inferior] classical learning of the Jian'an and Dali period poets, or even Yu Xin and Bao Zhao. 76 What classics did [the preclassical anonymous poets who wrote] "Guan, Guan Cries the Osprey" and "Pick Pick Curl Ears" study exhaustively, what commentaries did they read, to create such immortal verse?77 Yuan Mei suggests that many great poets of the past such as Bao Zhao ~,JRl, (ca. 414-66) and the Jian'an and Dali period masters lacked profound knowledge of the Confucian classics and that the Confucian canon could not have served as a model for poems in the Classic of Poetry, because these had been created long before the birth of Confucius. Why then should contemporary writers be so concerned with the contents of these classics? If one rejects the Confucian views of the moral and political functions of poetry and demotes the value of the Confucian classics, what is left? For Yuan Mei, the primary function of poetry is to be enjoyed, as with any other object of the senses: I once said that the radiance of a beautiful woman can nourish the eyes, and the poetry of a poet can nourish the heart. 78 Still, the composition and the reading of poetry does not merely involve the temporary gratification of the flesh, for great verse enables us to preserve forever what the senses experience: Poetry is something that allows you to hold on [chi ~t.] You hold onto your nature and feelings, preventing them from leaving you abruptly?9 Since poetry preserves experience, it is a record of the real self and stands in a relationship to the phenomenal world like that of the soul to the body: The Daoists thought of the body as a residence and the spirit as the real ego. Writing is our true spirit. Should it not be preserved?80

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Both body and experience are transient, but souls and poetry live on and on. In a preface to the collected poems of a deceased friend, Yuan Mei writes: Poetry is the voice of the heart. My friend's poetry has come, and although his body cannot come, his heart is certainly still present. 81 Poetry might even be superior to personal contact with a poet, as in the case of Tong Jue :tIE (1721-82,) an author who abandoned preparing for the civil service examinations as a young man to pursue poetry and painting, and whom Yuan attempted to meet unsuccessfully on several occasions, only writing the preface to his collected works after the man's demise: Even if I had seen his face, it would not have been better than seeing his poetry. Why is this? The face is a physical form, but poetry is human nature and feelings. Once you obtain [a man's] nature and feelings, you can forget about his physical form. 82 We may read poetry primarily for sensual gratification, but it actually can be said to transcend the immediate physical world, the normal sphere of our senses. Yuan Mei's view of poetry as immortal sensuality was original enough, but his rejection of Confucian morality also caused him to radically revise one of the key dicta of traditional criticism, namely, that "poetry speaks of the intentions" (shi yan zhi -tt-t ,t,) a statement first found in "The Institutes of Yao" ("Yaodian" 1t~) chapter of the Classic of History, parts of which may date from early in the Western Zhou dynasty.83 The precise meaning of this ancient text is hardly clear, but in later times Confucian critics explained the phrase in moral and didactic terms, so that shi yan zhi was supposed to mean that poetry is an expression of the inner moral and ethical intentions, an idea very close to the concept of literature as a vehicle of the Confucian Way. One of Yuan Mei's poems from the series in imitation of Sikong Tu seems to follow this traditional interpretation rather closely:

Exalting the mind Sage Shun taught Kui: 84 "Poetry speaks of intentions." Then why do modern poets Have many words but little thought? Thought is like a master; The words are slaves. Weak masters have strong slaves, Who won't come, when called. When untied by a string, Coins scatter on the ground. 85

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A thousand flowers bloom on a tree, Joined by a single trunk. 86 References to the sage emperor Shun and his musician Kui would seem to place the poem in a fully Confucian context, and neo-Confucians would have found nothing objectionable in the idea that style ("words," "coins," "flowers") should be under the control of "thought" (yi ~) and the "intentions." 87 However, a letter by Yuan Mei shows that he did not understand the old formula in the traditional way at all: Your letter was correct in explaining "poetry speaks of the intentions" by talking about the intentions of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Lu You, one after the other, but we should not be too inflexible about this. 88 The poet has intentions that last his whole life, the intentions of a single day, the intentions that lie outside his poetry, the intentions that lie beyond phenomena, as well as the intentions that [are the result of] a moment's inspiration, lingering in a beautiful scene, or the extemporaneous composition of a poem. Therefore, we cannot be obsessed with the way we view the word "intentions." Can we say that Xie An's wandering around mountains or Han Xizai's letting loose with singing girls were their primary intentions?89 [Confucius' statement that poetry allows one] to "know the names of birds, beasts, grasses, and trees" was only a casual remark, but were his real intentions therein?90 One might be able to square a moralistic interpretation of shi yan zhi with at least some of the poetry of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Lu You, but the traditional exegesis of this term could hardly include the seemingly "immoral" actions ofaXie An living in idle retirement or Han Xizai's nightly revels, nor could it deal with the intentions of a poet as they vary according to his moods and environment. In another passage, Yuan Mei explains shi yan zhi as "poetry speaks of [the individual's] nature and feelings.,,91 If one understands the words "[individual's] nature and feelings" (xingqing '[:l·tt) in a narrow Confucian sense of human nature and feelings as a microcosm of a morally and ethically structured universe, Yuan's statement might be acceptable to Confucian critics, but, although he is willing to admit that nature and feelings may have a moral and ethical component, he would be the first to deny that they are exclusively moral and ethical. Therefore, for Yuan Mei, shi yan zhi can sometimes mean the same thing that it does for a neo-Confucian critic, but he understands the expression in a much wider sense, which is frequently liberated from all ethical or moral concerns. Poetry may have political and social uses, but for the most part it is written to please the senses and express the poet's inner self.

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The poet In spite of his opposition to neo-Confucianism, Yuan Mei's view of the ideal poet has much in common with neo-Confucian literary concepts. In his poetry talks, Yuan Mei cites with apparent approval his patron and friend Yin Jishan's view that "speech is the voice of the heart; from ancient to modern times there has never been someone able to write fine poetry, who does not have a good heart.,,92 The emphasis on the moral qualities of the poet corresponds to the neo-Confucian ideal of the sage-poet, which probably also lies behind Yuan Mei's disdain for poets who write for the sole purpose of gaining fame: Nowadays, people who superficially yearn for fame as poets and force themselves to write it [for this purpose] are divorced from their nature and feelings and lack inspiration. They are not even equal to rude peasants who knock on cart shafts or pound [out rhythms] with pestles. 93 Here Yuan is probably just talking about authors who strive to gain a high reputation in their own age, but he also felt that the greatest authors do not write to court literary immortality but merely to express their individual feelings: The three hundred poems [of the Classic of Poetry] do not record the names [of their authors,] probably because the poets were speaking in accordance with their inner feelings and had no thoughts about transmitting their names [to posterity,] so the poems are authentic and lovely. At the present people want others to be aware of their learning, the structure of their poetry, or their teachers, so authentic ideas are few and verbose writings are many.94 We have noted that Yuan Mei did very well for himself as a writer, but he states quite clearly that he strove hard to liberate himself from materialistic motives when composing verse: There are some who use [poetry] to make a display in the marketplace or to make friends with great men and gain fame. I am truly pained by this in my heart and was stirred into cleansing myself of this defect. 95 Yuan's anti-materialistic ideal of the poet is expounded further in another passage that he quotes with approval from Wang Mingsheng .£~,f;j, (172298,) one of Shen Deqian's students and a strong proponent of the Han Learning and neo-Confucian moral values: 96 Wang Mingsheng wrote a preface for somebody, which reads: "The so-called poet is not necessarily just somebody who is able to write poetry. In the end, his thought must transcend [the world,] and he

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must treat others warmly and in a refined way, and then, even if he is totally illiterate, he will become a true poet. If his thoughts are filthy, and he treats others in a worldly and vulgar fashion, then, even if he spends all his days chewing on words, or joining chapters into volumes, he will never become a poet." I love what he said, and obtained much benefit from this predecessor in poetry, and so I have written this down. 97 Similar to many Song- and Ming-dynasty neo-Confucians, Yuan Mei frequently expresses a quietist view of the ideal writer: Peace When you are at peace, nature and inspiration are revealed; Water flows into a well at night, when no one draws it. The strand of a spider's web is quite visibly there, But if you do not have enough leisure, you won't see it clearly.98 Like both Song and Ming thinkers, he also does not hesitate to draw language and ideas from ancient Daoist and Buddhist texts to express this need for inner calm: Fasting the heart Poetry is like playing the zither Reveal your heart with every note. The heart is a human flute, Where sincere feelings take form. If the heart is pure and peaceful, Fire and smoke don't defile speech. If it is full of longing and nostalgia, Tears drip down your readers' faces. Chan poems don't make a Buddha; Ignorant of principle, you're no Confucian. 99 The human heart is very great; Its language welcomes al1. 1oo The term "fasting the heart" (zhaixin 11t.~) and the idea of the heart being a "human flute" come from the Zhuangzi; Yuan's image of the zither is from another Daoist text, the Liezi 11J-1-; and the ninth line of the poem seems to approve the Chan Buddhist contention that true enlightenment cannot be obtained, if one is attached to language. 101 However, Yuan's approach is fundamentally neo-Confucian here, because the central idea in the poem is cheng (~, usually translated "sincerity," i.e. the sincere and 170

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direct expression of the inner being,) a favorite concept of Zhu Xi and earlier neo-Confucians, and the last two lines allude to two important Confucian works, the Classic of Poetry and a letter by Han Yu, regarded as a forerunner of the Song neo-Confucians. 102 Another Confucian quality of Yuan Mei's ideal poet is that he must be highly sensitive to the feelings of other human beings: People just know that Ou Fu never forgot his ruler each time he ate, but they do not realize that no matter where he was, he had deep feelings for his friends, his brothers and sisters, his wife, and his children. Look how he risked offense to rescue Fang Guan, how he praised Sun Zai out of gratitude for having spent the night at his house, how he made a date with Zheng Qian in the underworld, and how he invited Li Bai to come from Mount Lu [and visit,] a kind of friendliness and righteousness which "can inspire, can allow us to see."103 For later men who lack the nature and feelings of a Ou Fu, to imitate Ou Fu's style suppresses what is basic!104 Ou Fu may have been a great stylist, but one of the most moving aspects of his poetry is his compassion for and understanding of other human beings. Ou Fu was the ideal brother, husband, and father, and he was also the perfect friend, willing to risk both his career and reputation for men whom he appreciated. Thus, although Yuan Mei did not agree with the Confucians that the primary purpose of poetry is moral or political, he did agree with their view that the ideal poet was unconcerned with selfaggrandizement and that he had to possess both an inner calm and a compassion for others. However, we must be cautious to overemphasize the neo-Confucian elements in Yuan Mei's view of the ideal poet, because we have seen him contradicting many of the moral interpretations of the key concepts of Chinese literary criticism. Although Yuan Mei felt that poets had to possess certain moral qualities, he strongly distrusted the idea that "good" people automatically make good poets: Confucius said: "[Men who are] firm and hard, wooden and stammering approach goodness.,,105 I say: "People can be wooden, but poems cannot be wooden!" Some people who imitate Ou Fu do not imitate his firmness and hardness, but specialize in imitating his wooden quality, creating rotten wood that is beyond all carving!106 Many neo-Confucian authors admired and imitated the moral and ethical qualities of Ou Fu's poetry, but they paid only scant attention to his consummate command of style. We must recognize that the principal reason that Yuan Mei seems to have written poetry had little to do with the lofty aims of the neo-Confucians, or as he told Yin Jishan: 171

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When I was more than sixty, I wanted to stop writing poetry, and I never imagined that I would still be at it and unable to stop at an age of more than seventy. Isn't this like a silkworm spitting out silk and not being able to stop until it dies?lo7 At the age of seventy-four, Yuan Mei tried to quit writing poetry again but concluded: Quitting poetry is like quitting drinking; Though I've stopped several times, I'm soon off the wagon. It's just the same as being a vegetarian, Who desires roast meat so badly he drools. lOB For Yuan Mei the creation of poetry was not just a form of moral cultivation or a way he could influence the government but was as essential to his well-being as the spinning of silk to a silkworm. It was the whole purpose and greatest pleasure of his life. Talent, learning, and judgmene09 Yuan Mei discusses the qualities required by the great poet in terms of the three concepts talent (cai ;t,) learning (xue "',) and judgment (shi ~,) a triad first linked together by the great historian Liu Zhiji ~1~~ (661-721) in his discussion of the prerequisites for outstanding historical scholarship.110 These three terms were soon adopted by critics of poetry and became a major source of contention among later writers, involving them in endless disputes over which of the three was primary. Since Yuan Mei maintained that poetry comes from the poet's nature and feelings, one is hardly surprised to find that his literary theory lays great stress on what is inborn in the individual, or as he writes in the preface to a friend's poetic works: Poetry is not created by people, it is created by the nature [tian ;;.., literally "heaven"] within people. If a man's nature has poetry, then he will be able to compose it whenever he opens his mouth. If a man's nature does not have poetry, it is better for him not to try writing. 11 1 Since talent is inborn, study is futile for those who are not fated to become poets:

If a person is far from poetry, it will do him no good to study it, even if he starts as a boy. You can grind iron into a pin, but you cannot grind a brick into a pin.112 As was the case with Yuan Mei himself, great talent for poetry usually manifests itself in youth: 172

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Since ancient times, even extraordinary gentlemen have all been limited by what heaven gives them. 113 Chess is but a minor skill, but if one wants to become a national champion, one must do this before the age of twenty. If one passes this age, there is no hope for the rest of one's life. The swiftest horses run at greater speed than their mothers just seven days after their birth.114 What is Yuan Mei's understanding of talent? At the beginning of his preface to a friend's collected poems, he wrote: "Talent is the expression of feelings. When talent is abundant, feelings are deep," and in one of his quatrains he tells us: "Being without feelings is to lack talent. ,,115 In other words, the most talented poet is the one in whom feelings are developed to the highest degree, a quality that enables him to react to his surroundings in ways that are different from other people. In the opinion of the twentieth-century scholar Gu Yuanxiang, another important component of Yuan Mei's notion of talent is imagination. 116 No one would dispute the rich imagination manifested in Yuan Mei's poetry and although he does not use the word imagination in his own critical writings, he sometimes suggests how the talented poet summons forth his own imagination: The writer should burn incense and bow down twice, Then worship his single writing brush. With it, stars and moon are at his beck and call, And holy Mount Hua gallops and races before him!117 Talent on this level confers the poet with almost supernatural powers, and Yuan frequently praises the transcendent nature of genius: People say that a greatly talented man is like the Yellow River flowing downhill for ten thousand Ii with its mud and sand. I say that this sort of man is a crude talent, not a great talent. Great talent is like the waters of the ocean merging with the horizon, with waves and breakers bathing the sun. All you see there are gold and silver palaces with their watchtowers, strange flowers, and exotic grasses. llS Yuan Mei considers talent fundamental to all creative writing, but in other passages he gives learning almost equal status: Poetry is like archery. When your theme is in hand, [the writing of a poem] resembles shooting at a target. Those who are skilled can hit with one arrow. Those who are unskilled cannot hit with a hundred or a thousand arrows. Those who have perfect skill can hit the target right in the bull's eye. Those who are slightly less skilled will hit halfway between the edge and the bull's eye. The ones on a lower level will hit not far from the target. The ones below these

