“Traditional Chinese Humor”
TO A REMARKABLE DEGREE THE ESSENTIAL QUALITIES distinguishing the civilization of the Chinese are expressed in the oldest of their extant works of pure literature, the Shih Ching, or Book of Songs . Hence whoever wishes to explore the nature of Chinese humor may expect to find in it clues of substantial value. It is a book without close parallel elsewhere in the world, as the Chinese themselves are beyond doubt a most unusual people. As preliminary to a description of the humorous elements in the Songs some observations on the general character of the collection are helpful. Such reflections serve to indicate the importance of this earliest chapter in the entire story of Chinese culture. It is a Book of Genesis in the history of cultural, aesthetic, and social life. The end of any investigation largely depends upon the course set from its beginning. A good start goes far toward a successful ending. In such studies as those undertaken here there can be no introduction remotely as auspicious as that provided by the Shih Ching. Let us take stock of this at the commencement of our enterprise before entering upon the actual undertaking.
To repeat, The Book of Songs is unique, as Chinese history is itself distinctly out of the ordinary. The earliest poetry of a people commonly consists of epics or hymns based upon a theogony, as in India, where the Rigveda and the Mahabharata answer this description. But, as we are often reminded, China has no epic nor does it possess a theogony in the customary sense of the word. Its first known compositions are ethical, political, historical, and geophysical treatises, accompanied by The Book of Songs, the last by far the most important specimen of early imaginative or poetic literature. To be sure, a few of the Songs, being dynastic hymns, possess certain properties often found in epic poetry but epics they certainly are not. Insofar as can be ascertained, for long periods of time the Songs constituted the firm and established basis for secular, imaginative literature. Though ethically idealistic, they are neither religious nor heroic in the strictest sense of these words. Their confirmed secularity and freedom from theology assist in providing within them a fertile ground for development of one of mankind’s most social qualities, namely, a sense of humor. The conjunction of the words with music unquestionably assisted in maintaining within the poems a prevailingly aesthetic attitude. The Songs were in this respect clearly set over and against the more voluminous didactic writings. They sustained perforce what longings the people possessed for an aesthetic life where words and music supplied the media for expression. Incidentally, it may be added that a few Songs as seen in book form imply not only music as a presentational art but dancing. It is, however, as poetry, not as dance or music, that the work is known and apprehended today. Its leading role or influence has been in literature rather than in the sister arts to which for so long a time it was happily allied.
It is, then, hardly too much to maintain that the Shih Ching constitutes the cornerstone or foundation of the spacious and long-lived structure of Chinese verse. Of course other elements, even at an early date, are known to have entered into the picture, among them mystical, shamanistic chants and popular verse narratives. Important types of poetry absent from The Book of Songs enlarge the field, with admixture of verse and prose. But the genius and even the forms and rhetorical figures in the Songs remained characteristic of Chinese poetic thought and expression for well over two millennia. These odes have set the key for much of the style and spirit of Chinese poetry even to the present day. Communism has revolutionized the theatre, for example, more thoroughly than it has altered the course of Chinese verse.
It has been held that the Songs have no parallel in literary history. This does not mean, of course, that there are no other collections where some instructive comparisons or contrasts may be advanced. The only collection of songs whose long life and wide dissemination remotely compares with the Chinese anthology is the Hebrew Book of Psalms. Here contrast is more significant than comparison. One collection is primarily religious and devotional, the other humanistic and secular. No people and above all no early or primitive civilization can dispense with nature and with nature, aided by some attractive folklore, the Songs maintain a firm relation. Yet the philosophy of the Songs accords with that of the primarily social Confucius and, indeed, they have long been associated with his name. It has been widely held that he first determined the canon of the Songs and in particular established their orthodox musical setting. The relation of the Songs to the other so-called Confucian Books is, of course, both clear and instructive. Whereas the prose works are essentially critical and intellectual, being treatises on moral, historical, and philosophical subjects, providing a system of thought, formulating and clarifying ideas, the Songs, on the contrary, reflect the emotions of the people, their experiences and feelings in the course of their daily living. One supplements the other. Deprived of either, Chinese civilization, which implies a synthesis of mind and heart, would be far other than it is.
Although the Songs were never forgotten, they experienced a history almost as strange and remarkable as the mystery of their creation, so that today fresh starts must be made to arrive at a satisfactory understanding and appreciation. In their interpretation the attitudes represented in the prose writings associated with the Confucian school lay heavily upon them and often, as the world of thought views the record today, much distorted their meaning. Although the odes have been at times attributed to Confucius himself, however the truth of this matter may be, it is certain that much misinterpretation of them must be ascribed to subsequent Confucianism. Much as the fathers of the Christian Church read new meanings inherent in Christianity into the Psalms of David, scholars for many centuries read allegorical meanings into the Odes which they cannot originally have possessed. This does not signify that symbolism especially of a political nature may not occasionally lie hidden in the Songs, but much of the fresh and singularly spontaneous quality of the poems as they were created was lost on the Confucian scholars, who read in them instruction in history and political theory. Although the Songs were unquestionably sung at all times by large portions of the Chinese people without thought for allegorical interpretations, the scholar class came to see in them primarily occult and hidden meanings. The Songs were, of course, one of the few books which all scholars passing the official examinations for government posts were required to know virtually by heart. Theoretically their prominent position on the required list of readings was justified by the literati through insistence upon these allegorical interpretations. One result was beyond doubt to diminish the original element of humor and even to diminish the total vitality and emotional force of the poems. It is on the whole a sorry story which has to some extent cast its shadow over the Songs to the present day. The Songs, in other words, passed through Dark Ages of scholastic pedantry. An interpretation of them in modern times is the better for overleaping this episode that persisted through long centuries in order to arrive at the probable meaning entertained even before Confucius bequeathed to them a canonical blessing that was by no means an unqualified asset. The Songs, like other true poems, miraculously survive their critics.
The humor in the great Chinese anthology is an adjunct of its predominant quality, an astonishing resilience. Whatever smile or laughter issues from it is characterized by its emergence from a basic condition of extraordinary health, welfare, and confidence in life. No stronger assertion of the positive values of life can be found than The Book of Songs. No wonder the civilization that it announced in ringing notes so many centuries ago proved in all records of human history the most enduring! Such a healthy child was destined to remarkable longevity. It is also important, of course, that the Songs contain no trace of the false romantic flush of optimism, the feverish high coloring of romantic sensibility. Many of the poems are sharply and bitterly satiric. Others are in their mood deeply tragic. Yet the general view of life remains incontestably affirmative. Even though a considerable proportion of the Songs belongs to the category of public protest, presenting images of social and economic oppression, of privation and distress, the spirit itself is not distressed. Man is free to exclaim loudly against his oppressors, honest enough to confess the misery to which not only bad government but conditions inevitable in life subject him. The Book of Songs by no means gives life an unqualified cheer. Yet behind the darkened image is incontestably a confidence in mankind’s strength to survive even the worst oppression and to emerge into light. Neither poverty, sickness, exile, nor any other evil freely acknowledged undermines the fact of human dignity, which no guardian angel is required to support. Man, if he will, may inhale oxygen to support a wholesome life. There is round about enough fresh air for him to breathe freely. Given this atmosphere in which to live, the sense of humor becomes not only inevitable but one of humanity’s peculiar and most precious possessions. Animals may grimace but not actually smile. Humor flourishes in The Book of Songs as naturally as vegetation in a temperate zone. To a critical eye it is equally important to observe both the extent and the limits of its provenance. It is an important and necessary ingredient in the book as a whole but it would be erroneous to consider it the predominant quality. For purposes of analysis the part must be carefully assessed in relation to the whole.
Mention has already been made of one quality found in a number of the poems and categorically distinct from the mood of comedy, namely the tragic sense. The collection contains a few poems that may be described as elegies, or threnodies for the dead. All such pieces, though tragic, are in the heroic mood. A reasonable number of poems are strictly focused upon sufferings, expressions in admirable verse of the various miseries that man is heir to. A large number of pieces acknowledge these miseries, become angry or satirical by describing misfortunes or conditions that may or might have been removed. Sometimes the attack is barbed with keen wit. If the arrow is poisoned, the poem is indubitably satire. If it is clean, it at least impinges upon humor. The line here is difficult to draw. The distinction lies to a large degree in the author’s motives. If it appears that he has been more angry at his enemy than pleased by his own skill in marksmanship, his work will be pure satire, if the contrary, comedy. The didactic element is conducive to weight and a direct attack, the aesthetic element to lightness and to humor.
The Songs contain no specimens of pure wit in poetry, such as are found in the Greek or Latin classical epigrams or in other and later pieces in both Chinese and Japanese poetry. Wit as understood in these terms is foreign to the earliest Chinese poets, who excel in the more genial quality of humor. Yet it must be recalled that the Songs are by no means naive, inasmuch as they exhibit great rhetorical ingenuity with much artistry in nuances, understatement and innuendo. A sly quality, peculiarly agreeable to the Chinese, is one of their principal characteristics, which in turn becomes one of their leading assets and especially favors their style in humor.
The critic must take pains to distinguish between the good humor that springs from an exhilarating experience and the humor that belongs to awareness of the human comedy. The distinction might at first seem transparent but is not as lucid as it may seem. A smile is no clear indication, since this arises almost as readily from a sense of well-being as from a sense of comedy. Laughter provides the better criterion, but then laughter is no true guide. The reader in his study may thoroughly enjoy a highly ludicrous experience without laughing, indeed the solitary laugher may be almost as much an object of suspicion as the solitary drinker. All that may be said is that an experience of well-being provides the best and most fertile ground for the sense of humor as exhibited in the Songs. Fortified by a confident spirit, the writers of the poems are enabled to view an incongruous incident which quite possibly includes some misfortune with actual amusement. Such humor springs from affirmation and happiness, satire from anger and dissent. The condition of being amused implies a basis of wellbeing. From the firm take-off of this condition the poets of the Songs achieve their flights of comedy and humor. The wellbeing is not in itself humor but the mother of humor. It provides a state of detachment equally favorable to the detachment of art and of comedy. Moreover, the artist whose spirits are exhilarated by the pure pleasure of his achievement of form enjoys a favorable station to exploit the free fantasies agreeable to humor. Humor must always be oblique; satire or wit is direct. The Chinese mind was destined to excel in the former, the Latin mind in the latter.
Nevertheless, where The Book of Songs is concerned, it must be acknowledged that all such truisms need to be observed with some caution. It should not be forgotten that the poems were highly acceptable to Confucians and that Confucius was above all a moralist. He was also a musician who, incidentally, expressed one of the most moralistic theories of music ever devised. The Songs are neither amoral nor immoral. Many— perhaps even the majority—are explicitly didactic. But here there is no skepticism, no area of disturbing and corroding doubt. No poem even goes so far as to present an argument, for who wishes to argue in song? Where, on occasion, a poem seems to the modern reader to pose a question which, morally speaking, calls for an answer, the question is never raised in the poem itself. Thus in Song 141 an injured wife declares that she will reform her roving husband by circulating reports of his wild ways. The poet recognizes the claims on both sides of the case, the possibility that the man is profligate and the possibility that the woman is a scold. From the pragmatic point of view it is fairly clear that the wife will not succeed, as she asserts, in taming her man by her complaints. But such is not the moral issue. The poet does not raise this issue and is the better humorist on this account. It would, of course, be unjust to presume that as a man the humorist who fails to raise a moral issue either denies or undermines the claims of morality. He simply does not deal in moral dialectics or moral statements in the particular work in question. Most of the Songs imply a world in which ethical values exist and have considerable force. A number are satires making explicit statements. As it happens, all the poems dealing specifically with war, of which there are many, imply that the war policy has been unwise and therefore evil. In the truly humorous poems there is irony but no doubt; an ethical incongruity appears but no answer is for the moment found necessary. That values are known and important is nowhere questioned. The Chinese humorist lives in an ethical world but sets himself to writing only on holidays, when the courts are out of session. The Songs provide many holidays for the moralist. They are so much the more artful and the better both as poems and as humor because, at least in many cases, they carry the issues no farther than irony and incongruity. One cannot avoid the conclusion that the more humorous pieces existed in ancient China as a longed-for relief from the excessive pressure put upon the mind and heart by a society on the whole so strictly regimented. Precisely because the values in society were assured, the comic poet found an especially favorable climate. He could presume a large number of standards that in actual experience existed in conflict. At this conflict he could afford to smile because he, at least, was not committed to an answer.
Pure humor, as represented in so many of the Songs, resembles mathematics. All such thinking is in this sense an abstraction from real life. Its images are assumptions. These assumptions may or may not have an ethical reference. Because the Chinese have lived so fully in a world ethically conceived, they have enjoyed the advantage of playing with ethical abstractions, as in so many of the Songs. With the advent of Buddhism, religious conceptions offered themselves to the humorists and hence one of the most brilliant of all humorous works, the story known as Monkey, came into being, a book in which the virtues and limitations of Buddhism are presented but not adjudicated. All is grist to the humorist’s mill. The incongruities of the psyche, for example, are especially attractive to the humorous poet. He reflects on the inconsistencies within the soul. Thus many of the Songs discover humor by exploring incoherence and inconsistency within the heart. This appears especially in a considerable section of the most admired and popular pieces, those dealing with what is allegedly the wayward and vacillating heart of woman. The humorist does not declare which of two attitudes is “right.” Instead, he relishes the perversity of the human spirit.
The Songs are, then, from many causes properly associated with Confucius not because he wrote or may even have edited them but because the society of which he became leading spokesman peculiarly invited both satirist and humorist. As Chinese thought is to so great a measure the coexistence of two spiritual ways of thought, Confucianism and Taoism, so Chinese humor is almost equally indebted to the two philosophies of life and to their interaction. Confucianism supplied the substantial materials of which the house was built, Taoism the freedom with which the design was decorated. The works that seem to us pure fantasy are, of course, largely inspired by Taoism, those that contain a realistic and a social content are inspired by Confucianism. The Chinese humorist in particular from the very beginning occupied a favorable position. His freedom of play he owed largely to the mystical sect, his fixed points of reference and his favorite objects of ridicule or grounds for amusement resided in the inveterate tendency of the formalists and moralists to assume rigid and affected postures.
The Chinese humorist acknowledges the value of both outlooks but, like most humorists, leans with favor upon those persons who follow dictates of nature or the heart as opposed to those who side with convention and rule. As centuries advanced the prudish, pedantic Confucian formalist became the favorite butt for the humorist. No true humorist ever condemned Confucianism as a way of life, for no true humorist, insofar as humor is his profession, ever implicitly condemns. But the pedant in thought and the stickler in conduct and manners offer the most fertile fields for his exploitation. These conditions exist only in an incipient form in The Book of Songs, although their roots may easily be detected. Chinese society had not as yet crystalized into its most rigid formalism. But the tensions were present in their early stages. Especially in matters of sex, the early humorists, like the later, are generally on the side of desire as against restraint and of youth as against age. This is the natural consequence of a point of view springing, as we have seen, from a sense of cheerful wellbeing rather than aggressive power. Humor in man is virtually instinctive. Like the visions that Wordsworth imagined in his ode dealing with immortality, it is too readily crushed by pressures of society and the shackles of formalistic education. But in these very shackles and pressures the superior humorist, who is heir to the condition of being an impudent child, finds the richest grist for his mill. The humor of The Book of Songs, then, expresses a culture still relatively young, sturdy and, above all, free from disillusionment. Although it lacks the ultimate subtleties attained in such masterpieces of the comic spirit as The West Chamber and Monkey, it has a sure refinement of its own. For all humor when examined from the rationalist’s standpoint must seem complex, as life itself is complex. It has the perfume and intricacy of a flower. Irony, insinuation, indirection, and nuance are of its essence. Although in some respects abstract as mathematics, it wholly avoids the conclusiveness of mathematics. It would be a gross humbug to assert that there are answers at the back of the book. The humor of The Book of Songs is as delicious as may anywhere be found; it lacks only the involvements of more intricately concocted draughts of humor.
With the foregoing comments as introduction, several of the more striking poems inspired with humor may be examined. The first song in the collection I take to be a sly comment on the unsuccessful attempts of a lord to seduce a peasant girl. This is but one of many instances in which the Songs express the point of view of the less powerful in contrast to the demands of the more powerful. It is part of the very essence of humor that it surprises us by showing the weaker in reality the stronger and to this extent, at least, sides with the underdog. The point of view is taken, however, not so much from moral grounds as from the humorist’s quest for surprise. David defeats Goliath. So in a large number of the Songs the common people seem superior to their masters and weak women stronger than strong men. Children are favored above their parents.
The poem, when put into its English dress, reads as follows:
On an island in the river
A bird proclaims, “ki, ki”;
A girl, fit for a lover,
Is beautiful to see.
On tendrils long and short
The water-mallows sway;
The lord sighs for the loved one
Dreaming night and day.
To left and right we gather
The mallow-plants that grow
By streams, while the lord tosses
Restlessly to and fro.
But not awake or sleeping
Can he catch hold of her,
Though soul and limbs are reeling
Stormily astir.
Sweet are those varied branches
We pluck from water-wells;
The girl, so fair and lovely,
Is hailed by drums and bells.
Water-plants are swarming
Above the river-bars,
The lovely girl saluted
By flutes and by guitars.
The second song shows much the same qualities but is more humorous than Song One and more readily elucidated by the modern critic. A young girl, presumably still a child, takes part in the family business of making and maintaining the clothes. She has gone to the irrigated valley to fetch the materials for cloth and to do the necessary washing. A maid has been sent to watch over her. But the child has ideas of her own. She is mistress of both the maid and the situation. As befits the poem’s organic form, its main point, which is its humor, appears primarily in the last stanza:
I tell the watchful matron
That I shall shortly cease,
Quit scrubbing, rinse the garments,
(I’ll wash what clothes I please)
And then, returning homeward,
Wish both my parents peace.
Clearly, the child has sound ideas of her own and succeeds against any possible opposition in putting them into effect. As in many of the Songs, the opening stanza may at first seem irrelevant but is not so. It reads:
Into the deepest valley
The vines extend and cling;
Yellow birds assemble
Fluttering on the wing,
Alight on the dense foliage
And resolutely sing.
The poetic meaning, left, as it should be, to implication, is that the young girl is herself a happy spirit completely at home and free to do as her naturally healthy will dictates. In short, she is partner with the yellow birds. Like the poet, she is a singer.
Most of the humorous lyrics in the first half of the collection were originally conceived as love songs and of these a large proportion are decidedly humorous. The times were not ripe for solemn eroticism. A few specimens of these beguiling songs may be examined in the order in which they are customarily given. By far the greater number imagine the woman speaking. Number Twenty is unusually simple and direct but nonetheless humor appears in the discrepancy between the girl’s expectation and experience. She is urged to be more receptive:
The plum-tree drops its fruits;
By summer seven are left:
Several lads are wooers;
I shall not be bereft.