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will have arrows sticking every which way, and success will elude them. Whether one hits or not is entirely a matter of the two words "talent" and "learning.,,119 One might complain that in this passage Yuan seems to be contradicting the primacy he gives to talent in other places, but the relation between the two is defined more precisely in one of his poems in imitation of Sikong Tu:

Wide study A pile of a thousand books Allows you to complete your poem. Poetry and books are linked, The difference is having or lacking feelings. 120 Bells and drums are only instruments, But can you make music without them? Yiya was a skilled cook, But he tasted many beasts' flesh. 121 If you don't read what the ancients left behind, Can you obtain their essence? Some say "poetry doesn't involve learning," But their poems are out of tune!122 Here Yuan Mei attacks the Southern Song critic Yan Yu, who wrote: "Poetry involves a separate talent and has nothing to do with books," a statement that was, perhaps somewhat unfairly, interpreted by later authors as an attack on the need of learning for writing great verse.123 Whether or not Yuan Mei's interpretation of Yan is correct, Yuan thought that learning is like a musical instrument (his "bells and drums") that can only be played by the person who possesses talent. Study enables the poet to greatly broaden his range of experience and is as necessary to the poet as the tasting of many kinds of flesh by a master chef. The relation between poetry and book learning is close, the difference being that poetry can only be written by a person with a suitable fund of feelings, the abundance of which constitutes talent. Exactly what kind of learning Yuan Mei requires of a great poet is evident from the following: [In our discussion of] the Dao of learning, [we can say that] the Four Books are the doors and windows, the Nine Classics are the halls and living room, and the Seventeen Histories are the master bedroom. [Moreover,] the miscellaneous histories are the east and west wings, the commentaries are the door pivots and thresholds, 174

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the encyclopedias are the kitchen and counters, the non-classical works are the bathroom and privy, and the poetry and prose of the hundred authors are the studies and gardens. 124 You can meet with guests in the living room and bedroom, but you can entertain your spirit only in the library and gardens. Those modern men who know the classics and history widely but who cannot write poetry are like people who have a living room and a large mansion but who miss the pleasures of garden kiosks. Those who can compose poetry but who do not have wide knowledge of the classics and history are like men who have gardens kiosks but lack a proper house and lofty halls. 12s This list of required reading may seem daunting to modern readers, but Yuan believed that his ideal poet must be thoroughly versed in the Confucian classics and the dynastic histories, as well as the works of all earlier poets. Without such learning, his poetry would be as uninteresting as a mansion without a library or a garden. One function of such wide reading is to develop the inborn nature and feelings, as is stated by the poet and critic Li Zhonghua (Metropolitan Graduate 1724) a contemporary of the older generation cited with approval by Yuan Mei: 126

*'1:.

In general, reading many books is an important thing for poets, and the reason that they must have ten thousand chapters down in their minds is that these can assist the vital essence of their spirit. 127 According to Yuan Mei, learning is particularly essential to prevent the poet from descending into vulgar practices: It is difficult for poetry to be refined. Only after you have learning is your poetry refined. Otherwise, it will be vulgar and sloppy. Li Bai [is said to have] "written a hundred poems after drinking a dipper of wine," and Su Shi [is supposed to have] "turned playful laughter and angry cursing into compositions." Their inspiration of a single moment [supposedly] "took form as language," and this language "was not allowed to harm their meaning." But if one really thinks the above [claims] are true, then the complete works of both masters should have filled their houses to bursting, but why do so few [of their writings] survive today? Moreover, if we select their [surviving] works carefully, we would retain only fifty or sixty per cent now. Men cannot merely rely on talent and just let themselves gO.128

If nature and talent are not controlled by learning, it is quite possible that even great poets such as Li Bai and Su Shi will write commonplace and trite verse. 175

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The possible dangers to the poet are explored further in the following poem from Yuan's continuation of Sikong Tu's series:

Reposing in the elegant Truth that lacks elegance, Is the bawling of servants. Zengzi warned of perverseness;129 Confucius scolded: "You're rustic!,,130 The true gentleman is not like this; Fragrant flowers cover his teeth. He talks only of ancient kings, Maps to his left, histories, right. Shen Yue bragged of chestnut allusions;131 Liu Yuxi thought "cake" too vulgar.132 I can imagine the ancients' appearance; I intend to aim for antiquity.133 We shall see how Yuan Mei valued truth (zhen) to one's nature and feelings above all, but if such truth were not restrained by elegance, it could easily descend into "the bawling of servants." The ancient thinker Zengzi had warned about the dangers of such perverse behavior, from which even Confucius' close disciples were not totally immune, hence the Sage's admonition of Zhong You. Our models should be the Confucian gentleman and such ancient authors as Shen Yue and Liu Yuxi, who were noted for their extensive learning and their care in avoiding overly vulgar language. In spite of Yuan Mei's exaltation of learning in this work, he was always opposed to pedantic poetry that merely makes a show of one's reading, a common fault of his age: Previous people did not write poetry appended with a commentary on its literary allusions. Ouyang Xiu, who attacked Yuan Zhen for composing a commentary on his "The Tablet at Tongbo," spoke of this in detail. 134 Moreover, any poem that requires a commentary is not a good poem. Wang Shihan's "Mosquito Coil Poem" in twelve rhymes has eight lines of commentary and is more like a mosquito encyclopedia than a poem about mosquitoes. 135 In Yuan Mei's view, the defect of much eighteenth-century verse was that its authors had too much learning: The reason why [earlier] men of the world were not equal to the ancients is that they had too few books in their hearts, but the reason men of our generation are not equal to the ancients is that they have too many books in their hearts. 136

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Even outstanding classical scholars were not exempt from this fault: The classical scholarship of the three Junior Compilers, Lu Kuixun, Zhu Jin, and Wang Shihan is profound, but their poetry is for the most part obscure and depressing, so-called "scholars' poetry," displeasing anyone who reads it.137 Some of these "learned" poets may have been lacking in talent, but it is also quite possible that they were deficient in the third quality that Yuan Mei thought necessary for writing great poetry, namely judgment (shi ~, also translated "discrimination,") a term which refers to the ability to distinguish what is appropriate for a particular situation. Yuan Mei discusses the relationship between talent and learning on the one hand and good judgment on the other, by making use of his favorite archery metaphor: Writers of history cannot lack even one of talent, learning, and judgment, and judgment is fundamental. The principle behind this is like archery. Learning is the bow and arrow. Talent is the handling of the bow and arrow. Judgment is what directs one to hit the bull's eye and not be embarrassed by [arrows] stuck every which way. If you write poetry with judgment, you won't sacrifice your life for others, nor will you boast about yourself; you will not be hoodwinked by the ancients, nor be a prisoner to your habits. Du Fu said: "My teachers are many," and the Classic of History says: "Regarding good as the main thing is my teacher."138 From the age of Yao and Shun to now, there have been thousands of famous authors, all different currents from the same source, all interconnected by the same principles ... You must first clear up your judgment [when examining them].!39 Many classical scholars of Yuan Mei's age were certainly very learned and may also have possessed a great deal of literary talent. However, they lacked the judgment and discrimination that would allow them to understand the underlying unity behind all writing and they were incapable of choosing what learning was suitable for their poetry and ended up sacrificing themselves for others and being "hoodwinked by the ancients," totally missing their target. They may have studied many books, but they failed to realize that good judgment is the quality which guides the talent and learning of the outstanding poet and allows him to transcend his ancient masters: Valuing judgment Study is like a crossbow; Talent resembles an arrowhead. Only when guided by judgment, Can they hit the target.

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Though skilled at imitating Handan, Don't forget how you used to walk.140 In your skillful search for the elixir, Don't be poisoned by the drug. I possess a magic lantern,141 Illuminating what I know. Take from others, but take nothing; Have teachers, but don't have any!142 Talent is the basis of poetry and learning provides much of its material, but only if an author can exercise good judgment will he be able to choose intelligently exactly which influences to absorb and which to avoid. Judgment allows the poet to remember his own way of walking after studying others and enables him not to be poisoned by the drug of his learning. The man of judgment and discrimination takes from others but takes nothing; he has many teachers but has no teachers, for the magical lantern of judgment illuminates what is unique in each individual. The reader

If Yuan Mei had such high expectations of the poet, what did he hope for from his readers? First of all, they had to have the necessary linguistic knowledge and literary background to read and understand classical Chinese poetry (no mean feat!,) but even such extensive book learning was insufficient, for the ideal reader must also possess a rich fund of personal experience: "I said in jest that unless you have personally experienced the realm within a poem, you will not understand it.,,143 Yuan Mei gives many examples of the need for extensive personal experience when reading classical verse, of which the following is typical: Wang Yanhong's poetry frequently enters straight into your heart. 144 I am old but still without a son, and whenever guests or friends come, they immediately ask me about this problem with an appearance of great concern, something I sorely detest ... Later I saw Wang's lines: What I despise most of all is people asking me face to face: When is your phoenix going to give birth to a chick?145 Practically anyone can enjoy Wang's lines, but only a person like Yuan Mei with the personal experience of not having a male heir late in life can really appreciate what Wang had written. Booklearning is just as important for the reader as for the author, but the first must also possess the ability to use his knowledge to make associations not obvious to most individuals: 178

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I once highly praised my nephew Jian'an's poem [i.e. couplet] on falling blossoms, which reads: I see they already chase after the water flowing east; But because of the wind, they also roll back. Someone disagreed strongly with me, saying: "This is something that any child could have written, so why do you praise it so highly?" I replied: "Haven't you read how Zhang Yue fought on behalf of Wei Yuanzhong? He had already been approached by the two Zhangs [Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzong, for his support in their attempt to slander Wei,] but because of Song Hao's single speech Zhang Yue desisted, assuring his fame and character for a lifetime. 146 Now when my nephew wrote his poem he did not necessarily have [Zhang Yue] in mind, but the reader must go far in his associations. 147 The cousin's poem would seem to be (and probably was) nothing more than a description of fallen blossoms being blown back and forth, but Yuan Mei interprets it as a complex allegory about how the Tang poet and politician Zhang Yue was able to save his reputation by reneging on a promise made to the evil Zhang brothers (the "water flowing east") to slander the honest prime minister Wei Yuanzhong (thereby "rolling back" to his original integrity,) under the good influence of Song Hao (the "wind.") Yuan's reading of this poem resembles the tortuous allegorical commentaries on earlier poetry favored by some of his contemporaries, but he differed radically from them by stating that he was not attempting to get back to the original intentions of the author but rather regarded the reader (and by extension the critic) as possessed of an authority totally independent from the author. He elucidated this idea in some detail in another passage: [The fame of] poets is brought about by their poetry, but [the fame of] critics is made by what they say [about poems.] A critic's fame is a product of the correctness of his ideas, which do not necessarily have to coincide with those of the authors themselves. Some might claim that the mind of the critic is identical to the mind of the author, but then although we possess the biographical chronologies for [the poets] of the Jian'an and Dali periods, and we can discover their names, we men of a later age cannot use what remains of their words and lines to reconstruct the authors' minds, not to speak of [the authors of ancient, anonymous] works such as the Classic of Poetry.148 This is certainly the case, but when [living] people have outstanding inspirations and are moved by certain scenes and then happen to write poetry, they will not succeed at attempting to find the reason why they wrote such and such a poem, after the passage of time or at another 179

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place, even if they think long and hard in order to recollect it. It is even less possible for someone living several thousand years later, who must rely on traditions and commentaries, to hem and haw and be in a hurry to claim that "my view is correct and that men who come later cannot have their own discoveries." Such people are just fooling themselves. 149 It is a shame that Yuan Mei did not develop such ideas with their unmistakable resemblance to the twentieth-century school of New Criticism more thoroughly, but his claim that the reader had a duty to understand a work in the light of his own knowledge and was not bound by the author's intentions, which could not be easily known even in the case of living authors, flew in the face of the exegetical tradition stretching back to at least the Eastern Zhou dynasty. For Yuan Mei, the poem has a life of its own, independent of its author. 150 The task of the ideal reader is to discover what this is.