The plum-tree drops its fruits;
Autumn leaves only three:
Fewer men are wooers;
May one soon turn to me!
The plum-tree drops its fruits;
In later fall I carry
My harvest basket out,
Hoping I still shall marry.
The next poem in the sequence is a song imagined to be sung by the members of the royal harem. The astronomical imagery in which the harem girls are likened to the multitude of minor stars and the queen to the moon in whose brilliance they are eclipsed is clearly humorous. They are indeed lesser stars or rather less than stars. The undignified language of the second and final stanza adds to the amusing imagery the certainty of a light, humorous touch. The poem follows:
Pale are those minor stars,
Triad and Pleiades;
We hasten through the night
Early or late to please,
A harem of small lights
Who sparkle and then cease.
Pale are we, minor stars,
Who with the wife have striven,
Who hurry through the dark
From our lord-master riven,
With blanket and chemise,
Poor concubines of heaven.
The Court of China was, of course, habitually likened to heaven, the ruler to the sun.
The thirty-ninth song, in four quatrains and possibly over-long to quote, is more advanced in its psychology. It is the soliloquy of a woman who is on the journey to her marriage but has presumably enjoyed some more spontaneous sexual relations and from still other causes is reluctant to place herself beneath a husband’s sway. Her words and actions are disingenuous. She does not acknowledge, perhaps even to herself, her true motives but consults with her female attendants how she may prolong her marriage journey. A humorous situation receives exquisite lyrical form.
Number Forty-Three presents a relatively primitive form of humor, although, as always in the Songs, with technical skill that is a sheer delight. It mocks a woman who has asked much of love but in the end “drew an ugly toad.” Several poems mock romantic and excessive pretensions of various sorts, as for the ultimate in wealth or beauty. Song 138 asks the rhetorical question whether any man should insist on having the most delicate food or the most beautiful woman at his command. Typical of Chinese thought, humor ridicules the pursuit of anything in excess. One of the most familiar of the Confucian texts, it will be remembered, is devoted to the doctrine of the mean.
Song Seventy-Two is an arch smile—no more than that—at the relativity of time as reflected in the lover’s heart. Different circumstances, as the lover, who is a farm laborer, finds, make a day pass more or less slowly. In some instances a day seems three months, in others an entire season, in still others a year. The Song which follows is conceived from the woman’s point of view; the man is depicted as vain, pretentious, and presuming. He peevishly complains that the woman dare not elope—it should be recalled that the Confucians were great sticklers in behalf of arranged and highly formal marriages. The humor is enhanced by a suspension of the comic intention. Not, perhaps, until the extravagance implied in the last lines, when the lover offers to provide his wife with a separate chamber and a splendid gravestone and swears endless fidelity by invoking the sun, is this intention clear. This is the humor of insinuation, an advanced phase of comedy in which the Chinese achieved virtual perfection.
The seventy-sixth lyric is a peculiarly winsome affair. A young girl advises her lover to be cautious and wait. It is his impatience that introduces the note of humorous, kindly ridicule. The girl in turn advises him (there are three stanzas) in the course of his secret visits not to break the willows by the street, the mulberries by the fence, nor the flowers by the garden gate. The immediately following poem is even more amusing in its mockery of passion that so clearly causes the lover to view the loved one in a light out of all proportion to reality. There is no satire here, for the song is wholly kind, sympathetic, and humorous. It has a rollicking mood. I have chosen to render it in limericks:
Shu has gone to the hunt; in the street
There is not one person to meet—
Of course they are there
But cannot compare
With Shu, who is fair and discreet.
Shu has gone to the hunt and no sign
In the street of the drinkers of wine—
Of course they are there
But cannot compare
With Shu, who is handsome and fine.
Shu has gone to the hunt, but, of course,
No one in our street rides a horse—
Of course they are there
But cannot compare
With Shu, who has beauty and force.
Timidity is well known as passion’s worst enemy. It is also singularly susceptible to ridicule, especially when appearing in the male, who is generally presumed to make the chief advances. The woman is presumed to be reticent but much humor is universally found in illustrating the truth that in sex she is commonly bolder than the man. A very short, succinct lyric, number eighty-seven, clearly humorous, is founded on these observations. The lady, if lady she be, with an impetuous gesture throws modesty aside:
If you love me truly
I will lift my skirt and wade,
But if you do not love me
My love for you shall fade—
Why were such cowards made!
If you love me truly
I will wade the river Wei,
But if you do not love me
No such fool am I—
So great a fool should die!
This is certainly frank enough and by way of frankness lies the humor, since this is no common virtue. Another piece from this section of the Songs, number ninety-five, depends for its humorous effect upon overtones. Like several of the Songs, it contains barely concealed sexual allusions. The form, which is rather unusual in Chinese, suggests a duet. The lovers, specified to be of the aristocracy, are on a spring outing beside the confluence of the rivers Wei and Chen. Again, the girl takes the initiative.
The Chen and the Wei rivers
Flow past clear banks of sand;
Each knight and girl holds up
The first spring flowers in hand.
The girl says, “Have you looked?”
The knight, “Indeed have I.”
“Then shall we look again
Beyond the banks of Wei?”
Knight and girl are going
Joking happily;
One presents the other
A shining peony.
The Chen and the Wei rivers
Flow past clear banks of sand;
Knights and girls in crowds
Fill all the shining strand.
The girl says, “Have you looked?”
The knight, “Indeed have I”
“Then shall we look again
Beyond the banks of Wei?”
Knight and girl are going
Joking happily;
One presents the other
A shining peony.
The mood here is especially gay and jaunty. Humor lies largely in the sexual insinuations. Unlike the girl in the earlier lyric, who offered to wade the same river, these lovers are highly bred and prefer to speak with indirection. The Shih Ching is a remarkable compilation of folksongs and courtly songs, although such is the universality of the art and such was evidently the character of Chinese society almost three millennia ago that the gap between the classes was much less than it became at a later time and considerably less than it has generally been in the Western world.
A few of the Songs having a folklorish quality suggest poems by the German minnesingers; a few of them with a more courtly flavor still more strongly suggest Provençal lyrics, especially the aubade. But from causes already stated, the Chinese poets are less romantic and more humorous, less inflated and more succinct. In a word, they appear superior both in art and humor. Poem Ninety-Six imagines the familiar situation of lovers parting at dawn. Here the man is evidently a counselor in the prince’s Court. In his love affair he cuts a wholly ridiculous figure:
“The cock has crowed aloud,
The court is summoned. Rise!”
“It was not the cock
But buzzing of green flies.”
“The Eastern sky is bright,
The court in full array.”
“It was not the dawn
But the clear moon-ray.״
“The insects fly in throngs”
“It’s sweet to lie reclined.”
“The court will soon adjourn
And we shall be maligned!”
Poem One Hundred, in the same sequence, has a similar character but stands closer to burlesque. The woman is speaking:
It is not yet bright in the East
But, called to the Prince’s feast,
He behaves like a country clown,
Putting clothes on upside down!
Dawnlight still is dim;
The court has summoned him;
He behaves like a lout,
Putting clothes on inside out!
He breaks the willow fence
Rushing madly hence,
Too early, too late, never right,
He cannot tell day from night.
Chinese writers can, of course, be from the Western point of view heavily didactic, yet it is notable how at times, in the hands of the more artful poets, pure Confucian teachings may be found together with lightness of touch. So here, the favorite doctrine of the mean is given a happily poetic expression.
The song in the Confucian collection immediately to follow the foregoing has a light, bantering tone notwithstanding the poet’s barefaced advice-giving addressed to a man who, presumably under the influence of strong emotion, has violated social proprieties. The situation is as follows. The usual family arrangements, quite disregarding the persons chiefly concerned, have been made for the marriage of a young man and woman. A second man, it seems, with something of Peer Gynt’s impetuosity, has projected a kidnapping of the lady on her long journey between two cities. The poet simply insists that such things are not done! He speaks mockingly, in the manner of a custodian of manners and morals. Does not the man know how to plant hemp? Does not he know how to split firewood? The planting must be orderly, the ax must strike a clean blow. (There may be sexual references here.) As for marriage, there is as everyone knows only one way of going about it, which is through marriage brokers! Besides, does not the man see that his project is wildly imprudent? The girl has already gone far on her way, along a well-traveled public road, where security is complete. The proper gifts have already been presented. Moreover, the husband is a sly fox. Thus prudence and decorum alike make the plan absurd.
It is true that a modern man, especially a Westerner, is likely to find persons in an old firmly established culture absurdly complacent where their values are concerned. Decisions are difficult. Much that does not seem amusing to the Chinese seems amusing to the West and the reverse of this, of course, holds true. Yet I cannot for a moment believe that the first singers of this song failed to regard it primarily as humorous. The moralist here seems so assured of himself that there is an absurdity in his very confidence, weakness in his assurance. Stranger things have happened in nature, or in China, than the arrest of an itinerant bride. This the poet instinctively knows. One almost hopes that despite the sly fox the bride-hunter disregarded the warnings and was successful. Certainly the metaphor of the fox fails to place the friends of morality in an ingratiating light. Although the Chinese might in general be extremely complacent, their very complacency afforded ideal material for their humorists, much of whose best work is spent in exploiting this subject.