Xingling and xingqing, a preliminary discussion Yuan Mei composed verse which discusses the creation of poetry long before any of the major sources of his literary theory discussed at the beginning of this chapter were published, the following poem being written when he was twenty-four: Your brush falls on the paper with scarcely a thought, And out pops lines like Su Shi and Han Yu. H you tack on some rhymes to sentences of prose, In a flash you've got something that takes little effort. And further you should know that these two gentlemen Unfurled their own banners in the realm of poetry.l51 You might be able to ride an elephant of white, But poetry's crimson strings are not so easily strummed. 15z In the end I conclude that a poet's poems Result from much grinding, are literally cut from his gutS!153 This poem comes from Yuan Mei's earliest series of didactic poems (1745,) a very mixed group of works touching on all sorts of philosophical and political problems. Although it does not mention the xingling .ti ~ (literally, "nature and inspiration") theory which gained Yuan so much fame in later ages, it can be seen to anticipate one aspect of it, namely, the idea that the composition of poetry is basically a spontaneous process, in which the verse wells up "with scarcely a thought" from within the poet's inner being. The poem also betrays Yuan Mei's strong debt to Han Yu and Su Shi (at least for his didactic poetry to be discussed in Chapter Ten) and 180

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initiates his discussion of the seeming contradiction between his espousal of spontaneity and his conclusion that great poetry also requires much effort, i.e. it is "cut from your guts." Yuan Mei's next significant poem on literary theory (1745) marks an important turning point in his thinking on poetry: When you pick up your pen, consult your nature and feelings, Don't divide styles into Song, Yuan, or Ming. All instruments can play the notes of the scale/ 54 And there are elegant poems in every age. 155 A crisp, moon-lit autumn night is beautiful everywhere; The creator's great talent makes a hundreds flowers bloom. Alas, my career declines, while my poetry progresses;156 I'll never lead an army, but I'm a good armchair strategist!157 This poem, which was written just three years after Yuan Mei's demotion from the Hanlin Academy, when he realized he might be fated to sit on the sidelines as a poet and never be a high official, is very rich in ideas, affirming the importance of contemporary literature ("There are elegant poems in every age,") and voicing disapproval of the tendency of more conservative critics to evaluate poets according to the dynasty in which they lived. However, it is even more important as the first dateable reference by Yuan Mei to one of his key literary terms, "nature and feelings" (xingqing ,t! ,tt,) something about which one must "consult" before even lifting a writing brush. 158 The expression xingqing ("nature and feelings") sounds similar to, and is, in fact, nearly identical in meaning with xingling ("nature and inspiration",) a concept most modern readers of classical verse associate solely with Yuan Mei at present, in spite of the fact that the terms xingqing and xingling both have a long pedigree in Chinese critical literature. 159 The calligrapher, poet, and painter Qian Yong ~lti* (1759-1844) was probably the first person to state that Yuan Mei's term nature and inspiration is actually the same as nature and feelings, in a passage where he discusses the fundamental differences between Yuan Mei and his rival Shen Deqian. 160 Other twentieth scholars agree that xingling and xingqing are practically identical in meaning, so although Yuan Mei does not use the term xingling in this poem, we can say that it marks the formal beginning of his xingling theory.161 Before saying more about the meaning of these terms, let us first look at their constituent elements. Both xingling and xingqing share the Chinese character xing ,t!, which consists of the heart radical,.,:; and the phonetic sheng 1., meaning "to be born," hence, the traditional explanation of the word xing as "what one is born with," or what we would call "innate human nature.,,162 From the Eastern Zhou dynasty onward, Confucian and 181

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non-Confucian thinkers argued incessantly about the quality of human nature, the philosopher Mencius claiming that it is originally good, Xunzi affirming that it is innately evil.!63 Qing, the second component of the term xingqing, seems to have meant little more than "feelings" in early texts and is still used this way in modern Chinese, but the Han-dynasty thinker Dong Zhong shu -1:1'1'# (second c. B.C.) considered qing to be something negative, explaining it more in the sense of "desires" and opposing it to xing, and then classifying people in three categories according to the balance between their xing and qing.!64 This opposition of xing to qing exercised a great influence on later neo-Confucian thought, the proto-neo-Confucian Li Ao promoting the idea that xing is good and qing is bad.!65 In neo-Confucian philosophy of the Song and Ming dynasties, this duality is frequently expressed in the idea of "preserving the heavenly principle and getting rid of human desires" (cun tianli qu renyu 1f .kJll.-k A~t,) where heavenly principle (Ii) is the orderly structure of the universe underlying the xing of an individual and human desires are equivalent to qing.!66 The Cheng Brothers and Zhu Xi also distinguished between a "nature of heaven's command" (tianming zhi xing .k 1p- Z '[1.) and a "material nature" (qizhi zhi xing %I. -f '[1.,) the former being roughly equivalent to Mencius' intrinsically pure nature, the latter being polluted by contact with the physical world. !67 All these neo-Confucian thinkers assumed that human nature in its purest form is intrinsically moral, a conclusion in line with the Confucian view of Ii itself as an ethical and moral order and not just the physical structure of the world. In our discussion of his thought, we saw how Yuan Mei disagreed with Li Ao's separation of xing and qing and the Song neo-Confucians' downgrading of human desires.!68 In the seventeenth century, Yan Yuan had attacked the Song-dynasty distinction between the two types of nature, writing: "If there is no matter, there is nothing to form nature; if there is no matter, there is no way to see nature."!69 Yuan Mei examines some of the other contradictions in the Song neo-Confucian view of human nature in the following:

z

When Han Yu discussed the three grades of human nature [xing,] he respectfully followed the two sayings of Confucius, namely [the one stating that] "men are close by nature" and [the other about] "the highest wisdom and the lowest stupidity," explaining them both without the slightest error.!70 The Song neo-Confucians did not dare contradict Confucius but used Mencius' statement that human nature is good to contradict Han Yu, which is really laughable. One of the Chengs said: "Nature is principle." Zhu Xi said: "Heaven is principle." But according to the Doctrine of the Mean, "the mandate of heaven is called nature," so if it can be principle, does that mean that the mandate is also principle?!7!

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In view of Yuan Mei's rejection of neo-Confucian interpretations of xing and qing, it would seem that although he does not exclude ethical and moral qualities from either, he most certainly does not see xing in opposition to qing. For Yuan Mei xing is close to the meaning it had in earlier classical texts, namely, it includes everything, both good and bad, that is inborn in people. Similarly, Yuan Mei strips qing of all the negative connotations it possessed in much Chinese thought from the Han dynasty onward and merely understands it in the relatively neutral sense of human feelings and emotions. The word ling in the expression xingling, was not so widely used by Confucian philosophers and does not have such a complex pedigree. The original graph seems to show a shaman summoning rain from a cloud, and even in later times it can have the sense of "magical.,,172 The word also frequently refers to a person's soul or spirit but can have less supernatural meanings such as "ingenious," "clever," or "inspired." The magical side of ling might suggest that xingling and xingqing are quite distinct, but a number of passages in which Yuan Mei uses xingqing and xingling within the same contexts suggest that Qian Yong and his followers are not too far wrong in saying that the two are largely identical: The three hundred poems [of the Classic of Poetry] ... are all nature and inspiration [xingling.p73 The three hundred poems are merely concerned with nature and feelings (xingqing.)174 Or: The way of poetry takes nature and inspiration (xingling) as its standard. 175 Poetry is based upon nature and feelings (xingqing.)176 In addition to such parallel passages, one also finds other places where Yuan switches freely from the term xingling to xingqing. For example, in a critique of Yang Wanli's verse, he first quotes a passage by Yang attacking authors who give primacy to form and meter and insisting that good poetry "specializes in expressing xingling." Yuan then explains Yang's statement saying: "You must first have xingqing, before you can have form and meter. Form and meter do not exist outside of xingqing.,,177 Thus, although there are occasional differences between Yuan Mei's use of xingling and xingqing, it would seem that, for the most part, the terms are practically synonymous. 178 If xingqing and xingling are roughly the same, how does Yuan mean us to understand the single character ling in the term xingling? In the few passages where ling seems to take on a meaning of its own, it signifies

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"clever" or "inspired," as in Yuan Mei's explanation of why he refused to include poems by a certain high official in his poetry talks: Someone said: "His themes are all quite serious." I said: "That is not so. If the nature [xing] of someone's writing brush is inspired [ling,] then when he writes about loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and righteousness, his poems will all be full of life, but if the nature of his brush is dull [ben Jt,] then even if he writes about the ladies' quarters and [the romances of] young men and women, [his poems] will lack romance.179 Here Yuan suggests that ling {"inspired," "clever"} is the opposite of ben Jt {"dull," "clumsy."} In conclusion, we can say that in most cases Yuan Mei uses xingling in the sense of xingqing, i.e. the innate nature and feelings of human beings, but when he wants to stress the word ling, the term takes on the added meaning of inspired nature and feelings. Actually the term xingling is not used more than twenty times in the vast corpus of Yuan Mei's poetry talks, much less than xingqing, and the obsession of some of his contemporaries and later scholars with the expression xingling would seem to be at least partially a result of their desire to explain all of Yuan Mei's literary ideas with one convenient catchword. In spite of the relative infrequency of the word xingling in his poetry talks, Yuan does consider it to be the basis of all great poetry from remote antiquity to the present: From the three hundred poems [of the Classic of Poetry] to the present day, all poetry that has been transmitted to posterity is based on human nature and inspiration [xingling.p80 The xingling/xingqing theory was so central to Yuan Mei's literary approach that he constantly strove to find classical authority for it, and we saw above how he attempted to link it to the ancient theory of "poetry speaking about the intentions," but it is best now to quote the entire passage in which that statement was imbedded, because it supplies the historical context in which Yuan wanted contemporaries to view his ideas: 181 The man who spoke best about poetry throughout the ages was [the sage emperor] Shun. When he taught Kui to be his court musician he said that poetry speaks of aspirations, which is to say that poetry is based on human nature and feelings. 182 The sage emperor Shun # was supposed to have lived more than two thousand years before Confucius himself and was revered by the Sage and all Confucians of later ages, and by citing his authority for the xingling/ xingqing theory, Yuan Mei was cleverly attempting to preempt even the most conservative scholars of his day.

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Xingqing / xingling and self-expression

Since Yuan Mei considers innate nature and feelings to be the basis of great poetry, he quite naturally looks inside himself for inspiration: Poetry is the nature and feelings of people and can be found close at hand in the body and is sufficient in itself.183 Since great poetry comes from within, one of its most important qualities is fidelity to the poet's inner nature: Immortal literary works transmit [inner] truth [zhen,] not falseness. 184 Or: It is difficult for poetry to be true [zhen.] Only with human nature and feelings can it be true. Otherwise, it is just a perfunctory composition. 185

The word zhen J,. ("true or truth") does not refer to some ideal of universal truth, but is very close in meaning to such Confucian terms as zhi JL (literally, "straightness") and cheng ~ ("sincerity",) both of which refer to the unaffected external manifestation of a human being's inner reality.186 Poetry which is "true" will also possess the quality that Yuan Mei calls "freshness" (xian .~): Tree and bush peonies are the most luxuriant of flowers, but if they are made from cut ribbon, they are not as good as wild smartweed or mountain mallows. Freshness [xian] is necessary for good flavor; excitement [qu] requires truth [zhen.] People must know this before you can discuss poetry with them. 18 ? Or: Water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, fish, and shrimps are all gathered from the water, but after an hour, their colors and flavors change. Their form as water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, fish, and shrimps still exists, but they have lost their natural qualities ... Thus, we can understand the meaning behind the composition of poetry and prose. 188 Artificial poetry that is not a direct and authentic expression of a poet's own nature and feelings is like flowers made from artificial materials or vegetables and seafood that have been allowed to lose their original flavor. Any poet who is unfaithful to his inner nature and feelings and emphasizes externals, is courting disaster, as Yuan writes in his continuation of Sikong Tu:

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Preserving purity

When the ancients wrote their works, They couldn't stop themselves writing. False smiles, feigned sadness, Make you resemble an actor. 189 A beauty's portrait doesn't arouse love; Painted orchids are not fragrant. Think of the reason why this is so They have lost their inner form!19o The poet who is unfaithful to himself creates poetry that is as counterfeit as the feigned emotions of a poor actor, a superficial portrait of a beautiful woman, or man-made flowers. Yuan Mei values unadulterated inner feelings so highly that he sometimes compares the ideal poet to a little child: I frequently say that poets are people who have not lost the heart of a child. 191 Yuan's emphasis on the child-like qualities of the great poet echoes the late Ming philosopher Li Zhi's theory of the child mind (tongxin -i".-:;,) and although Yuan does not mention Li anywhere in his poetry talks, he does quote his mentor, the famous Ming thinker Wang Shouren .l.!ff-1Ep!f ~~ 6.1 (December, 1973,) 245-317; and Komatsu Ken ,J'ork-tt, "Go Baison kenkyu" "*#J-#,l>ff-1E, Chugoku bungakuho tf ~ X ~:tlt 39 (October, 1988,) 95-150 and 40 (October, 1989,) 76-125. Another study is being completed by Professor Wu Fumei of Wuhan, other works of whom are cited in the bibliography. For a discussion of Wu's Tang influences, see Zhu Zejie, Qingshishi, 67-8. For Wu's ci poetry, see David R. McCraw, Chinese lyricists of the seventeenth century, Honolulu, 1990, 25-40. See also the article in Kang-i Sun Chang, "The idea of the mask in Wu Wei-yeh (1609-1671,)" HJAS 48.2 (December, 1988,) 289-320. For Qian Qianyi, see Zhao Yongji ,liiA, 1 b, in Shang Rong,

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Song-dynasty verse and Yuan Mei's "normal" style