Frustration in the love-quest, as in Aristophanes, is in The Book of Songs frequently viewed in a ludicrous light. When seen from the detachment of art and humor, how great may be the discrepancy between the quest and whatever ending there may be! There is ample occasion for humor, either as a defense mechanism for those immediately concerned or as a possible lesson in wisdom for momentarily objective observers. The humor begins in Song 129 with the basic situation. The woman is pursuing the man, who ingeniously avoids her. The scene, as often in Chinese love-poems, is beside a river. It is a winding stream and a circuitous chase. At the close of the first strophe the man is standing in midstream to the north of the point where the chase began; at the close of the second stanza he is in midstream to the south; at the close of the third and last he escapes by comfortably isolating himself on an island. Unquestionably a facetious spirit prevails throughout, although there is nothing in the plot to keep the episode from being a minor tragedy.
Song 125, though more kindly to the woman, is no less humorous. As often, there are three stanzas, each with only slight variations from the others. The focus is on the girl’s insistence that on going to Shou-yang hill she has been picking herbs, such as licorice and parsley (suspicious items). Her fellow townsmen simply should spread no more mischievous gossip! Whether she tells the truth or not makes small difference. In any case, the lilting lines certainly have comic value. The girl is evidently witty, never without her excuse. Whether or not she deceives us, she is certainly amusing, an admirable girl who knows her way around this circuitous world. The poem, like most in the collection, remains as fresh as the day it was first sung.
So much for the humorous poems with reference to love, which as a group comprise some of the most admired and most popular works in the anthology though a relatively small part of the whole. For long periods later on in Chinese literature the poets enjoying the highest prestige among the scholar class gave relatively little attention to erotic themes, leaving this for the most part to less esteemed and more popular song writers. By far the greater number of pieces in The Book of Songs deal with other aspects of life and many of these pieces also reveal humorous attitudes. Sometimes moral judgment itself takes on such a jaunty air as to be palpably humorous. This appears in a very short poem likening a man without morals to a rat:
Look at the rat,
Pale skin and sly,
A man without morals—
Why doesn’t he die?
Look at the rat,
It has teeth to ply.
A man without morals—
Why doesn’t he die?
Look at the rat,
Its limbs are spry.
A man without worth—
Why doesn’t he die?
The good nature prevailing in so much of The Book of Songs often makes such moral or social judgments possible while the sense of humor is still strong. We encounter the highly civilized condition of reproof without anger. Even if the poet is unconvinced, he succeeds in smiling at the plight in which he finds himself, while placing his opponent in a ludicrous rather than infamous position. The following, Song 135, is typical of this phase of Chinese humor:
Deceptively, the stately house was grand.
In time scant food was served at any meal.
The end in no way answered the beginning.
Great is the disappointment that I feel.
Ah me! at first at every meal I had
Four vessels with four courses for my treat.
Now from each meal I walk away with hunger.
Great is the disappointment that I meet.
The following song is still more happily humorous. It reproves the vanity and zeal of a musician who plays too loudly, too often, and who too much loves to be heard. It might almost be described as a humorous character-sketch or specimen of caricature in verse. The first line is simple Confucian precept. Prosaic as this, too, may seem, the poem develops on lines rendering it as a whole aesthetically satisfying, warmly imaginative and in no way prosaic or trite. It is Chinese to the core but the Chinese heart is itself surprisingly universal:
Too much is much too much. In the feasting hall
You play your music with a zest above
Discretion. I admire your passionate zeal
But your extravagance I cannot love.
Winter and summer you strike your rattling drum;
Loud through the feasting hall its fierce beats boom.
Summer or winter by the public road
You wave aloft your egret’s dancing plume.
Several poems begin with questions that are clearly regarded as so preposterous as to be amusing. When to this condition is added the sense of well-being and diffused happiness, humor may well be said to be achieved. This becomes especially clear as the poet’s manner takes on a rollicking tone. Poem 190 may be translated as follows, with an effort to convey in English the genial informality of the Chinese lyric:
Who says you have no sheep? You have three hundred.
Who says you have no cattle? There are ninety steers,
All seven feet high. Your sheep have curly horns,
Your cattle come with stately, flapping ears.
Some stray down hill to sip the valley pool;
Some sleep, some walk; your herdsmen’s coats are straw;
They have bamboo hats and spacious carrying bags;
Your beasts accord with sacrificial law.
Your workmen bring in wood and forest game;
Your sheep are strong and handsome to behold;
When your herdsmen wave to them they come,
Obsequiously trotting into fold.
The herdsmen dream of locusts and of fishes,
Of tortoise-and-snake and falcon banners flying.
The diviner says: “Locusts and fish mean riches,
Snake-and-bird banners mean a race undying.’’
Poem 217 begins with a similar proposition considered so erroneous as to be absurd. Each of the three stanzas uses this formula. The question is, shall the feast of the clan be open to strangers? The answer is, quite obviously, no, for clannishness constituted one of the most cherished forms in ancient Chinese society. The song asserts that the good things at the festival, especially its rich foods and wines, shall be solely for the clan, never for others. It is clear that although the poet accepts the basic social values as he finds them, he recognizes that they can be pressed to ridiculous extremes. Tu Fu’s poem, later to be examined, “Given to Cousin Tu Tsi,” similarly pokes good-humored fun at the clan system. The institution is approved but the humorist exercises his well-known function of rejecting too much of a good thing, good custom made foolish by excess. “Too much is much too much,” as the Confucian poet declares. This is a salutary phase of the comic spirit, so often vocal in behalf of moderation and common sense and against fanaticism and radicalism. The position has been made famous by Aristophanes, first and foremost of humorists in the West, but is even more often exhibited in China.
Unlike pure fantasy, humor may operate under a degree of restraint, indeed it often flourishes with understatement. An out-and-out satirist is likely to be extravagant, his temper manifest by the flush of anger rather than by smiles. Moreover, throughout the world humor has often appeared in one of its most felicitous forms when employing a muted voice, since the heavy hand of an oppressive ruler suppresses all adverse criticism that comes into the open. Understatement flourishes with shrewd and humorous innuendo. It attracts skilled hands where nuances and implications are generally discovered more congenial to the true spirit of poetry than rational statement or moral assertion. To be sure, one of the most striking and surprising aspects of The Book of Songs is the free and outspoken character of many of the lyrics. A few of the longer poems in the latter pages of the collection are dynastic hymns in loud praise of the houses of reigning princes. Also many more poems are complaints by the mass of the public against rulers who have thrust them into war and reduced them to poverty while amassing wealth for themselves by the most cruel and ruthless means.
Extending this line of thought, a large part of the voluminous commentaries on the Songs has regarded even the lyrics that are apparently love poems as hidden allegories directed by the people against their rulers. In most cases the commentaries are now regarded as misleading, much as beyond any doubt the Scholastic commentaries on the Psalms read into the Hebrew works meanings never intended by their composers. Whatever may be the truth in these matters, the disputes have little or no direct bearing on the humor of the poems. Most of the angry poems within the famous collection are astonishingly direct in their approach and in no way concern the analyst of humor. The relatively few pieces clearly rich in innuendo do, however, bear upon this, illustrating one of the most enjoyable and truly typical phases of Chinese humor.
As specimen may be cited Song 225. Here the nature of the poet’s praise of the bureaucracy only serves to betray his dislike. He specifically renounces any desire to deal in adverse criticism. Yet with refined imagination he unmistakably expresses his contempt. What he pretends to admire he actually condemns. The poem is a masterpiece in the humor of the oblique, the very opposite of true satire. To give an adequate conception of its sly, ironic method, it is necessary to quote the whole:
Court officials wear fox-furs of saffron.
Their bearing is important and refined.
They come to Chou, the gaze of common people.
Such noblemen are greatly to my mind.
Court officials wear broad palm-shaped hats
Or tall black caps; their ladies wear a pad
Of long thick hairs, most marvelous to see.
When I cannot see them I am sad.
Court officials wear ear-plugs of jade.
Men call their noble ladies fair and good.
When I am absent my poor heart is knit
In knots and sentiments ill understood.
Court officials flourish long thick sashes,
Like gorgeous trains; hair like a diadem
Or scorpion’s tail is now the ladies’ wear.—
They pass, and I walk swiftly after them.
It is not that the sash is really a train;
It is not that the sashes are so long.
It is not that ladies really curl their hair;
It naturally turns up: my thoughts were wrong!
Even this cursory review indicates how large a role is played by humor in the Shih Ching. As befits the poetry of an heroic age, the prevailing spirit of the humor is affirmative. It provides a critique of life but no disillusionment with it. The humor itself is of various sorts, derived from many moods. Into whatever path it turns it bears peculiar evidence of being Chinese, yet the humorous poems have a great sturdiness appearing in their remarkable power to survive the erosion of centuries and in many cases to show a bloom astonishingly fresh even to the present hour.
2 / Poetry (300 B.C-1200 A.D.)
ALTHOUGH The Book of Songs, WITH ITS MANY ODES of a lusty, indubitably humorous spirit, remained a keynote of Chinese poetry virtually to the dawn of the twentieth century, during the tempestuous periods shortly following the death of Confucius the quality of the poetry began to change materially. Popular verse naturally followed with less radical change from the prevailing styles of the Shih Ching than did more sophisticated forms, as the esoteric or mystical lyrics and the eloquent Court poetry. In serious art-poetry a strong vogue developed for personal confessions in a mood of refined melancholy. It is far from a rash statement that for nearly two millennia the finest poetry produced in the Empire was on the whole weighted on the side of sadness and the minor key. At the same time that in general, it may be said, the prevailing sentiment of the people was resilient if not actually optimistic, fashions in verse tended to gravity. More elegance could, apparently, be obtained with melancholy than with mirth. The tragic spirit in poetry, if not in actual life, carried more weight than the comic spirit. More prestige was to be gained by composing a sad song than a gay or humorous one.