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52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Chiyatang quanji #*-i:"~~, Xunansanyu shuwu chongkan BftW..::.#'-£ :ifl] , 1879. Shang thought that Bai Juyi was the second most important influence. See also Ibid, 3b. Yuan mentions Songshi jishi several times. See Shihua, 7.87.234 and 14.53.467. Yuan also talks of another anthology of Song quatrains, Yan Changming's A Thousand Quatrains from Song Authors, from which he quotes extensively in Shihua, 11.12.362-4. A modern edition of this is Yan Changming 1l-k1lA, Qianshou Songren jueju -tit *-Jd! J], Shanghai, 1934. There is an excellent anthology of Lii's own poetry with detailed modern Chinese annotations in Xu Zheng -ft.iE and Cai Ming ~aJJ ed., Lit Liuliang shixuan g, ~ J~ut:i!, Hangzhou, 1991. See especially Lii's biography pp. 1-8 and an analysis of his political thought on pp. 10-15. Other biographical materials are discussed in Huang Xiuwen, 351-2. A useful article is Xu Zheng -ft.iE, "Lii Liuliang shige liielun" g, ~ R#-:jk~i!i1i-, SZDX 1 (1992,) 37-41. Cao Xuequan t.f1~ (1574-1647) was a scholar and poet who got into trouble with the Southern Ming court (the government established in southern China by a descendant of the last Ming emperor after the Manchu conquest of Beijing) for his unorthodox approach to history writing. For his biography, see Goodrich and Fang, 1299-1301. Lii Liuliang and Wu Zhimu ed., vol. 1, preface, unpaginated. Wang Jin .I.~ (1725-92) was a poet from Suzhou. See Hummel, 617. There is a letter from Yuan Mei to him in Wenji, 35.646. I have not been able to find biographical materials for Fan Qifeng M:.~~. There is a poem to him by Zhao Yi together with Fan's original work in Zhao Yi, 28.626-7, "Fan Shousheng wangfang bing tou jiashi ciyun fengda" M:.~ 1.;J£ -w 3t.f1t 11ft *- i}l*-$-. Zhao Yi also inscribed his verse with a poem found on page 628. Shihua, 8.69.263. See the discussion in Schmidt, Yang Wan-Ii, 56-9. This term can have such various meanings as "law," "teaching," and "constituent elements of existence." Zhou Bida )!).x., k, Zhou Yiguo Wenzhonggong ji )!)~ il:i:,t*~, "Pingyuan xugao" -tmJ f.!t~, Zhourixintang cangban )!) EI .,fJj-i:"i;&,Ji&., 1899, 1.10a, "Ciyun Yang Tingxiu Daizhi ti Zhushi Huanran shuyuan" ;k i}l ~ ~ Jt #' {jil] ~ J\. i~,~ .- flt. For discussions of the live method, see Zhu Jiongyuan it, "Yang Wanli Chengzhaiti shi di yishu yuanyuan" ~ ~.l[ ~~tt #~ f".#f iJl-~ iJ.l(, Shenyang shifan xueyuan xuebao(shekeban) itl%- ~Ht.fflt .f:fJl(;i±:fH&.)l (1992,) 56-62; Li Jun 3f:.f., "Chengzhai shi huofa tanxi" ~~#~ *~*Jf, Hulan shizhuan xuebao "1'-~ ~'P4.f:fJl1 (1995,) 45-9; Zhang Fuxun ~#Sth, "Chengzhai shi di huofa yishu" ~~#~ ~*f".1#, Yinshan xuekan (shekeban) ftJ..J .ffl] (;f±# Ji&.) 1 (1995,) 30-7; and Schmidt, Yang Wan-Ii, 56-77. Zhang Zi ~4ii., Nanhuji tW~Jl~, 7.22a, in Zhibuzuzhai congshu ~::r- Jt~t:.-, Shanghai, 1922. For Liu Kezhuang, see ICTCL, 586-8. Liu Kezhuang Jl] Jt.. jf±, Houcun daquan ji -ft# k~~, 95.822b, in SBCK. Liu Kezhuang, 95.826a. The sword mentioned here is like the Buddhist "sword" of knowledge, which enables one to cut through ignorance and obtain enlightenment. Ge Tianmin ~ k~, Ge Wuhuai xiaoji ~ $J!-. '1,fI.J'~, in Nansong qunxian xiaoji tW*-jfIjtIJ'~, 1801, vol. 10, lb. CZJ, 42.408b. Luo Dajing ~ k #~, Helin yulu -AA it..f,. ji., in Biji xiaoshuo daguan xubian *~IHJt.k,Jill.~~, Taipei, 1962, 3.4a, p. 2290.

*-

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331

Major Styles and Themes 61 Zhu Yizun !ilt4t-, Pushuting ji 1Il'- +~, 38.319a, in SBCK. 62 Ibid., 52.412b. 63 There is, of course, much debate among linguists about what exactly consitutes a "word" in classical Chinese, but, in any case, the lexical items represented by most Chinese characters can stand as independent unbound words in contrast to modern spoken Chinese. 64 CZJ, 10.100a. 65 The pronouns qunong -it in this line are also vernacular. 66 The first line adds the words "in Zhaoyang," Zhaoyang !J?l ~ Palace being an imperial residence of the period. 3.43, b 23. 67 I.e. the stream reflects the sky and cannot be distinguished from it. 68 11.246. An example of a poem in which it occurs in the last line is the fourth quatrain of the series found in 20.464. 69 20.481. 70 Another example of this use of the vernacular potential complement is found in the following:

*-

Looking at plums (one quatrain of four) The mountain is empty, habitually nurturing lofty feelings; Spring comes early and makes the beautiful weather stay long. I'm annoyed my grove's fragrance floats too far, Enabling people to find my home! The first three lines of this quatrain are written in pure classical Chinese, but the final line contains the vernacular potential complement xundezhao -4-f-¥- (literally, "be able to find.") This expression dilutes the compactness of the final line at the same time that it destroys the normal caesura, which should come after the fourth syllable, namely de of the expression xundezhao, impossible here, because the three characters are a semantic unit in the spoken language. In most poems this would be a fatal flaw, but it is quite effective in this work, because the delay of the caesura until after the fifth syllable creates a wonderful image of people following their noses in a long search for Yuan Mei's fragrant plum flowers. 10.208. Laozi -}t-t (born 604 B.C.?, original name Lao Dan -}tJfll!-) is one of the founders of Daoism and the supposed author of the Daodejing. Zou Yang is an early Western Han author, four pieces of whose prose writings survive. See Yan Kejun, "Quan Hanwen" ~i~:t, 19.233ab. Sun Mou ~4- was a writer in the circle of Wang Anshi. Allusion to Liu Kuan 1'IJ Jt (fl. second c. A.D.,) who was so lenient as an official that he punished people with a whip made of reeds. See Fan Ye, 25.15.887. CZJ, 114.989ab. Yang Wanli obviously did not consider Su to be his only master for this device, since in another passage he praises an example of fan'an in the work of Du Fu, concluding: "Du Fu has overturned all the cases of ancient men, which is the most miraculous method." CZJ, 114.988b. Zhang Tinglu ~JtJff§. (1675-1745) was an official and writer of the period and son of the more famous Hanlin scholar Zhang Ying ~* (1638-1708.) See Hummel, 65. Huang Zhijun -1t.:t. ~ (1668-1748) was a book collector and poet with a highly original style. He never passed the higher examinations. Shihua, 14.84.479. For Li Bai's line, see Hanabusa Hideki, 796.05. CZJ, 36.345b. Yan Kejun, "Quan Qi wen" ~~:t, 19.8.

*

71

72 73 74 75

76

77 78

332

Song-dynasty verse and Yuan Mei's "normal" style 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

CZ], 14.127b. Tao Qian, 3.28b-34b. These have been translated in Hightower, 124-56. Du Fu, 137.3.19. Literally, "Loyang," which was a capital city during the Eastern Han and Tang dynasties. 7.145. The entire poem, "On the Snow," is translated on page 582. CZ], 35.336a. For more examples of personification in Yang Wanli's verse, see Schmidt, Yang Wan-Ii, 110-14. 1.3. 5.75. Fang Licen if iL..:t;- died in 1766, according to Yuan Mei's note. Literally, "Yearning for someone during flute music, how many frosts?" For flute music, see note 14 to Chapter 2. This is an allusion to Lii An, for whom see the same note. 22.520. Yuan's longest literary work to use personification as a unifying device is his prose-poem "The Mountain's Questions," in Wenji, 1.7-8. Quoted in Zhou Ruchang %l )-k~ ed., Yang Wanli xuanji ~;tY;JfU!~, Beijing, 1964, 6. Zhou does not give his source. CZ], 114.987a. Ibid. CZ], 25.236a, "Pixiangeshang tumi" 4.t1JJ 1iI'lJ:~ •. Literally, "Black silver catches fire." Yang's comparison of charcoal to black silver alludes to a line by the Tang poet Meng ]iao, which compares charcoal to black (literally "raven," wu ,~) silver. See Meng ]iao it.3ij;, Meng Dongye ji it.~Jf~, Taipei, 1966, 9.4b, in Sibu beiyao 11!1~1t~. CZ], 28.261. When they do not use mineral metaphors, one could say that they are like fine miniature paintings, or rather like the small album leaves so popular during the age. CZ], 18.169b. CZ], 14.132b. CZ], 15.144a. The Chinese say that the moon is most beautiful on the evening of the MidAutumn Festival and frequently organize outings for the sake of viewing it at this time. 3.49, b 30. 8.162. Fan Chengda, 35. For Cheng ]infang see page 46. 7.139, b 65. CZ], 33.313a. 28.725, a 114. 28.726, c 162. Literally, "When people were first tying strings," alluding to the practice of making records by tying strings, before the invention of writing. 281.726. The Tang poet Wang Wei was also famous as a painter of nature scenes. See the discussion in Cahill, Chinese painting, 19,25. 28.733, 106. Of course, many metaphors "created" by Song authors are actually based on earlier texts. See Wang Yingzhi, Yuan Mei shixuan, 162.

333

Major Styles and Themes 115 According to Confucius: "The man of knowledge delights in water, and the man of goodness delights in mountains." See Lunyu, 11.26.33. 116 28.734, 108. 117 Yuan's extended metaphors remind one again of Su Shi's poetry, but are even more extended than what one normally finds in his verse. See, for example, Su's work comparing mountains to horses, which in the context of Song verse is already remarkable for its extended metaphor, found in Su Shi, Jizhu fenlei Dongpo xiansheng shi, 7.162b, "Jiangshang kanshan" ;J:.J:.;fr J.J. 118 I have not done a precise count, but I have the impression that the quantity of poetry in those two forms far exceeds that of other forms. In this regard, it is interesting to note that one modern scholar thinks that only the quatrains are a true reflection of Yuan's theory of xingling. See Jin Dakai, 17. 119 Shu Wei, Pingshuizhai shihua, 8a-b in Pingshuizhai shiji. See Wang Yunwu .I..1;Ji. ed., Xuxiu siku quanshu tiyao ~1~~ ,*1:-t" .f,t~, Taipei, 1972, vol. 18, 266 for another critic who regards Yuan's heptasyllabic regulated poetry highly. This author also admires his quatrains. Note that Zhang Weiping also concurred with this judgment and ranked Yuan Mei's heptasyllabic quatrains just after his heptasyllabic regulated verse. See Zhang Weiping, 30.15ab. 120 There is an excellent study of the origins and style of Yang Wanli's heptasyllabic quatrains in Long Zhenqiu tt.;lJ>it, "Yang Wanli qijue di shicheng ~lJ {f., yuanyuan he biaoxian shoufa chutan" ;f~ ~ .!. --\:: i@.€fJ i!ip i)f-~ v.f. :;fI> ~ J)t Lingling shizhuan xuebao (shekeban) 1:f!i!ip olli UHfJ!Ii) 3 (1994,) 102112,4 (1994,) 69-77, and 1 (1995,) 83-93. Unfortunately, the author passed away recently. See also the comments by the noted modern scholar Zhou Ruchang about Yang's heptasyllabic quatrains in Zhou Ruchang, xxxix. Yang Wanli's best heptasyllabic regulated poems are certainly equal to his quatrains in quality, but they are far rarer. In the introduction to his anthology of Yang's verse, Zhou Ruchang complained that Yang wrote so many good quatrains that it was difficult for him to make a selection of them. 121 For example, no one would argue that Wang Wei's ancient-style poetry is superior to his more famous penta syllabic regulated verse or that Li Bai's quatrains are as important as his ancient-style verse. 122 Wenji, 17.286. 123 Many of Yuan Mei's best heptasyllabic quatrains are didactic, but a few of his poems in this form fall flat precisely because of too much attention to ideas and not enough concrete imagery. 124 Those without a background in classical poetry should consult the notes on "regulated poetry" and "parallel" in the table of literary terms. 125 CZJ, 40.380b. 126 This example is from a pentasyllabic regulated poem. Another example of the same problem is found in a heptasyllabic regulated poem about a festival, in which Yang puts the normal classical phrase huran .~.~ and the vernacular zousha *-.~ opposite each other in the second couplet in spite of their lack of grammatical parallelism. See CZJ, 37.355a. 127 See Jin Dakai, 17. Jin agrees about the central importance of heptasyllabic regulated verse in Yuan Mei's work. A few Qing critics attacked Yuan Mei's looseness of form, but they provide no examples. See Zhu Tingzhen *-J!Jt-, Xiaoyuan shihua aOO-thl;-, 2.4a-6a, in Yunnan congshu 1;m 1i.t",Jibu ~~, Yunnan tushuguan keben 1; m mJ t" -it ilJ;f.., 1914. Zhu Tingjian was a ninteenthcentury scholar and critic. Shang Rong also complains of the same problem but gives no examples of what he means either, stating that Yuan allowed himself such freedom, "probably because he wanted to chase after the exalted

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334

*

-+ *

Song-dynasty verse and Yuan Mei's "normal" style songs of the Tang masters." It seems peculiar to us now that a Qing critic would fault Yuan for following Tang practice in his regulated poetry, because the Tang period is generally considered the first (and for some the only) golden age of the form, but Shang is probably evaluating Yuan's verse according to the highly standardized rules for regulated poetry that became popular in the Ming dynasty and were "perfected" in Yuan Mei's age. See Shang Rong, 3b. Since Yuan Mei became freer in his literary practice in old age, some critics wrote that his poetry declined after middle age: After he was summoned to the Erudite Literatus Examination, he became more reckless and dissolute, the style of his poetry turning baser day by day. His "Song of Yuan Mei" [translated on page 605] and the poems that he presented to his student Liu Zhipeng are a hindrance to morality, having completely lost [sight of] the purpose of poetry.

128

129 130 131 132 133

134

135 136

137 138 139 140

See Lin Changyi :.lt~4f, Sheyinglou shihua MJf, {t1t~, 1851, 7.7a. Lin does not specifically mention form here and may be more upset by Yuan Mei's alleged immorality than his failure to pay attention to the niceties of level and oblique tones, but loose form is probably one thing he dislikes. In any case, the late Qing critic Qiu Weixuan vehemently denied that Yuan's verse declined in old age. See Qiu Weixuan, 13b. I do not mean to say that Yang Wanli is always so "careless," Jor he wrote many finely wrought parallel couplets that are as good as the best from the Tang dynasty, but I am only suggesting that his Chengzhai style was not as demanding in this respect as was Yuan Mei's ordinary-style poetry, particularly when Yang wanted to incorporate vernacular language. Another possible translation is: "The flowers have colors that make your soul leave you [i.e. cause you to faint.]" 9.189, c 71. 13.281, bIOS. CZJ, 40.380b. The change seems to have come by about 1760. See the beautiful pentasyllabic quatrain "Standing beneath my stairs at night" (16.362) and his poem on frogs in a lotus pond (translated on page 615,) both written about that time. Note that Zhang Weiping also ranks Yuan Mei's penta syllabic ancient-style verse just behind his heptasyllabic regulated poetry and quatrains, but complains that they and his heptasyllabic ancient-style verse are sometimes crude (i.e. too free in form) and indulge in "playfulness" (youxi ~Jfl!.) too often. See Zhang Weiping, 30.15ab. Shang Rong concurs with this view. See Shang Rong, Sa. "A Ballad of the Sun God," in CZJ, 25.241b. In future chapters we shall see that pentasyllabic ancient-style verse forms the backbone for three other styles (didactic, political, and narrative) of Yuan Mei's poetry, but although the boundaries between these and his normal-style poetry is sometimes a bit fuzzy, normal-style poetry in this form is more dominated by the clever wit and polished language of the heptasyllabic regulated poems and quatrains. For Zhang Jun's biography, see Franke, vol. 1, 1316. For a discussion of why Yuan Mei detested Zhang Jun, see page 403. CZJ, 23.219b. See Yoshikawa, An introduction to Sung poetry, 24-8. CZJ, 9.87b.