In the judgment, at least, of the present writer only one of the lyrics in The Book of Songs (number 184) can possibly be considered to reflect wholeheartedly the Taoist strain in Chinese thought, which was, nevertheless, distinctly powerful throughout the entire period actually recorded by historians of literature. As a philosophy, Taoism was at least as potent a force as Confucianism in the development of Chinese art and verse. Its profuse literature and powerful traditions, nursing romantic fantasy and imagination, strongly appealed to the aesthetic mind. Both the popular and the esoteric elements in this great movement encouraged highly fantastic and even eccentric modes of thought and expression. Also, another phase of the movement promoted quietism that encouraged what may be called “the still, small voice” in Chinese poetry, heard at its best from such masters as T’ao Ch’ien and Su Tung-p’o, over a period of nearly a thousand years. In their essential temper, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism had much in common, containing, of course, more powerful elements of mysticism and supernaturalism than does Confucianism. Thus in the arts, the Ch’an Buddhists assimilated much from the native Chinese tradition of Taoism, the Confucians standing apart from the two mystical religions though almost always occupying the center of the arena. Two great poets of the eighth century A.D., Tu Fu and Po Chü-i, presumably owed most to the Confucian tradition: Li Po and Li Ho may well have owed more to the mystical sects. In any case, mystical and romantic tendencies made themselves strongly felt in both poetry and prose shortly after Confucius’ death. The rise of Buddhism as a potent factor shortly before the times of T’ao Ch’ien (372-427 A.D.) like a converging river added materially to this force. All the major poets to some degree felt these influences, though no two of them, of course, in quite the same manner. This being so, the full-throated, natural humor and gaiety expressed in so many pieces in The Book of Songs was not only never to be equaled but never closely approached.
One persistently asks, what is humor and where are its manifestations in poetry most clearly discerned? Where are the springheads of this spirit in Chinese poetry if, indeed, any such primal sources are discoverable? On the whole, I should maintain, in The Book of Songs, but the immediately preceding observations seriously qualify the statement. Occasionally critics have rashly presumed that they have found an answer. So in the Introduction to George Kao’s anthology, Chinese Wit and Humor, Lin Yutang writes:
There emerged what seems to my mind the most mature humorous spirit of China. I refer to T’ao Ch’ien, the poet, in whose spirit the last slightly sour note which existed in Changtzu was lost, and humor, joined to an understanding acceptance of life, evoked only a kindly, leisurely smile. Confucianism and Taoism had sufficiently combined to make his appearance possible. T’ao Ch’ien was both responsible and irresponsible, and we see at last neither a crusader nor a cynic, but a family man, one of us, and therefore truly a great human spirit, conscious of the limitations of human existence, but nevertheless achieving his own freedom without abandon, and peace of mind without rebellion. It would be difficult, though possible, to point to some particular piece of T’ao’s as showing his humorous spirit; but that is so with the greatest and best kind of humor when it becomes a pervading view of life. In him, humor becomes perfectly natural. Tao had come to terms with himself and with his relations with the human world.9
This statement appears to the present writer less than half a truth, ascribing too much to Tao Ch’ien in a general appraisal of the humorous element in Chinese literature. Who will wish to say that the clear, pure voice of humor is anywhere heard more admirably than in certain lyrics of The Book of Songs? Wang I and Wang Yen-chou, writing nearly three centuries before Tao, at least equal him in humor. The great Tang poets are clearly more powerful than he in this domain. As a humorist he does not remotely approach the writers of plays and novels that appeared considerably later in the stream of Chinese literature. Tao Ch’ien is obviously a quietist. He may have pronounced a magic charm that stilled alien voices and created a quietness through which the voices of the true humorists were to be heard. As will later be shown, some of his poems certainly present a rather mild, though charming, expression of the humorous spirit. As might be supposed, there is no actual father of humor in Chinese literature. Its growth and evolution were continuous and directed through the collaboration of countless hands. It may be well to pursue the inquiry at a point that will presumably, to some minds, appear capricious and paradoxical. But humor is not to be traced by consulting ruler and compass. Let us examine the famous poem, Ch’ü Yüan’s Encountering Sorrow, or the Li Sao.
This English title frequently given the poem as a rendering of the Chinese certainly does not suggest that research into the secrets of Chinese humor need take the least account of it. One of the most recent scholars to discuss the poem, Burton Watson, would appear to discourage any such thought. He writes: “At one point in particular, after the poet has been refused admittance to Heaven by the surly porter and tells us that ‘knotting orchids, I stand in indecision,’ there seems a real danger that inadvertent humor may intrude its fatal presence.”10 I suggest that Professor Watson to at least some degree yield to temptation. The result may not be as “fatal” as might be supposed.
Before examining any possible relation of this strange poem to humor a brief account of it and of its critics should be useful. It has been observed that the work, traditionally ascribed to Ch’ü Yüan, was composed in a section of China well to the south of that represented by The Book of Songs. There is indeed a tropical luxuriance in its rhetoric. Its style has been accounted for in part by its religious flavor, for it certainly reflects the invocations of the shamans, or magicians, who possessed among their other powers an ability to summon the souls of the dead. Several poems of the same school as Encountering Sorrow are almost surely of this nature, in other words, hymns of a magical power, incantations primarily religious and not strictly aesthetic in character, or, in any case, religious in their primary function and aesthetic only in a secondary phase. It may be asked if such poetry can be anything else than wholly serious? The answer depends in part on the meaning of the word “serious.” One of the most powerful of the Chinese incantations apparently designed to summon the soul of a dead or dying prince back to its normal consciousness contains a long and very beautiful passage gleaming with gaiety, laughter, and sensual delights.11 These exhilarating pleasures are promised the soul as inducements for its return from the borders of the world of shadows. Such a poetic landscape cannot be said resolutely to exclude the sense of humor. Not all religion is as grim as that of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Encountering Sorrow is a spiritual extravaganza beside which a mass by Charpentier might seem almost prosaic. It far out-baroques the baroque. It is difficult to believe that in the case of writing of such intoxicated imagination as seen in Encountering Sorrow the self-praise is without some grains of salt. It is hard to believe that even in the early stages of Chinese poetry a poet could shower himself with flowers without a gleam of amusement or that a man in such a period could have assumed himself to be a woman, his sovereign to be his mistress, and showered her with an extreme erotic imagery without a trace of a smile. It is clear from the profuse rhetoric that the poet is as highly self-conscious in art as his imagined figure is self-conscious and self-pitying in life. With so many mirrors flashing at once, many variations in mood are not only plausible but probable.
It is indeed remarkable that two of the earliest specimens of Chinese poetry to come down to us through the centuries, the Shih Ching and the Li Sao, should be so drastically opposed to each other in style, the first so patently forthright and direct, the second so elusive and convoluted. But the mystery in literature is surely no greater than that in philosophy, since the same land and age produced Confucius and Lao Tse.
It is at least plausible to hold that an inordinate love of rhetoric gives a tang of humor to some of the first major poets to succeed Ch’ü Yüan. A fantastic view of both language and nature characterizes some of the most striking poems of the Han dynasty, such as Sung Yü’s The Wind, Wang Fs The Lychee-Tree, and a master-piece by that poet’s son, Wang Yen-shou, The Wangsun. The Lychee-Tree is a lyrical flight of joy, fantasy, and ingenuity reflecting a distinct phase of humor; The Wangsun is a pure grotesque, imaging a quaint, odd little animal that not only smiles but compels those who contemplate it to smile.
The most remarkable poet in the long, troubled period between the Han and T’ang is presumably the before-mentioned T’ao Ch’ien, sometimes called T’ao Yüan-ming. His general position in relation to humor in poetry has already been briefly examined, with indication that the question has received various answers and still merits attention. Inasmuch as he exercised a strong and lasting influence on many aspects of Chinese verse, his work calls for further examination.
T’ao Ch’ien’s contribution to the evolution of the sense of humor among his countrymen clearly hangs upon the character of his singularly well-established and confirmed philosophy of life. Virtually all his poems unmistakably express this outlook, fortified by precept and doctrine. He is a quietist in the sense that in his verses he cherishes divorce from all the more strenuous and stirring forces in life and society. He discourages all commitment to both the emotional and the public life. His prescription is simply to let the world drift as it will; all moral idealism and crusading zeal is renounced as fanaticism and illusion. Furthermore, he renounces ascetic fanaticism as conclusively as he rejects political activism. His own ideal, if an ideal it can be called, is retirement to domestic life in the quiet of the countryside. Only the fantasy is free to roam. Rejecting the ethical responsibilities demanded by Confucianism, he admits and even invites the pleasure of wine and drunkenness. Playfulness of the mind is to take the place of exertions of the will. Moreover, he holds small commerce with the world of magic, which so profoundly attracted Ch’ü Yüan and the poets of the Southern school. The roots of his philosophy are clearly in Taoism, although he dismisses the more exuberant and the more popular forms of that faith. He weds the Confucian sense of moderation to the Taoist sense of detachment. Although his position somewhat resembles the “sweet reasonableness” of the English seventeenth-century quietists and the worldly wisdom of the French eighteenth-century rationalists who advised each man to cultivate his private garden, his position is emphatically Chinese. There is enough of the universal in the outlook to render it, broadly speaking, intelligible to all the world, yet the peculiar blend of its constituent elements gives it a unique aroma. The major Chinese poets were for centuries to declare that T’ao Ch’ien’s verse was the most exquisite and highly refined in the course of literary history.
This view encouraged a few remarkably satisfying symbols expressing basic ideas. One was the image of the official returning to his home and family in the country. He comes in a boat happily approaching the landing-place. Such was the central image in his most famous poem, The Return, used by countless painters as their subject-matter. The spirit of the scene is happy but certainly not ecstatic. The returning official is represented as an elderly man wholly resigned to shaking off the burdens of officialdom and pleased to enjoy the quiet pleasures provided by the play of children and the charms of a hospitable countryside. A skeptic might, of course, remark that the play of children does not always seem quiet to their elders nor does nature at all times appear hospitable. Such reflections seldom find expression in the verses of Tao Ch’ien and his followers. In both literature and art the proponent of Tao Ch’ien’s school of thought is commonly represented as an elderly man, a retired statesman or gentleman, who has somehow contrived to look smilingly upon existence. Insofar as he wears a smile, he at least shares in the outlook of humor; insofar as he is restrained or even faint, he occupies only a minor province in the humorist’s world.
Tao Ch’ien’s view of humor is, then, to a large extent compromising. In some of his poems we are sure that a quiet humor is to be detected; in others all humor appears to have dissipated, refined out of existence. There are no violent tempests. There is only a high degree of humidity. Laughter has given place to smiles and even the smile tends to vanish. In an over-all view it must be acknowledged that the philosophy is conducive to certain forms of humor but actually hostile to a lusty development of humorous expression. What humor does manifest itself is more genteel than forceful. The major humorist smiles at himself, the minor humorist smiles only at the world. Humor and the complacent man cannot live altogether happily together. For this reason Po Chü-i and Tu Fu represent a far more developed form of humor than Tao Ch’ien and his followers. The quietist’s philosophy led to a finely cultivated but, comparatively speaking, overbred and over-tamed mentality. It declined at length into the gracious but relatively tepid world of the Sung poet, Su Tung-p’o, where the voice of comedy is reduced to a whisper. While Tao Ch’ien’s philosophy encouraged a mild variety of humor, it discouraged all stronger manifestation of humorous verse. Comic his vein certainly is not. At its best it may possibly be called humoristic.
Some typical poems by T’ao Ch’ien bearing upon the sense of humor may be noted to clarify the foregoing statements. Blaming Sons, for example, shows him mildly vexed that none of his sons exhibits the slightest talent for literature. This state of affairs, he maintains, has driven him to drink. But the entire tone of the piece shows that he is more vexed than desperate. Although his words are a protest and, no doubt, voice sincere disappointment, the archness and wit of the expression indicate that the father is actually reconciled to these deficiencies in his family. It is doubtless a part of the vexing contradictions in nature and destiny that son does not always follow father, that life unhappily abounds in troublesome contradictions. The wise man, insists T’ao Ch’ien, dismisses these with a smile. He does not, in Chaucer’s image, break the crock against the wall. In this, as in many of the poems, the poet has searched out and discovered the art of smiling at life’s irregularities and inconsistencies. Humor is present with its healing force. But it must further be admitted that the bruises are minor and the therapy itself light and easy. His gauze bandages are for minor wounds.
Such poetry and such humor obviously depend upon a lightness of touch. This is well seen in Reading the Book of Strange Places and Seas. The book in question consists of strange and fantastic legends concerning far away places. The poet imagines himself contented with home on a peaceful spring day. After performing the light work demanded by his farm, he retires to the uninterrupted quiet of books and study. Even the lane to his house is so narrow and rough that friends who might come as visitors are discouraged from interrupting his peace of mind. Pulling a book from his shelf, he takes out his carafe of wine. Outside there is a fine rain and a light breeze, no violent downpour. He enjoys the luxurious sense of idleness. His eyes merely roam over the pages that describe the far away and long ago. He experiences perfect happiness.
This highly contrived and artful poem may well be described as humorous. The gesture by which Tao Ch’ien wraps his soft, protective garments around him causes both him and the reader to smile. He does not, however, even suggest that his indulgence is in any way a defect. He does not laugh at himself; he somehow contrives to smile at his success as he sees it in taming the universe. The well-being of the humorist is here but a well-being under highly contrived and constricted circumstances. Such flowers of humor are blossoms of plants grown indoors. Chinese verse for many centuries provided such ornaments. It also provided more substantial things. It must be confessed that in the greater number of Tao Ch’ien’s poems even the milder forms of humor are absent. Like Su Tung-p’o, the love of wine notwithstanding, he is primarily a sober poet. In a fair number of his pieces there is rather an intimation of humor than the essential quality itself. Most of his successors read him with pleasure, for he is a master of the poetic idiom, but in respect to humor he has negative rather than positive qualities. By easing the mind from the straightjackets of moral and intellectual conformity, Tao Ch’ien opened the ground for lustier growths of imagination and, above all, for the more powerful creations of the comic spirit. Technically he came close to perfection. In this respect his art resembles the extremely refined style of the chief English laureate of genteel country living and humor in retirement, William Cowper. But greater spirits in China had been before him and were still to come.
The story hastens on to Li Po, flourishing over three hundred years later. Li, a man of the most commanding genius, was essentially a poet of ecstasies, owing more to the followers of Ch’ü Yüan than to those of the quietist, Tao Ch’ien, though he was to some extent the heir also of the younger man. Many of his poems are erotic and still more are colored by magic, mysticism, and religion. He seemed equally at home when at Court or when in exile. There are at least some parallels with Pushkin. When at court, Li was arrogant and untamable, when in exile he apparently denied himself the quietude of domestic happiness and rural life. Unlike T’ao Ch’ien, he was in no conceivable sense a pastoral poet. Instead, he searched for the elixir of immortality, for inspiration that should lift him above vulgar existence into an ecstatic life. His excess of violence was almost as hostile to the exploiting of humor as T’ao Ch’ien’s quietism. But humor is on the whole more robust than peaceful. Hence research into the springs of humor is more profitable in the instance of Li Po than in that of his predecessor. Li’s habitual extravagance provided a happier soil for humor than T’ao Ch’ien’s studied and habitual understatement.
There even is more of orthodox Taoism, with its element of enthusiasm, and more, paradoxically, of simple quietism, in the following poem by Li Po than in the many more or less analogous pieces from T’ao Ch’ien:
Life is only a dream. Why all this unrest? To me wisdom
Lies is being drunk perpetually
And sleeping the rest of the time.
And that I did one day;
When I awoke and looked around me,
I saw a bird chirping among the flowers.
I asked what day it was. They told me:
‘It’s spring. An oriole is singing’
I sighed deeply, for the voice had touched me.
I helped myself again to a copious draught,
And sang a cheerful song, while waiting for the moon;
When I had ended, it was all forgotten.12
This is, doubtless, not an especially humorous poem but nevertheless is the work of a humorist. There is a note of humorous illogicality in the discrepancy in the poet’s moods. The oriole’s cheerful singing at first causes him to sigh. But presently he has recovered his accustomed bright spirits and sings a cheerful song. The poem as a whole is unquestionably exhilarating.
Perhaps his most famous poem is also a drinking song. It reveals a much more developed spirit of humor. This is the piece entitled Drinking Alone under Moonlight. Li imagines himself dancing, with the moon and his shadow as his companions. The wine-cup affords the center of this ritual inasmuch as the dancer’s leading thought is that neither of his comrades knows the joy of drinking as he does. This is a mad, exuberant lyric that can only be understood as humor in its most hilarious mood.
It is creditably reported that Li Po at one period of his life was much of a bravo, flinging himself about with riotous fun at the expense of persons weaker and much more sober than he. His extravagant moods and actions proceeded from an irrational excess of high spirits further impelled by the irrationalist’s sense of humor. His very defiance of convention was a humorous extravagance. Such a poem as The Bravo of Chao is not only an apology for extravagant and unruly conduct; like much Chinese lyrical poetry it is also self-expression. Its essential meanings will be clear even without quotation. Satire is contained in it but the poem is not properly satire. Two characters are present who are actually symbols. The Bravo of Chao clearly reflects the poet himself though in no sense is he literally the poet. The meaning is clarified by certain references in the verses. In the final stanza mention is made of a Confucian scholar, Yang Hsiung, author of a commentary on the classical text, The Book of Changes. “This worthy had lived in the first century B.C. TU FU especially despised him as typical of the pedant in the class of scholar-gentleman. As a modern commentator reports: “He is said to have studied by the window for so long that men had forgotten whether there was any part of him except his white head.”13 The Bravo is declared by Li Po to be vastly more alive and effectual than this notorious pedant. The poem as a whole is more concerned with the high spirits of its hero than with the conformity of the hero’s antithesis. Hence it is much more in the spirit of humor than of satire. The school of T’ao Ch’ien looked askance at the busy world and further declared it to be absurd but the alternative which its poets placed over and against the prevailing follies of society was quietism, which actually attracted Li Po far less than vigorous exercise of the will, mind, soul, and body. He was accordingly the stronger humorist.