335

Major Styles and Themes

*

141 Literally, "Luckily it only struck the attending chariots," an allusion to an It assassination attempt against the emperor Qin Shihuang by Zhang Liang (d. 187 B.C.) It miscarried, because the assassins attacked a chariot following the emperor's vehicle, but after the overthrow of the Qin dynasty, Zhang assisted Liu Bang in founding the Western Han dynasty. See Sima Qian, 55.25.2034. 142 The term zhixu \jJ"t ("hoard") used in this line comes from Shijing, 8.34.6. 143 During the Liao dynasty, it was the custom to celebrate a ritual of rebirth every twelve years with the emperor or other person of high position officiating. See Tuo Tuo JlJtJlJt, Liaoshi :itt., Beijing, 1974, 116.1537. 30.789, b 203. 144 Vimalaklrti was a wealthy merchant and fully enlightened Buddhist layman, who is the central character of a Buddhist scripture named after him. In this work he preaches some of the most advanced Mahayana doctrines to disciples of the Buddha, when they call on him after hearing that he is sick. See the translation found in Burton Watson tr., The Vimalakirti Sutra, New York, 1997, especially pp. 34-51. This work was especially popular in China, because it suggested that lay people could be more enlightened than monks. Although the various Chinese translations of the scripture were widely read before the Song dynasty, it was especially popular then with Chan Buddhists and remains so even today. See the discussion in Kenneth Ch'en, 382-5. 145 Fan Chengda tttAk, Fan Shihu ji ttt-E ~Jl:l, Shanghai, 1962, 17.244. 146 CZJ, 34.325b. 147 11.239, b 94. 148 10.234, b 92. 149 10.230, b 89. 150 The semi-mythical Yellow Emperor was a sage ruler now regarded as the ancestor of the Chinese people. In later ages he was generally considered to be an immortal, but his purported "tomb" (Huangdiling 1t-t F!) is located in Huangling 1tF.t District, about half way between Xi'an and Yan'an ~* in Shaanxi province. See Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1036. 151 The great ancient physician Bian Que ih~ (also known as Qin Yueren ~~A., fl. fifth c. B.C.) was killed by a court physician who envied his skill. See Sima Qian, 105.45.2794. 152 These lines are an allusion to a story in the Chronicles of Zuo about Gongzi Song ~-t*-, the son of Duke Ling :t of Zheng 1F (reg. 604-3 B.C.) When the ruler of Chu presented a large tortoise to Zheng, Gongzi Song's finger began to twitch, and he told his brother that this signified he would eat something good. At the time that the tortoise was served to the nobles, Duke Ling summoned Gongzi Song to watch but did not allow him to eat, whereupon the young man put his finger into the bronze tripod containing the delicacy. His father became angry, and the ill feelings that followed caused Gongzi Song and his brother to assassinate their father. See Zuozhuan, 184. Xu an '§. 4.4. 153 As he became older, the Han general Lian Po (third c. B.C.) found it difficult to control his bowel movements. See Sima Qian, 81.21.2449. 154 I have not been able to find any prose-poem with this title in the most complete collection of such poetry. See Chen Yuanlong ~tit-U, ed., Yuding lidai fuhui 4~Jt&R~ of, Taipei, 1974. Instead of referring to a specific piece, Yuan is alluding to the emperor Wudi's idea that one of Sima Xiangru's prose-poems composed shortly before his death had "the aura of climbing to the clouds." See Sima Qian, 57.3063. 155 A reference to Yuan Mei's service in local government after his demotion from the Hanlin Academy.

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336

Song-dynasty verse and Yuan Mei's "normal" style 156 The previous lines allude to a passage on death in the Zhuangzi: "Now if a great smith were casting metal, and if the metal were to leap forth and say: 'I have to be a Moye [a famous sword of antiquity,] the great smith would certainly think that this is unlucky metal." See Zhuangzi, 17.6.58. 157 Master Bai is the Tang poet Bai Juyi, who, according to popular tradition, attained immortality. See his quatrain "Ke you shuo" :.t.1f~, which states: "There is an empty altar in the middle [of the sea,]/Which, according to most, is waiting for Bai Juyi's arrival." Hiraoka, 3599. 158 32.923. 159 Zhuangzi did use similar language in talking about death, but he was not describing his own imminent death. 160 The term used for "void" here (kong ?t) is a favorite of the Buddhists and refers to the emptiness of all phenomenal existence. 161 32.924, "Four poems composed orally to rush all the gentlemen whose dirges had not arrived yet." 162 32.924, a 146. 163 Literally, "From the nine heavens and nine terrestial [realms.]" According to tradition, Song Yu ;RJ',. (ca. 290 B.C.-ca. 223 B.C.) was a disciple of China's first named poet Qu Yuan AftJ,f. (340?-278 B.C.,) and the putative author of "Summons to the Soul" ("Zhaohun ~~ 15t,") written to summon Qu's soul back after he drowned himself. See Chuci buzhu, 9.105, in SBCK. The work has been translated in David Hawkes, The songs of the south, 101-9. For Qu Yuan and Song Yu, see ICTCL, 352-3. 32.924, a 146. 164 The triad consists of heaven, earth, and man. 165 32.924. 166 The representative poems by Tao on this theme are in the three-poem series "Form, Shadow, and Spirit" ("Xing ying shen" 1fH,Hf.) See Tao Qian, 2.14b15a. These are translated in Hightower, 42-6. The only exceptions in Tao Qian's work would seem to be some seemingly humorous dirges he wrote, probably for himself. Tao Qian, 4.50a-51b. Hightower, 248-53. 167 For a considerably more unconventional work on death, still influenced by Zhuangzi, but approaching modern nihilism in some regards, see the long didactic poem translated on page 407. 168 Refer to the discussion at the beginning of the chapter on Yuan Mei's didactic verse and see Wu Mengu's seminal article on this issue. 169 Literally, "Up and down a thousand years, my strength is not up to it." 170 Literally, "The three Tang and two Song," for which see note 69 to Chapter 6. 33.932, c 185.

337

CHAPTER EIGHT

The historical style and the Qing re-examination of history

F

Background

OR THE MOST part, Yuan Mei's earliest surviving verse consists of highly allusive poems on historical topics written in the heptasyllabic regulated form. 1 Although he had largely discarded this style of poetry by 1741, his interest in historical verse revived whenever he traveled to areas of China rich in historical relics, and poems on historical themes constitute a part of his oeuvre that cannot be ignored. Nor was Yuan alone among his contemporaries in his interest in historical verse, for Jiang Shiquan wrote a number of excellent historical poems, and the historian-poet Zhao Yi is probably most famous today for his verse on China's past. 2 The Western scholar of literature may well wonder about the relationship between history writing and lyrical poetry, which were under the patronage of separate muses in ancient Greece, but for Yuan Mei and contemporary historians, including his adversary Zhang Xuecheng, all writing was originally historical, or as Yuan explains: 3

In ancient times there was only history writing but no classics. The Classic of History and the Spring and Autumn Annals are now called [Confucian] classics, but previously they were [categorized as] works of history. The Classic of Poetry and the Classic of Changes preserve the words of the ancient kings. The classics of ritual and music are the laws preserved by the ancient kings.4 Their records were all handled by the court historians. 5 According to traditional Chinese bibliographical practice, books were classified into four categories, Confucian classics (jing #£,) history (shi ;/:,) philosophy (zi -f,) and collected works (ji .,) which included poetry, but as Yuan points out, at least two of the Thirteen Classics are properly classified as history, even in the narrowest sense of the word, and in antiquity books that are now thought of as philosophy or literature would have been regarded as history together with them, since they also record past events. Contrary to what one might expect, Yuan Mei's poetry talks frequently treat historical questions, the very first entry discussing his peculiar notion

338

The historical style and the Qing re-examination of history

that "before ancient heroes were successful, they did not have great ambitions.,,6 Yuan felt that a knowledge of history was essential for any educated man, but that it was not easy to obtain, as he states in a study of certain unfair judgments of the Southern Song poet Lu You: History is not easy to study. You must first read a complete work of history before you can read the biographies in it. 7 You must read unofficial histories and informal histories before you can read the official histories. Otherwise, it is difficult to know the men [treated in history books] or to discuss their ages. 8 In Yuan Mei's opinion, many of the same elements were involved in the writing of great history on the level of a Sima Qian or a Ban Gu as in composing great verse, although he felt that poetry was even more demanding: The only three things essential for history writing are talent, learning, and judgment, but in poetry it is best to combine all three, and it is especially valuable if feelings command them. 9 Even if one only wants to read poetry and not write it, an extensive knowledge of history is essential, since practically all earlier poets dealt with historical issues, and "if you read poetry but do not read history, you will not know the significance of the writer's allusions. ,,10 Sometimes the knowledge required goes far beyond normal book learning, as Yuan demonstrates in his discussion of poems by himself and a contemporary: Poetry with personal allegory that sings of antiquity is certainly marvelous, but the reader must know the meaning of the allegory before he can understand the excellence of such poems. Lu Jianzeng is not more than three feet tall [sic] and people call him Shorty Lu, so his "Inscribed on Li Guang's Shrine" reads: ll His bright and reverent countenance will live a thousand ages; But he was not enfeoffed just because of his physical appearance. 12 ... I had just risen from my sick bed to take an official post before I was forty, and my "Inscribed at Handan" reads: The millet is not cooked, and the day is still young; What's to stop me from dreaming another whole life?13 At the beginning of this century, the average reader of classical poetry would have known the biography of Li Guang referred to by Lu Jianzeng and Yuan Mei's allusion to the millet dream at Handan, but only those who were widely read in biographical and historical texts would have been able to understand the connections between Lu's shortness and Li's 339

Major Styles and Themes

physical appearance or between Yuan's brush with death and the Handan story. Before the Tang dynasty, Chinese critics were already using separate terms for two fairly distinct varieties of what we would call historical poetry today, namely, yongshi ttld:, literally, "singing of history," which refers to poetry containing evaluation of historical events and huaigu 'Il1> ("yearning for antiquity,") verse that gives the author's response to some specific historical site. 14 The first of these terms, which is now used by many Chinese critics as a general term for historical verse of either variety, derives from the name of the first surviving work of its category, written by the Western Han-dynasty historian and author of prose-poetry, Ban GU.15 Much more important is the work of Zuo Si £.$ (ca. 253-ca. 307,) who wrote a series of eight penta syllabic poems in the ancient style, also named Singing of History ("Yongshi,") a famous example of which is: 16 Jing Ke drank in the marketplace of Yan; Intoxicated by wine, his spirit was aroused. He sang a sad song with Gao Jianli, As if no one was sitting by their side. Though he lacked the virtues of the strongest heroes, He was of a different sort from other men in this world. With his lofty vision he despised the whole land;l? For him, aristocrats were hardly worth mentioning. Although these nobles valued themselves, He looked upon them as dust or dirt. Men of low origins considered themselves humble, But he valued them the same as thirty thousand catties of gold!18 On the surface, Zuo's poem is an ode to the assassin Jing Ke #j ff (d. 227 B.C.,) who was renowned for his unsuccessful attempt on the life of the first Qin emperor, but the poem is really an attack on the hereditary aristocracy of Zuo Si's age and a complaint about the government's failure to promote commoners like himself. Jing Ke was also of humble birth and freely associated with the lowly Gao Jianli ~ilJf~ (d. ca. 221 B.C.,) a man who played the zither for Jing's farewell banquet when he set forth on his mission and who later unsuccessfully tried to avenge Jing's death by another attempt on the Qin emperor's life. 19 Since both Jing and Gao displayed considerably more courage than the noble sponsors of their plot, Zuo Si identified closely with them and used them to vent his own dissatisfaction with contemporary society, thus becoming one of the first Chinese poets who successfully employed historical (yongshi) poetry to "sing of his own heart" (yonghuai ttl\. 'Il. )20 Yuan Mei considered the type of poetry that Zuo Si wrote to be one of three major categories of historical verse:

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There are three forms of historical poetry. The first uses past deeds of historical characters to express what is in one's own heart, an example of which is Zuo Si's "Singing of History." Another is to summarize the events subtly, expressing them with a plaintive melody, as with Zhang Xie's "Singing of the two Shus" and Lu Chen's "Singing of Lin Xiangru. ,,21 The third uses clever parallelism. Li Shangyin's "Herding Boy" is parallel to "stopped the horses," while Wei Zhuang's "Wuji" is parallel to "Mochou.,,22 Yuan states that both his first and second forms of historical verse were creations of the period after the fall of the Han dynasty and before the rise of the Tang, while his third type, which largely recounts historical events with no obvious emotional response from the author, did not become important until Late Tang times. The first type was the most productive of all and certainly of the greatest significance to Yuan Mei and his contemporaries. Some critics consider Du Fu's historical verse to be the summit of the tradition, particularly his highly realistic works about the political and military turmoil of his age, but Late Tang poetry saw many new developments, some of which can be subsumed under Yuan Mei's third category of historical poetry. As one recent study of Wen Tingyun's historical poetry has demonstrated, some Late Tang authors began to lose confidence in the idea that one can really find ethical lessons in history, causing them to try recreating history by the use of fictional devices rather than using it for moral remonstrance. 23 Yuan Mei does not discuss the problems posed by such verse in his short statement, but his comments suggest that he did recognize how the Late Tang authors' aestheticism, manifested in an obsession with perfect parallel structure in their poetry, caused a breakdown in their ability to address moral and ethical issues or even describe historic causation, a tendency that would be unacceptable to most Qing scholars.24 The moral and political issues were revived during the Five Dynasties and the Song, but even more important for Qing authors was the inclination of a few poets like Wang Anshi to use their verse to overthrow traditional judgments of historical characters. 25 During the earlier reigns of the Qing dynasty, two main approaches emerged in historical verse. The first of these, influenced by the works of the Yuan poet Yang Weizhen ~iIJ ~ii:{~ (1296-1370) and the Ming master Li Dongyang, favored the creation of historical verse in the Music Bureau style and is represented by the poetry of the early Qing scholar You Tong Jt1~ (1618-1704) and Yuan Mei's contemporary and erstwhile student Hong Liangji. 26 The late nineteenth-century scholar Song Zeyuan 5K;'fG (1834-1901,) who made an anthology of their poetry together with the works of two other authors, characterized You Tong's verse as "historical discussion put to rhyme" and praised him for being:

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... particularly familiar with the anecdotes of the former [i.e. Ming] dynasty and having a basis for all his judgments. Since he always loved to divert himself with literary writing, his poems are frequently in a humorous style ... , something that a person of shallow learning would not have been up to at all. 27 This combination of profound historical learning and wit was a basic quality of much eighteenth-century historical verse, including that of Yuan Mei. The second tendency, inspired by the growth of textual research in the late seventeenth century, was to create learned verse connected with the history of a particular period, the most famous example of which is the massive collection of historical poetry named Poetry of the Assorted Affairs of the Southern Song Dynasty (Nansong zashi shi ~ ~#. -tt,) which consists of seven hundred and one poems on every imaginable aspect of Southern Song politics and society.28 The seven poets responsible for this collection were all major writers of the age and included Shen Jiazhe 'iic J,,-lil (fl. 1740) and the Zhejiang School master Li E. Although Yuan Mei never attempted anything on this scale, his work frequently exhibits the devotion to scholarship favored by these authors. Yuan Mei's historical studies Before we can look at Yuan's historical poetry itself, It IS necessary to say something about his historical scholarship. Many eighteenth-century scholars had a high opinion of his historical studies, the scholar Qian Daxin writing that Yuan Mei's "subtle historical research has successfully illuminated numerous problems in the comparative study of government institutions with profound insight into difficult points. ,,29 In a discussion of Yuan's study notes, the principal source for a study of his scholarship, Sun Xingyan writes: "What he speaks about is not what the Confucians who hunt for their lines and verses can comprehend. Is he not a talent for all ages, who assurely possesses a discrimination transcending others?,,3o Yuan's reputation as a historian is at low ebb now, but his historical writings are noted for the same fresh approach that informs his poetry and particularly the boldness with which he attacked many of the cherished notions of neo-Confucian historiography.31 One of the most influential of these was the idea that the Mandate of Heaven to rule the civilized world is passed down in an "orthodox succession" (zhengtong iE~Jt,) a knowledge of which must be reflected in the way historians record the facts of history. According to this theory, only one person receives the Mandate of Heaven at a single time, and once the historian ascertains who that is, he must treat all other contenders as the man's moral inferiors, labeling them as "banditS" or "usurpers" in his writings. Yuan Mei found such moral hair-splitting absurd: 342

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The term zhengtong [orthodox succession] only began during the Northern Song dynasty, just as the term daotong [succession of the Way] originated with the Southern Song. 32 However, all that the term zhengtong really signifies is that someone has control of the world. When a person gets that, it is given by heaven. Whether it is considered "orthodox" or not is decided by men ... If we suppose that someone who takes over the country by usurping the throne or assassinating a ruler is unorthodox, then the only orthodox rulers since the creation of the world were Yao and Shun, and the rest were not. 33 If the only orthodox rulers are those who executed a ruler lacking the Dao, then the only orthodox ruler since the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties was emperor Gaozu of the Han, and the rest were not. 34 Such historian-poets as Ouyang Xiu and Yang Weizhen debated the meaning of orthodox rule over the centuries, but Yuan Mei wryly observed that in early ages only bad rulers who "were not able to obtain the world, secretly relied on the idea of orthodox succession," to bolster their rule. 35 We saw Yuan opposing the neo-Confucian idea of an orthodox succession (daotong) for the Confucian doctrine, and his rejection of zhengtong in historical studies was part of the same anti-traditional iconoclasm, an approach that would cause him to question the contents and judgments of much earlier historical poetry. Similarly, Yuan Mei was opposed to the baobian ~~ ("praise and censure") approach to historical writing so popular with neo-Confucian scholars, claiming that it did not even exist at the time of the ancient sage kings whom they worshipped: There is no praise or censure in the Classic of History, which merely writes directly about events and lets the meaning become apparent by itself. The Spring and Autumn Annals is only a name for the history of the state of Lu. It already existed before Confucius' time, and he merely transmitted it [to posterity] and created nothing new. Even in the case of [the expressions] "summer, fifth" and "Duke Guo" he followed the old [text] entirely.36 Yuan Mei is not promoting the amoral Late Tang approach to history here, but he did feel that historical writing must not be overwhelmed by heavy-handed praise or censure and that the historian should recount the facts in a clear and unbiased manner, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions:

In writing history, you only have to write directly in accordance with the events, and the good or evil of people will be revealed naturally. Labeling people as wicked or rebellious subjects according to one's own views is unnecessary.37 343

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Yuan is talking specifically about the writing of history in these two passages, but his comments could be applied to historical poetry, too. Thus, Yuan's historical verse is never as heavily didactic as the work of many earlier Chinese poets, for although he does not always avoid drawing moral conclusions, they are frequently different from those of other authors and rarely so cut-and-dried. 38 The eighteenth century was a period of doubting antiquity (yigu ~ -i; ,) an attitude which found concrete realization in the textual research of the Han Learning and in Yuan Mei's own historical studies. 39 We have seen how Yuan even dared to doubt the authority of Confucius' Analects, and he brought the same skeptical attitude to his discussion of all historical sources: In the Records of the Grand Historian, the fifteen generations from Houji to King Wen are stretched out to one thousand ninety years, so [these rulers] did not get married until they were sixty and did not have children until they were eighty!40 [The period] from Xie until King Tang lasted four hundred and twenty years (fourteen generations in all,) so [those rulers] got married at thirty but died of unnatural causes at the age of forty.41 The text under consideration, the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian ,3J .~:it (ca. 145-ca. 85 B.C.,) is one of ancient China's most revered works of historical scholarship, but as Yuan Mei shows, its chronology for ancient events is severely flawed. 42 Not only did ancient historians get their facts wrong, but their moral judgments were often highly suspect: It is proper that the section of "Biographies of the Filial and Friendly" in the History of the lin Dynasty is crowned by the biography of Li Mi and that the section of "Biographies of the Loyal and Righteous" has Ji Shao at its head. 43 However, Wei Zhong was loyal to Liu Yao [Jin's enemy,] and he did nothing for the Jin, so how can he be ranked together with Liu Chen and Wang Bao?44 Deng You, [who was also included,] toadied men of power and good birth and abandoned natural morality, so he was hardly a man of good character. 45 Wang Hong made a woman go naked on the street, so what were his political principles?46 Why was he included in the "Biographies of Lenient Officials? ,,47

Since the ancient historians were frequently in error with respect to their scholarship and value judgments, it was the duty of the eighteenth-century scholar to set the record straight, no matter whether he was writing poetry or prose.

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Basic concerns As a result of his skepticism about received traditions, Yuan Mei maintained that the best historical poetry contains fresh and original interpretations of the past:

If poems about reading history do not have any new ideas, they turn into something like "Folk Ballads on the Twenty-one Histories.,,48 Even though [works like this] may incorporate some discussions [of history,] they are deficient in original or lingering flavors and resemble historical encomiums, which are themselves hardly poetry.49 Similarly, Yuan praised Zhao Yi's poem about the tomb of five martyrs killed during the late Ming persecution of scholars by court eunuchs as superior to his own work on the same theme, because it "sets forth its conclusions on a wide arena, therefore, [resembling] an impressive and dignified banner," and after reading Zhao's "Twenty-one Poems on Reading History," Yuan commented: 50 Ancient-prose authors all discuss antiquity in order to express their own ideas. Zhao Yi has transferred this method to poetry, which seems a brand new development. 51 The praise of new ideas and the attack on "historical encomiums" (shizuan :t'f) all suggest that Yuan Mei expected the historical poet to engage in a thorough reevaluation of the history of China and be ready to transcend the judgments of the ancients. The historical poet was just as important as the historian, because, according to the literary thought of the age, historical verse frequently provides a valuable supplement to the standard histories, or as Yuan Mei put it in a passage praising a poem by a contemporary about the Tang imperial favorite Lady Yang: "In his use of historical material he was able to supplement what earlier people did not have," i.e. the poem contained materials lacking in the standard chronicles. 52 So far we have treated historical poetry as if it were just another branch of historical research, an approach that would have appealed to many of Yuan Mei's contemporaries, but for a critic who promoted the expression of human nature and feelings, historical poetry held special pitfalls, it being difficult for an author to manifest his own individuality in a form depending so much on book learning. Hence, in contrast to most of his contemporaries, Yuan Mei was careful to point out that historical verse was not the same as scholarly research into the past and that it need not adhere too rigidly to the historical record: You cannot discuss poetry with the textual scholars. One of them reprimanded me for my poem "Mawei," which reads: "Husband and wife separated at Rock Moat village,/Their tears flowed more than in the Palace of Long Life," saying that on that day Lady Yang did

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not die in the Palace of Long Life. 53 I laughed and replied: "Bai Juyi's 'Song of Eternal Regret' reads: 'People walking beneath Mount Emei were few,' but when did the emperor Xuanzong ever pass by Mount Emei on his way to Sichuan?,,54 That really shut him up! No one questioned the greatness of Bai Juyi's work on the tragic romance of Lady Yang and the Tang emperor Xuanzong, but in the age of the Han Learning, it was necessary for Yuan Mei to remind readers that the author of historical verse had the right to bend the historical facts for literary purposes. Yuan Mei avoided the excessive use of historical and literary allusions in his other poetry, and the danger that a flood of learned tags might bury the author's individuality was probably one of the major difficulties of writing good historical verse: Poetry about yearning for antiquity [huaigu] results from a moment's inspiration and is best if it is not [the product] of doing a detailed study comparable to classics on mountains or geographical gazetteers ... When the ancients [wrote poems about] yearning for antiquity, they only spoke about one person or one event. For example, Du Fu's "Singing About My Longing for the Remains of Antiquity" has one poem about Zhuge Liang and one poem about Wang Zhaojun, without the two being mixed together [in a single poem.p5 Liu Yuxi's poem "Yearning for Antiquity at Nanjing" only celebrates a single event concerning Wang Jun's towered ships and the last four lines of the poem are just light sketching ... 56 However, the events concerning Wang Jun were scarcely the sole allusions about Nanjing [available to him.] Did not Liu know more than just this single allusion?57 Historical poetry that piled up allusion after allusion could be a thoroughly dreary affair, as was attested by some of the creations of Weng Fanggang and his followers. The true poet should follow in the footsteps of Liu Yuxi and never attempt to show off all his learning on a particular topic: Whenever I write poetry that sings about antiquity, ... I inevitably search out all the books relevant to the subject, but when the poem is completed, I will end up not having used a single allusion. I once said: "A person who knows allusions but does not use them, is like someone who has power but does not abuse it.58 Yuan Mei's early historical poetry History was actually Yuan Mei's first love, and he was learning the names of the great men and women of China's past and studying the historical texts in the Thirteen Classics long before he had a chance to read very much poetry. The first chapter of verse that Yuan Mei preserved for posterity

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is almost entirely historical, and it is quite likely that his interest in such writing in later years was closely connected with his continuing historical research. As a young poet beginning to write historical verse in the 1730's, Yuan Mei had at least two possible routes available: (1) highly learned verse in the heptasyllabic regulated style similar to Shen Jiazhe and his friends and (2) freer poetry in Music Bureau style similar to what You Tong and the Ming masters had written. 59 Quite typically, Yuan Mei chose both of these routes, although he leaned much more heavily to the first approach. The very first poem in Yuan Mei's collected verse (ca. 1736) was not a heptasyllabic regulated poem but what written in the closely related heptasyllabic quatrain form:

Yearning for antiquity by the Qiantang River Ancient relics of King Qian are many by this river; I come here to sing the "Songs of a Century" once again. I urge the king to select three thousand crossbow marksmen Don't shoot the river's tide, shoot the Bian Canal!60 The King Qian referred to here is Qian Liu ffi~ $J. (852-932), the founder of the Five Dynasties period state Wuyue *-~ with its capital in Yuan Mei's hometown Hangzhou. The "Songs of a Century" were once performed at the request of a famous figure of the immediately preceding Late Tang period, Li Keyong ~>tJfJ (d. 908,) but it is actually "sung" here by Yuan Mei to "encourage" the long-dead King Qian to acts of bravery.61 A series of five famous quatrains about the tidal bore on the Qiantang River near Hangzhou, written by Su Shi, described how Qian Liu did battle with the sea god by having archers shoot at the tidal bore on the river. 62 However, Yuan disapproves of Qian's actions and concludes that it would have been better for him to have shot at the Bian Canal, the main watercourse of Bianjing (now Kaifeng I#l -it, Henan,) the capital city of the Latter Liang 1~* emperor Zhu Wen *-i.lil (titled Taizong let, reg. 907-915,) his major competitor during the Five Dynasties period. The Late Tang historical poet Luo Yin had urged Qian Liu to do exactly this in the year 907, but Qian had foolishly ignored his advice. 63 The dense web of historical allusions in this work seems to contradict Yuan Mei's mature literary theory about the need for spontaneity and is not likely to appeal to many twentieth-century readers. However, in spite of the lack of any historical revisionism, we are impressed with the wit with which Yuan satirizes Qian's hubris and general failings as a ruler. After reading such a difficult work, we are perhaps relieved to turn to two poems about the recluse Yan Guang, who originally was a good friend of the first emperor of the Eastern Han dynasty before his accession to the 347

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throne but began living incognito in the garb of a fisherman at a place called Fishing Terrace (Diaotai 4~") to avoid high position in the new imperial government. 64 Both of these works are in the pentasyllabic ancient form, the first one reading:

The Fishing Terrace At night I moored by the side of Fishing Terrace; Strange stars above me were as large as the moon. 65 I imagined that I could see Master Yan Guang, Sitting there angling with his bamboo pole. At day he followed old fishermen in their pleasures, But at night he slept with His Highness in bed. Because Yan felt their friendship was more important, He came to treat the office of emperor lightly. One night he stretched his leg over their bed, And disturbed a "star" that lives in the sky!66 The transparent allusions and prose-like language of this work make it more accessible to the reader, but its most memorable feature is the fertility of imagination with which Yuan Mei reconstructs Yan Guang's scandalous sleeping arrangements and apparent lese majesty.67 Much more typical for the period, however, is the following poem in the heptasyllabic regulated form, so popular during the eighteenth century for historical verse and the mainstay of Yuan Mei's historical style as we have defined it:

The Shrine of Xie An With one laugh he packed wine for his pleasure trip, And served East Mount's singing girls like other commoners!68 He could save the refugee regime, which lay south of the Yangzi, But it was hard to deal with his feelings after middle age. 69 He kept playing chess by the flowers as "boys" destroyed the enemy/o His old man's tears dropped before the lamp, when a musician strummed the zither. 71 A yellow oriole sings behind leaves near his desolate shrine,72 Like the silk and bamboo instruments of those long-gone years. 73 Xie An saved his homeland from barbarian conquest by his able leadership during the Battle of the Fei River 1)Je. 7](. in the year 383, but before that he had spent most of his life in retirement at East Mountain, disporting himself in drinking parties with singing girls, one reason that the

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young Yuan Mei appreciated him so highly. Before his death, Xie felt great resentment at the jealousy his military victory aroused in the court and once broke into tears after hearing a musical performance at a palace banquet. 74 The technique of this poem is nearly flawless, the work being unified around references to passages from the History of the fin Dynasty and the Period of Division collection of anecdotes, A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu -t.!!.-itifJf"*.f5 Yet, in spite of its excellent organization, Yuan Mei's reconstruction of these events is fairly conventional, and he does not attempt any reversal of past interpretations of Xie An's career, the failure of Xie An to capitalize on his earlier successes merely arousing the poet's nostalgia for antiquity, a response that had been mined by countless authors before him. Yuan Mei did not introduce anything that was very original into his historical verse until his first trip to Beijing to take the civil service examinations (1736.) Something of the new approach can be seen in a heptasyllabic regulated poem on ling Ke, the subject of Zuo Si's work translated earlier in this chapter:

The assassin's village They drank a thousand toasts on the river's bank, and their songs ended; Then ling carried his own head to the ferocious beast's realm. 76 Though ling failed, he still requited the favors of Prince Dan, But he couldn't bear meeting with Tian Guang's ghost.?? The tears at the hero's farewell banquet so long ago Have become frost on men's garments as they pass by today.78 Jing Ke, don't regret that your sword did not work Rugged mountains will stab your enemy's capital forever!79 This work inhabits a world very different from both Zuo Si's original and Yuan Mei's earlier historical verse. Zuo's attack on the hereditary aristocracy had little meaning for Yuan Mei's age, Yuan's poem emphasizing ling's loyalty to his royal master Prince Dan of Yan (d. 226 B.C.) Nostalgia for the heroes of antiquity similar to what we find in much Tang verse, still dominates the work, but the wit of the closing couplet with the clever conceit of the rugged mountain peaks "stabbing" the enemy's capital is typical of Yuan Mei's later poetry, especially the works of his normal style. This work, however, does not contain the historical iconoclasm that was a product of Yuan's mature historical research, something that appears for the first time in the following ancient-style work from the same period on the subject of the Terrace of Gold. This famous structure had been

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constructed by King Zhao rm of Yan (reg. 310-277 B.C.) to attract talented advisors to his employ with the expectation that they would help him take vengeance on Qi's ruler, who had defeated Yan earlier:

The Terrace of Gold The east sea is vast, and the great wind is fierce; When can the king of Yan ever avenge these wrongs?80 He built a terrace for summoning heroes, And piled gold on it as high as heaven. Before the terrace was built, the age lacked great men, But after its construction, throngs arrived. I wonder where these gentlemen had been hiding before; Now advisors like Ju Xin and Yue Yi turned up in droves. 81 The defeated troops of Qi retreated toward Shandong, And their state was vanquished with the flick of a hand. 82 But if today we examine the heroic deeds of Yan's king, We might ask if they were worth all that expenditure of gold. Now green vines and grass enshroud his terrace, Visited for a millenium by bravos weeping at its sight. But even if King Zhao were still living today, He wouldn't build a terrace without a score to settle!83 This poem abandons the denser, allusion-generated style of Yuan Mei's earlier historical verse and is written in a form that is strongly reminiscent of the historical Music Bureau verse of You Tong and his followers. In the manner of other eighteenth-century scholars who "doubted antiquity," Yuan Mei uses his sharp wit to overthrow the conventional Confucian admiration for King Zhao as a patron of scholars and bravos, for as he so sarcastically observes, the king would not have been so generous, if he had not wished to take vengeance on his enemies. 84 Works like "The Terrace of Gold" announce the beginning of the end of Yuan Mei's historical "style" (narrowly defined as highly allusive heptasyllabic regulated verse on historical topics,) for more and more he turned to the freer form of ancient verse to express his musings on China's past. 85 However, Yuan never abandoned more restricted forms for poetry on historical themes, and perhaps his most remarkable verse of this sort written during this period was a series of sixteen heptasyllabic quatrains about famous women in Chinese history. These abandon such traditional themes of verse about women as "the abandoned wife," but a number are still concerned with the related theme of unhappy marriages: 350

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Madame Sun A sword glittered like autumn snow in the bridal chamber; In this world, getting married is truly sad sometimes. 86 The candle flickered red, and her husband lay half drunk; On the bridal bed he was still dreaming of his land in Jingzhou. 87 According to tradition, Madame Sun was the younger sister of Sun Quan ~ {fi (181-252,) the ruler of Wu during the Three Kingdoms' period. Sun wished to force Liu Bei tlJ 1ri (162-223,) later the ruler of the state of Shu 1), to hand over Jingzhou ffl ~'J'l, so he offered to marry his sister to him, in the hope that he could capture Liu and make him give up the territory. Sun did not succeed in his plan, but his sister was married to Liu just the same. Far more powerful than the typical poem of the abandoned or mistreated wife, Yuan's work gives us a haunting portrait of Madame Sun, a pawn in the power politics of the age, lying in her bridal bed, the sword of her powerful husband glinting beside her as he dreams of the land he has saved from her brother. In common with the historical iconoclasm of "The Terrace of Gold," many of the poems about famous women in this series attempt to reverse the unfair treatment they received at the hands of earlier historians and poets:

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Xishi The king of Wu lost his country because of her fatal attraction;88 Thus this flower of Yue became famous for all ages. She enjoyed the king's favors, but people blamed her for his downfall; They never really understood the anguish concealed in her heart. 89 Xis hi had been presented by the king of Yue to the ruler of Wu in order to distract him from his duties in the hope that his state could be overthrown. Most earlier historians and poets saw Xishi as an evil temptress who had been responsible for a major tragedy of history, but Yuan Mei disagreed with those who blamed her for Wu's destruction. In his view, her proverbially beautiful frown concealed the torment of her inner heart, which resulted from the degrading way she had been used as human bait. 90 Yuan Mei not only rejected received historical judgments about her, but he was also one of the first poets willing to see Xishi as a real human being. The unfairness of historical writers to women is expressed just as forcefully in another quatrain about Zhang Lihua *- Jl;f, the Honored 351

Major Styles and Themes

Consort (Guifei -t:kc.) of the Chen ~:t dynasty's last emperor, Houzhu 11.i.. (reg. 583-605): Zhang Lihua (one quatrain of two) Flowers curse the spring season near Silk-Binding Pavilion; The moon grieves by the sluice gate across Blue Creek; If poor Baosi and Daji had married noble husbands, Their life stories would be told in the poems of Zhounan!91 Zhang Lihua lived in the luxurious Silk-binding Pavilion of Nanjing's imperial palace and met her end together with the emperor near Blue Creek (Qingxi -t ~,) when the armies of the Sui dynasty captured the Chen capital. 92 Baosi J/l~), was the consort of the ill-fated Western Zhou ruler King You &I (reg. 781-770 B.C.,) and Daji -1tE? G was the consort of the last ruler of the Shang dynasty, Zhou M- (traditional reg. 1154-1122 B.C.,) both women being blamed at least in part for the overthrow of their respective dynasties. However, Yuan Mei disagrees with such judgments and suggests that if their husbands had been better rulers, both women would have been celebrated in the Zhounan )lJ section of the Classic of Poetry, which contains poems praising virtuous females of antiquity. Similarly, the last Chen emperor Houzhu was renowned for his profligacy and cowardice, but historians unfairly blamed Zhang Lihua for leading him astray and causing the downfall of his dynasty. Yuan Mei's different view of history distinguishes his work from earlier poems about Houzhu, transcending both the moral condemnation of Du Mu and the romanticizing tendencies of Wen Tingyun. 93

m

Later historical verse Yuan Mei wrote practically no verse on historical themes between 1742 and 1746. His interest revived briefly in 1747, when he composed a series of six rambling pentasyllabic ancient-style poems with the same title as Zuo Si's masterpieces ("Y ongshi,") but in the totally different style of his didactic verse (see the example translated partially on page 402.) Very little more of significance was written until his second trip to north China in 1752. This year saw a revival of historical poetry in the heptasyllabic regulated form, but there were also longer works in the ancient or Music Bureau styles inspired by the tombs of emperors, including those of Guangwudi 7tArt (reg. 25-58,) the founder of the Eastern Han dynasty, of the Tang (889-905,) and the creator of the Chinese Zhaozong ~ empire, Shihuang of the Qin. 94 The most impressive of these longer pieces is Yuan's poem on Shihuang, which is composed in a Music Bureau style of widely variable line length, strongly influenced by Yuan and Ming predecessors and similar to many of his more creative non-historical poems

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of the period. The work commences with a description of Shihuang's ruthlessness, followed by the emperor's obsession with his own mortality and his futile search for fairy realms in the seas east of China. Then Yuan continues: After his return, he made no more journeys in search of immortals; Changing tack, he became concerned for the fate of his bones. Modeled on the Three Mountains above, Sealed from the infernal springs below, His grave was carved hollow inside, like the lower heavens. A hundred men moved stones, a thousand men hammered; They sealed the coffin with fish glue and mortar of burnt frogs.95 Women as beautiful as flowers were buried far from sunlight; Men built a second Efang Palace in the nether world,96 Pools of mercury were made to flow around his body, But the stench of rotten abalone was still blown by the wind. 97 The men of Black Horse Mountain burnt his tomb with fire, Coming in hordes with plows and crowbars.98 After they plundered the pearled robes and coffers of jade/9 The tomb lay empty in the midst of livestock herds. On the fifth month of 1752 in the Qianlong era,100 A decree ordered sacrifices to China's past rulers. But high officials rode horses over the Qin emperor's tomb, Without tossing a single piece of our government's incense!lOl The free verse form of the original does not translate easily, but English readers can still appreciate Yuan's bizarre description of Shihuang's tomb, along with the biting sarcasm of his closing lines. Although Yuan does not attempt to revise the traditional evaluation of the Qin emperor, his work can be viewed as a sly attack on all the despots in Chinese history. The iconoclastic approach of many of Yuan Mei's historical poems during this period is even better exemplified by the following quatrain about the Beimang 31:. iF Hills, the principal burial ground for the rich and famous of ancient Xi'an: Gloomy tomb mounds loom jaggedly in the sky, As my light carriage passes by the foot of the mountain. It's difficult to think of poems in a place like this Too many ancient authors have been here before me!102

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The first two lines set up a delightful contrast between the worlds of the dead and the living, but the most striking feature of the quatrain is Yuan Mei's deconstruction of historical poetry, in particular his idea that much of it is a futile contest with ancient poets who have traveled the same path before. In such a work, Yuan was going one step beyond poets who merely wanted to rewrite history by means of their superior scholarship; he was questioning the tradition of historical poetry itself. Perhaps for this reason, after his visit to Xi'an, Yuan Mei created less poetry on historical themes, and much of what he did write treated history in the form and style of his didactic verse. We have mentioned how he experimented with this sort of poetry in 1747, but most of the later verse of this category abandoned the rambling structure of those works for a more developed line of thought as in the following poem, written when Yuan Mei was forty-one (1757):

If Yan Hui lacked a Confucius to praise his virtue, The simple life he lived would have counted for nothing. 103 Some prime ministers, after serving for thirty years, Were given official biographies, though they were second-rate men. Most of the noble gentlemen are in love with fame, Yet neither fame nor power are my domain. Just take a look at our dynastic histories; Half the men in them are my inferiors!104 The first two lines of this poem prepare us for a paean of history writing, which Confucians praised as a tool for immortalizing wise and virtuous men like Yan Hui, but from the third line onward Yuan's work launches into an attack on the biographies that are the backbone of traditional Chinese historiography, correctly stating that historians usually ignored outstanding men who had not held official posts and that a writer of his stature might be omitted from their massive tomes. Just as the poem on the Beimang Hills questioned the tradition of historical poetry, this poem doubts the validity of all traditional Chinese historiography as an accurate and meaningful record of the past. Much of Yuan Mei's later historical poetry, written from his early sixties until his death, continued his discussion of ancient worthies, but it frequently went beyond a mere reevaluation of a figure's position in history, as in this poem of 1779 about Wang Xizhi £~ Z (307-65,) China's most famous calligrapher and author of the widely read prose work "Preface of the Orchid Pavilion Collection" ("Lantingji xu" &Ii of ~;f.) Wang's prose piece was written to celebrate a gathering of literati at Orchid Pavilion, and the various versions of the text in Wang's calligraphy are among the most renowned examples of Chinese art, but as Yuan Mei writes: 105 354

The historical style and the Qing re-examination of history

Orchid Pavilion Because he wrote the "Orchid Pavilion Preface" in this place, The green mountains here now belong to Wang. Pure streams still glisten like a belt around it, But the famous men disappeared with the clouds and mist. Who can be unmoved by Wang's complaint of life's shortness?106 Who is his equal when it comes to calligraphy? A small number of lines that he left behind by chance, Started scholars arguing for centuries and centuries!107 One expects this poem to be an appreciation of Wang Xizhi's calligraphy and prose style, but, although Yuan Mei does not attempt to deny the man's greatness, his main purpose is to make fun of the interminable and seemingly futile arguments of contemporary scholars about the authenticity of Wang's calligraphic works, bringing into question the purpose and value of all such scholarship. However, Yuan never totally abandoned the scholar's approach, as can be seen in this amusing work written about a site he visited in the Wuyi Mountains in 1785:

My guide said that Stop-block "Fort" is the ruggedest spot here and was a military camp in the previous dynasty. After I struggled up to the top to read the stele set up by Wu Zhongli on the cliff, I couldn't help breaking out in laughter. 108 Nature is normally broad and free, But it suddenly narrows when it comes to this place. I wonder who it was who built this square "fort," Sandwiched with jagged rocks on every side. It makes me as anxious as a ferocious tiger, Enclosed in a cage from which he can't escape. I am also as fearful as a magical sword, Stuffed by somebody into a wooden box.