The Bravo of Chao is related to the earlier part of Li’s life, when he was chiefly active in Court affairs. It best exhibits his humor as related to society. As a reveler or man of the world he presents analogies to figures familiar in the West, as Benvenuto Cellini and the aforementioned Pushkin. The strong religious and metaphysical aspect of his thinking, chiefly characteristic of his later years, is seen in the half-humorous poem, To a Monk on the Tai-Pei Mountains . For Li Po was at heart both bravo and monk and in each capacity a profound humorist. His religion is chiefly derived from Taoism, indeed his friend Tu Fu reports him to have been seeking the elixir of immortality among the hills. His poetry abounds in flights of pure magic. The alchemists of the West seem prosaic beside him. He is visionary, transcendental, at one with the forces of nature and with the soul of the landscape. Through his fondness for this phase of the Chinese mind he becomes also the humorist. He laughs more often and in verse more effectively from sheer joy through oneness with the illogical forces of the universe than from a stooping to satirize either human folly or vice. He cultivates the fantastic images familiarized in Chinese art by the Ch’an Buddhists. To the Taoist monk, subject of the last mentioned poem, he ascribes the properties of the true magician who delights in playing humorous tricks on the mind. These are not to make the observer appear foolish but are above all to give to the performer a sense of power and joy. The aged monk in Li’s poem appears and vanishes at will. He floats high in air. Inaccessible mountains are his habitation. His diet is the dew. The nearest villagers have never seen him. The entire universe he envisages as a cosmic caprice.
Li Po’s humor unhappily transcends our common vision. He himself cannot give adequate expression to his vision. No man can explain it and perhaps no one fully understands it. But we believe in it nevertheless. His ethereal poetry is one of the most precious achievements of Chinese civilization. The West, to repeat, has nothing quite analogous to it. In English the nearest approach may well be the highly intuitive poetry of Coleridge or Poe. But how limited in comparison appear the visions of these masters of English verse! Their products have a forced and hothouse quality when seen beside the visions of the Chinese poet-sage. In his poetry is epitomized much of the mysterious insight and beauty of Chinese landscape painting at its best. Of all major Chinese poets he seems farthest divorced from Confucianism. Even the visionary Ch’ü Yüan stooped at times to mere satire of corruption. But even in his bitterest poems Li Po rises above this. He soars into heights of an exalted humor, his spirit the epitome of an O Altitudo. Humor becomes an essential ingredient even in his supernaturalism.
His great compatriots, Tu Fu and Po Chü’i, brought humor once more down to earth. Like almost all major poets, with the exception of the masters of theatrical comedy, they appear more often in a serious than in a humorous guise. But humor constitutes an important phase of their achievement. By far the greater part of the work of the two men deals with man in his social relationships, no matter whether the poet himself is the chief actor or the vision is purely objective. As the older, more synthetic and possibly more inspired of the two, Tu Fu calls for first consideration. The refinement and subtlety of his art demands considerable quotation to clarify generalizations. The quotations unless otherwise specified are translations by the present writer.
Social humor frequently resides in the successful acting of a role where there is a subtle element of understatement and restraint. The incongruity at the root of virtually all humor lies along these oblique lines. An agreeable bait covers a hidden hook. Such is a special quality of Tu Fu’s poem, On Rejecting a Gift of a Satin Brocade. A further feature of the humor here is one already mentioned in other connections, the turn of the humorous criticism against the poet himself. Here this strategy, though certainly present, has still a further refinement. The poet’s humility is not only a mask to deceive the villain of the piece; it is in fact an affectation on the poet’s part. Even while he seems to be demeaning himself he is not really doing so. He does not think meanly of himself, though such is the appearance that he assumes. The truth is that he may even take some pride in his rectitude. Although he assumes that he is too humble and undeserving a man to receive a gift fit only for princes, his deeper thought is that the giver and not the man to whom the gift is offered demeans himself. The obvious impolitic reaction of the moralist would be indignation at the offer of a bribe. Expression would be one of anger. Instead, the poet’s response is couched in the irony of humorous indirection. The reader is presumed to take a far different view of the situation from that of the figure to whom the speaker’s remarks are addressed. This is the leading formula for high comedy on the stage. Here the actor is the official offering the bribe. The reader takes the place of both audience and poet, seeing the action through radically different eyes from those of the unlucky victim of the jest. The poem is as follows:
My honored guest from the Northwest has made
A present to me of this bright brocade.
Opening the package somewhat gingerly,
I look on seething waves of a vast sea.
A whale among them lashes his huge tail;
Other creatures swim in shining mail
But at the distance it’s too far to see
What their true identity may be.
My guest says: “This is for your cushion’s seat.
Take it as a present, I entreat.
Doing so, your joy will be increased
When you sit on it at some glorious feast.
Sleep on it, and you will have dreamless rest.
Display it, and bad luck will be suppressed.”
My guest’s great kindness I appreciate.
But since I am no minister of state,
This could not be auspicious. I decline
To place it in this modest house of mine.
There is a fitting law of long duration
That gifts should be appropriate to one’s station.
Since I’m a humble man, precedent shows
I should be satisfied with plainest clothes.
So exquisite an object’s only fit
For the Imperial Palace. Surely it
Would never be appropriate in my home
And from it only much bad luck could come.
I am surprised how in these cursed years
Of fighting and disorder it appears
That many leading men in high command
Have snatched advantage of their power in hand
To stock themselves with finest clothes and horse.
Li Ting died in Ch’i-yang since in his course
Of governing he showed excessive pride.
Lai T’ien was forced to commit suicide
Because his arrogance hindered the war.
Both were well known to have amassed a store
Of tainted wealth. It’s no surprise at all
They met their sad, inevitable fall.
How can an old and common farmer dare
Accept so sumptuous a gift or wear
Such fabrics? Let me fold this whale-brocade
Which you have with such courtesy displayed
And so return it to you, if you please.
Then only shall I feel myself at ease.
Let me dust off this mat. Please take your seat!
Only thus can my pleasure be complete.
Even so my shy and timid spirits droop
Handing you this thin cup of vegetable soup.
How close this comes to techniques familiar in the comic theatre appears in the last line, which combines humorous understatement with theatrical exaggeration. The poet’s hand actually trembles as, frightened by the dignity of his illustrious guest, he hands him a cup of thin, unsavory soup.
Another sampling shows the poet’s social humor with delicate variations. Here instead of assuming humility he assumes an air of supercilious superiority. In each case there is a figure who clearly gets the worst of it; on one occasion the unscrupulous official offers a bribe, on the other is a foolish and impecunious cousin. In each case are incongruities and contradictions that comprise the chief formula for humor itself. In the second poem is the somewhat improbable assumption that the poor relation does not know that he is placed in a rather absurd light. He should have known enough in his unfortunate condition to economize and take greater care of things about the farm. He must not draw recklessly from a shrinking well; he must not be careless in cutting down his sunflowers; he should not use too much water in cooking rice; he should stop gossiping with neighbors across the fence and, worst of all, with strangers; he should keep within the circle of family and the clan. Such is the advice of the successful relative and official.
The poem is spared the aspersion of being merely didactic and is all the more clearly assured in its humor by some irregular features in the delineation of the speaker. He begins by announcing that he is lazy. He will not, he tells us, attempt to do business with rich and clever men but instead will pursue his duties as overseer by visiting his poor relation. By virtue of his authority and place rather than through any peculiar insight or merit he lords it over his inferior. There is no intimation that he blames himself morally for this. Yet it is evident that he is on both a moral and a physical holiday, riding out into the countryside and dispensing advice which he well knows to be commonplace to a simple soul willing to take all seriously and in the best spirit. The official and the reader smile inwardly. A sophisticated humor is enjoyed at the expense of a countrified relative. A qualifying feature in the apparent stupidity of the farmer is seen in the second of the poem’s three parts. The man’s impoverishment is not altogether his own fault. He has suffered from frost and other hostilities in nature. This renders the critique more genial and more removed from either satire or a gross type of humor. The humor is all the more refined for being to a great degree kindly.
I am an old man, lazy as can be
And you, my boy, can either walk or run
Beside me, as you choose. It pleases me
To ride my donkey in the morning sun.
My duty is to travel and inspect.
I’ll go not to the mighty and the high
Because from them small profit can accrue.
My cousin is a person such as I
And at his cottage I shall win respect;
So this is what this morning I shall do.
You are a simple person, unemployed;
Your homestead stands like a deserted town.
In autumn’s frost your tall bamboo were spoiled;
Some of your lily plants have fallen down.
Under such circumstances it is right
That, as an elder in our family,
I should keep your vicissitudes in mind.
I do not come for porridge, as you see,
But to place matters in a lucid light
And to say what is rational and kind.
Too many drawings make a muddy well,
So don’t use too much water to wash rice.
When cutting your ripe sunflowers, do not fell
Plants with a broad-axe, or you’ll pay the price
By injuring their taproots. Do not be
Lured by idle gossiping that serves
No useful purposes. Carefully scan
The counsel of outsiders; it deserves
Always to be viewed suspiciously;
The Ancients favor a united clan.
Apparently all peoples capable of detecting human vanity regard it as a prime cause of risibility. The discrepancy between reality and presumption and the exaggeration which the individual places upon his own importance and dignity lead to an amused smile. The higher reaches of enlightenment and sophistication are attained when a person is shrewd enough to smile at his own vanity. Such is the case in an amusing and exceptionally well sustained poem, Drunk, I Fell from Horseback . The narrative contained in the poem is so circumstantial as to be thoroughly convincing; the story clearly reflects an actual experience. Tu Fu has been feted at a party. Though already elderly, he drinks heavily and rises to perform a lively dance. So successful is this that he aspires to prove to his friends that he has maintained at his advanced age the skill in dashing horsemanship for which he was celebrated in his youth. On riding rapidly down a mountain-side he experiences a sharp fall, encountering minor but by no means negligible injuries. A few days later, to prove their undiminished admiration of him, his good friends arrange a banquet in his honor. At the same time that they fete him they laugh at him. The poet’s good humor is unshaken. He receives the ridicule in the best of spirit. In fact, his last remarks in the poem, far from being of a repentant or cautionary nature, recall a scholar who had written a book on the laborious means of guarding health but who himself died at the hands of the public executioner. Although for most of its length the poem promises to be a cautionary tale in behalf of reasonable conduct, its closing lines, where, if anywhere a conventional moral might be expected, actually advance a plea in behalf of daring, risk and even recklessness. They afford a delightfully humorous surprise.