This cave is divided into upper and lower parts, And resembles a ring curving around you. An inscribed stele by an ancient worthy survives, With finely written characters, just right for rubbings. "Stop" is said to mean that the cave stops the vulgar; The word "block" signifies it blocks the stone canyon. 109 This means that it is an excellent place for study, And the mist and clouds are good for your lungsYo 355

Major Styles and Themes

Alas! They They With

When I asked the ignorant locals, mistakenly said it was a military camp. even invented a General Stop,111 sword in hand and a suit of golden armor!

Someone once explained the word "tenants" as "ten aunts;"ll2 I laughed so hard, I couldn't shut my mouth!113 The locals told Yuan Mei that Stop-block Fort was the military camp of a non-existent General Stop, but like any good scholar with a background in the Han Learning, he carefully read the inscription at the site and ascertained its true historical background. As Yuan Mei became less certain about the possibility of reevaluating a history about which he harbored serious doubts in the first place, his poetry about historical characters turned less scholarly but more personal in tone. An example is the following work of 1782, written about the ancient recluses Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who gave up their father's throne in protest against the evil last ruler of the Shang dynasty. The two had originally hoped to serve King Wen of the state of Zhou but after his death discovered that his son, King Wu, did not live up to their lofty ideals and starved to death on Mount Shouyang it fW, where they found only ferns to survive on:

I look at the stone statues of Bo Yi and Shu Qi after arriving at Tongbo Shrine Here stand two stone effigies with ancient mustaches and eyebrows; People say this temple was built in the Xuanhe periody4 A pure stream outside the gate twists and turns a thousand ways; Two or three lone bamboos stand before its courtyard. I know they did not regret giving up their thrones; Climbing the mountain to starve, they may not have written a complaint. lls Gentlemen, don't laugh at my offering of duckweed and wormwood, For I imagine you still remember your former diet of ferns!ll6 Yuan Mei sympathized with these two ancient worthies, who had given up the world much as he had, but rather than drawing serious moral conclusions about the past, he jokes and and banters with them as if they were his literati friends. Yuan uses a similar approach in a poem about Yan Guang, which forms a striking contrast with the early poem translated just above:

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Inscribed on the Shrine to Yan Guang (one poem of three) I remember the first time that I passed by Fuchun;117 I was a flighty man of twenty come to pay my respects. Now exactly sixty years later I return for another visit, Already counted among the old friends of Master Yan!118 All the mystery of the earlier work is replaced by a jocular familiarity, for as a talented man who had happily escaped from government service, the old Yuan Mei could consider himself a worthy companion of the recluse Yan Guang. Some of this more personal historical poetry was a product of Yuan Mei's declining health and his realization that he soon would be ancient history himself, as in the following poem written at the age of eighty-one, after reading the official history of the Northern Wei 31:A.i dynasty, the government that rule northern China from 386 until 534:

I was moved after reading the Book of the Northern Wei In the middle of a banquet, Xiahou Kuai Whispered to his friend Jiang Wenyao: "Human life is so terribly brief; We watch each other fade, one after the other. Let us make an agreement in front of our friends To invite each other to a post-mortem party. Pick an auspicious time and beautiful scenery, For a regular banquet, just like tonight.,,119 Before long, Xiahou Kuai did pass away, And once more it was the morning of Purification DayYo Master Jiang was true to his word, Set out a chair and summoned his friend's soul. Xiahou Kuai actually turned up, too; His cup was filled, and his wine disappeared! Although his ghost was vague and hard to see, His spirit seemed to transcend all things. Later there was a man named Pei Bomao, Who was the best of friends with one Li Hun. 121 After Pei's demise, Li brought his friends, To offer soup and victuals in front of Pei's altar.

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After the libations and offering of toasts, Li paced tirelessly, filled with nostalgia. Then he wept and questioned Secretary Pei: "Friend, is it possible that you no longer know us?" After I finished reading both of these biographies, I could not help being torn by grief in my heart. I was touched by the feelings of these departed souls, And I was also moved by their exalted behavior. Alas! I have reached the age of infirmity, And most of my generation are silent forever. Some day in the future, in the front of my altar, I wonder who will pour offerings of wine to me. 122 To the best of my knowledge none of the rather obscure characters of this poem had ever been treated by earlier poets, and the work is an example of the rather strange byways that Yuan's increasingly personal view of history took him down. The eccentricity evident in this poem is particularly striking in some of Yuan Mei's more polemical historical verse from his old age, as in the following two quatrains from a series of sixteen (1797) on "the delightful and shocking [actions] of the ancients," including a Song-dynasty official by the name of Pan Zhaofeng iii ~I:. 'f and Huyan Zan "1'- ~ it (d. 995,) a military leader and patriot from the same dynasty:123 Song neo-Confucians are renowned for being timid and pedantic; Only Prime Minister Pan was a true and blue friend. He lent his concubine to bear a son, and then the jewel was returned; Two separate families honored a single mother!124 And: Ignorant filial piety and fidelity have been scorned from antiquity, But Huyan Zan's affair is even more worthy of laughter. His family tattooed themselves with the words "Strive for the ruler;" And he sliced his rump to cook a broth for curing his son!125 Although the title to the series informs us that Yuan wrote the poems to "instruct his sons," one wonders exactly what he was trying to teach them, so shocking are these poems from a conventional Confucian viewpoint. Historical poetry, when narrowly defined as highly allusive historical verse in the heptasyllabic regulated form, only existed as a separate "style" for Yuan Mei early in his literary career. Even during this period we discover

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a few historical poems in a freer style, but the first significant shift in Yuan's historical poetry occurs during his first voyage to Beijing, when he started creating verse which strives to overthrow the earlier verdicts of history (especially in the poems about women,) possibly influenced by Song masters such as Wang Anshi, but also inspired by contemporary historiography and changing social attitudes. From this point on, we can no longer speak about a "style" of historical poetry, for Yuan's historical verse tends to blend with his normal and didactic styles poetry and is no longer such an important part (in quantity at least) of his total oeuvre. Notes 1 The bulk of the poetry in Chapter 1 of his works consists of heptasyllabic regulated poems, and if one eliminates poems in this chapter on non-historical themes (an important minority,) the percentage is even higher. 2 An example of Jiang Shiquan's historical verse is Jiang Shiquan, Zhongyatang shiji, 3.303, "Du Nanshi" it :t, in Zhongyatang ji jiaojian. For a discussion of his historical verse in the regulated form, see Wang Jiansheng, Jiang Xinyu yanjiu, vol. 2, 832-5. Some important examples of Zhao Yi's accomplishments in this area are the six poems in "Yongshi" $it~ ~#-ti, Taipei, 1963. This edition contains a continuation for the Ming and Qing period by a later author. For a discussion of Yang Shen's work, see Qiu Liangren, 119-20.

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The historical style and the Qing re-examination of history 49 Shihua, 2.63.57. 50 Yuan Mei, "Oubei shichao fu Yuan Mei piyu" ~JI:.#iJJ!It:ttR4tI:.-t! (hereafter abbreviated Oubei pi,) 656, in YMQJ, vol. 2, 655-658. Zhao Yi's poem on the Five Men is found in Zhao Yi, 13.249-50, "Wuren mu" 3i..A.L. There is a commentary on it in Hu Yixiao, 53-6. I am not certain what series of twenty-one poems Yuan Mei refers to here. Perhaps he means an earlier and larger version of Zhao Yi, 32.743-7, "Zhaiju wushi ouyou suode zhe yunzhi gong shiqishou" f»}"%~.1~:1rfJf4-¥-.w.~.z~-t-1::it, most of the seventeen poems of which deal with historical topics. 51 Oubei pi, 655. 52 Shihua, 15.70.513. 53 Rock Moat (Shihao ~~) is the site of Du Fu's famous poem about a peasant family separated by the horrors of warfare. See Du Fu, 54.11. This is translated in Liu and Lo, 130. The Palace of Long Life (Changshoudian k"Jftt) is a Tang palace. 54 Yuan Mei is referring to the emperor Xuanzong's flight from Chang'an to Sichuan in the year 756. He could not possibly have passed by Mount Emei, which is in the wrong part of Sichuan. Shihua, 13.29.431. The poem by Yuan Mei is translated just below. 55 These five poems ("Yonghuai guji" $it. Another remarkable poem on a "historical" topic is "Written on the Temple to Cang Jie." Although Yuan cited quite a bit of historical material in the poem, the mythical nature of its topic allowed his imagination to run wild. This work has links with his later historical verse, but I feel that it is closer to early eccentric works such as the long nature poem written in Guilin, which will be discussed on page 461. Literally, "Being a groom." 2.33, b 20. Literally, "Overturning of cities," a common expression used to describe women who are so beautiful that they can lead the ruler of a country to self-destruction. Literally, "Clasping her heart, she frequently felt it was not clear." This alludes to a passage in the Zhuangzi, which reads: "Xishi frowned at her hamlet, when she was at pain in her heart. The ugly women in the hamlet saw this and thought it so beautiful that they clasped their hearts and frowned at their hamlet." Zhuangzi, 38.14.42. 2.31, b 18. Yuan Mei also refers to a poem by a contemporary, expressing the same idea. See Shihua buyi, 3.21.614. 2.32, a 12. Yuan Mei was very interested in the unfair treatment of women by historical sources and gives examples of other poets who tried to correct the record, particularly in cases where women were blamed for the falls of dynasties. See Shihua, 3.76.95.

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Major Styles and Themes 92 See the account of her death in Li Yanshou, Nanshi, 12.2.348. 93 Du Mu's most famous poem on Houzhu is "Mooring at Qinhuai" ("Bo Qinghuai" i€! ~ifi) in Cao Yin, 523.1326. For an excellent discussion with translation of Wen Tingyun's poem on the subject, "Cockcrow Lock" ("Jimingdige" $fi~.~J.t~,) see Rouzer, 118-22. It is interesting to note that Wen Tingyun's fantasy, which seems to abandon the moral approach of earlier authors, does not even mention Zhang Lihua by name. 94 The first two are found in 8.163. 95 See the description of Qin Shihuang's interment in Sima Qian, 6.6.265. When Duke Wen of Song (reg. 609-587 B.C.) was given an extravagant burial, his tomb was sealed with mortar made from burnt frogs. See Zuozhuan, 215. Cheng A 2.5. 96 This refers to the ancient practice of burying palace ladies alive with rulers. See Sima Qian, 6.6.265. Efang Palace (Efanggong f- €r.J t. it - ii 4~*ft ill JJ I'iJ it 4, Ming Qing shiwen yanjiu congkan a)] it it i:. ~1E It flJ 2 (December, 1982,) 155-64. See also the discussion of his later nature poetry in Zhu Zejie, Qingshishi, 120-26. Like Wu Weiye, Qian Bingdeng wrote a historical work named A Record of What I Know (Suozhi lu pij- 4;P ~,) a diary of events during the Southern Ming dynasty. See Qian Bingdeng 4~*ft, Suozhilu pij-4;P~, Taipei, 1960, Taiwan wenxian congkan .f;~·i:.j,tltfIJ, no. 86. For Chen Gongyin's poem, see QS1S, 890-1. For biographical materials on Chen, see Huang Xiuwen, 358 and his official biography in QSG, 484.271.13331. There is a detailed discussion of Wu liaji's narrative in Chaves, "Moral action in the poetry of Wu Chia-chi," the two poems mentioned being discussed and translated on pp. 400-1, 403, 440-4. Chaves discusses and translates many more examples of such verse in this article and in Chaves, The Columbia book, 377-87. Qian Qianyi's collection is found in Qian Qianyi :£It-tf: ji, Qian Zeng :£~ it comm., Toubi ji jianzhu .tt .. ;l ~ ii, in Fengyulou congshu f.i1..f,ft~ .t.. "Lun liqu: Zhongguo gudai zhelishi di shenmei tezheng" -tt~)t - 'f m-;l;f\1lf~#i¥J :i-¥:4t-tti. Wenyi yanjiu ~ft.hjf7t3 (1992,) 59-67. Chen Xiang f>t~. Qingdai nushiren xuanji ltf\htA.i!~. Taipei, 1977,2 vol. Chen Yanxiao f>t* j!J • Gengxi shihua »t i~:ttt~. In Ding Fubao T #! 1*. ed. Lidai shihua xubian )fH\-th~#.t ,~. Shanghai, 1916. Chen Yinke f>t ~.~. Liu Rushi biezhuan #p-kn Jt)jIJ1Jf. Shanghai, 1980, 3 vol. Chen Yuanlong f>tj(.ff., ed. Yuding lidai fuhui -f!P~&f\P):, t:. Taipei, 1974. Chen Zuoming f>t;;jf l!Jj. Caishutang gushi xuan *-~ i:-;I;#i!. 1748, 12 ceo Cheng, Chung-ying tr. Tai Chen's inquiry into goodness. Honolulu, 1971. Cheng Jinfang t1. : Jiyuan shiji ~ Ill-tt ~. Jingzhentang keben ;)t;;X i: ~IJ ;f.. ed. 1762. Cheng Mingzheng t1. aA ,ft. Suiyuan shihua shuping I'it Ill-th~ l!.1t. (Unpublished M. A. dissertation,) Taiwan National University, Taipei, 1963. Cheng Shaozong ~J?l Yuan Mei wenxuan ~#:'~i!. Shanghai, 1947. Cheng Tingzuo t1.J!At. Hu Shi -tAi! ed. Qingxi wenji 11~~~' 1936 repro of Dongshantang cangban *-J, i:~JI&.., 1837. Cheng Xiangzhan tVj:I'l,5. "Wang Yuyang yu chanzong" ~i.$.)f.~~lf.*. Shandong daxue xuebao (zhesheban) J,*-:k