I was the Governor’s old, welcome guest
Whose warmth and hospitality expressed
Itself in lavish feasting and strong wine.
Then, in one of those mad moods of mine,
I rose hilariously to sing and dance
The lively figure of “the Golden Lance.”
Next, suddenly remembering my pride
In youth, I mounted a swift horse to ride.
Outside the K’uei-chou Gate steep highways go
To where the stream and clouds stretch out below.
Precipitously the canyon walls dive down
Nine hundred yards beneath the white-walled town.
Like summer lightning the white fort flashed past
My purple bridle. Faster and more fast
I rushed across the level plain beside
The rustic village at the river’s side.
Across the plain and underneath the bluff
The hills are rugged and the pathways rough.
Easing the rein, letting the whiplash trail,
I galloped with the madness of a gale
Over red, dusty land.
My foolish ends
Were always to surprise my many friends
And garner for a white-haired man the praise
Won by his valor in his early days,
Showing I still can ride and shoot as then.
Though I might gain some favor among men,
I was indeed a fool to think of course
My views of speed congenial to my horse.
The white foam on his lips and the red sweat
Along his streaming body might have let
Me grasp the matter clearly as I ought
And know he could not share my private thought.
A careless stumble left a serious hurt.
To follow impulse so is to pervert
The truth of nature and to court disgrace.
Now I confront my error face to face.
I’ve much to ponder as I lie in bed
Reflecting on sad follies time has bred.
Kind souls and neighbors come with searching eyes;
I must now shamefacedly arise,
Leaning upon my servants and my cane.
I tell my tale. Good friends cannot refrain
FIG. 1. Incense Burner. Lao-tzu on a Water-Buff alo. Sung dy- nasty, A.D. 960-1280. Bronze, 8V4 inches high. Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum.
FIG. 2. The Poet Li Po on a Stroll’, by Liang K’ai (13th century). Hanging scroll. Courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum.
FIG. 3. The Poet Tu Fu on a Donkey’s Back, by Sesshū Tōyō, late 15th-early 16th century. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, height inches. Courtesy the Tokiwayama Foundation, Kamakura.
FIG. 4. Portrait of the Artist’s Friend I-an, by Lo Fing (1733-1799). Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on paper, inches high,
inches wide. Courtesy of James Cahill.
FIG. 5. Two Men in Conversation. Detail of painting on hollow tiles. Late Han-early Six Dynasties, 2nd-4th century A.D. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
FIG. 6. Chung K’uei, the Demon-queller, on His Travels, by Kung K’ai. Sung, 13th century. Detail from painted scroll. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art.
FIG. 7. Mother Monkey and Child, by Mu ch’i (middle of the 13th century). Detail of hanging scroll. Courtesy of the Daitokuji, Tokyo.
FIG. 8. Boy, Buffalo, and Calf (album leaf). Southern Sung dynasty. Color and ink on silk. Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Severance A. Millikin Collection.
FIG. 9. A Quadruped. Late Chou dynasty, 6th-3rd century b.c. Bronze. Width a inches. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art.
FIG. 10. Boar. Ordos. Fifth century B.C. or later. Bronze. Courtesy of the Indiana University Art Museum.
FIG. 11. Bear. Shang dynasty (1523-1028 B.C.). Jade. Height inches. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
FIG. 12. Winged Dragon. Farly part of the Huai period (947-770 B.C.). Bronze. 7 inches high, inches long. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Alfred F. Pillsbury Bequest, 1950.
From bursts of laughter. Now they carry me
To fields beside a stream that pleasantly
Purls on and there a mountainous feast is laid
With music that weird strings and flutes have made.
All pointing to the West, profoundly say
Time passes and the sun will not delay.
They shout for everyone to drain his glass,
Sipping the sparkling moments as they pass.
But why, good friends, envoys of gentleness,
Give me this comfort in my late distress?
The author of Good Health held prudence high
Until a headsman led him out to die.
The sense of humor as properly understood does not consist in verbal wit, mirth, satire, or the hilarity that induces loud laughter and guffaws, though it borders on these and at least to some extent shares territory with them. It is a branch of the comic spirit on which grow fruits of various colors, shapes and sizes, many being hybrids. On one extreme it approaches a low comedy of mere slapstick, farce, or nonsense, too rude to be called pure humor. On the other, it borders on archness, urbanity, and pleasantry. It is neither entirely of the body nor of the mind but a condition of the spirit expressed by a refined smile or civilized laughter. Much of the finest Chinese humor is remarkably sophisticated and cultured, expression proceeding from a state of mind where delicate shades of thought and feeling are apprehended and amusement derived from incongruities within an advanced stage of society. This condition presumes at most a smiling, certainly not a loudly laughing, audience. It appears at most in overtones. These may even be heard against bass-notes played in a distinctly minor key. A work of this kind, actually inspired by highly refined humor, may on too cursory reading appear altogether serious. The impression received becomes a matter of sensibility. What was altogether apparent to the Chinese scholar class in the brighter periods of their culture is not equally apparent to persons of other times and places. Yet the finest expressions of this state of mind and the species of art springing from it will be apprehensible and enjoyable to those of educated sensibilities in any time or place where advanced civilization exists. Some of the most fragrant flowers of humor or the comic spirit undoubtedly flourished in China from an early date and for a long period of time. By the side of the completely robust, uproarious humor of such a prose narrative as Monkey flourished humorous works of a much quieter but essentially more refined nature. The culmination of the urbane Chinese humor is found in Tu Fu. Let us examine another of his pieces exhibiting this delicate, muted variety of humor, played, as it were, upon the harpsichord.
Annoyed! is a poem not quite in a manner familiar to Western light verse but approaching it. The mood dominating its early lines appears to be a familiar though paradoxical fusion of irritability and boredom. The speaker is clearly one of the masks of the poet himself. There can be no question of the poem’s considerable faithfulness to social actuality. The speaker’s irritability derives from frustrations that in turn spring from several sources. The weather is bad; transportation in the city is wretched; he cannot be on time at his place of business (the Court); prices are rising; above all, he finds it especially hard to indulge in his greatest pleasure, which is to share with his best friend wine, music, and verses. The irritability amounts almost to peevishness. A distinct suspicion arises that the poet engages to a certain degree in self-mockery. The view of life is anything but heroic. No emotional storms, philosophical or religious doctrines, nor moral values are at stake. To say the least, life is not taken overseriously. Yet is it not an honest reflection of the life of a truly civilized and lovable person? The enlightenment comes, as the best standards of form lead us to expect, in the last few lines. Apart from his friend, obviously one of the comparatively few intelligent persons in town, life tends to become tedious. With his friend all is changed. A desert bursts into bloom. Affection, charm, beauty, wit come abruptly into their own. Ill humors vanish before the force of true humor. This is social comedy, high comedy. Some readers will prefer John Milton, others may prefer Tu Fu.
I am highly annoyed! We live at two ends of a row
So why haven’t we seen each other for ten long days?
I gave up the horse that the government loaned me and so
I’m faced with the rough, rugged ground of the public ways.
I’m far too poor to hire a personal chaise,
And, again, if I walked, my superiors wouldn’t approve!
So a warm wish to see you suffers vexatious delays.
This is my problem, so please do not question my love!
This morning it rains; spring winds make house-walls tremble.
I was sleeping soundly so didn’t hear the bell
And loud drum that summon courtiers to assemble.
To be sure, I have some kindly neighbors who dwell
To the east who would loan me a donkey. That’s all very well,
But the mud is so slippery I dare not ride it to Court.
My troubles and trials are more than a man can tell.
I’ve petitioned to be excused as a last resort!
How can I bear the whole day with a longing heart
To hear your poems that impress me so movingly?
Youth fades as these early magnolia blossoms depart
And the high price of wine is a frightful thing to see!
Inebriate sleep comes seldom to you and me.
Come quickly, please, and release the wine-keg’s stoppers!
We’ll empty a hearty gallon immediately,
For I happen to have precisely three hundred coppers.
A variation in this fertile vein of high comedy appears in Poem Sent to Tu Tso. This piece is less personal than those by Tu Fu so far examined, though the poet is a figure in it. Like Annoyed! it is conceived as an epistle. The humor lies in the high degree of inference contained in it and the sharp interplay of two contrasting themes. The address is to a cousin who has recently paid Tu Fu a visit. Their relation unquestionably is friendly and even affectionate. Tu Fu hopes that the man has returned to his house safely and at not too late an hour. Earlier in the season Tu Fu had visited Tu Tso and assisted in some harvesting of grain. The poet himself is relatively poor. With a delicate understatement he declares that “he seems to remember” a promise from his cousin of a gift of millet. Although the time has passed when this grain must have been ground, no gift of it has arrived. Besides, Tu Tso must have harvested some green-mallow and some especially succulent shallots. The poet only hints but the hint is unmistakable. Why has Tu Tso procrastinated and thus failed to send these products of his farm that would contribute so much to the table of his poor and affectionate uncle? This poem is a gentle reminder that begins with an expression of solicitude and concern for his cousin’s comfort and ends with a petition for a gift to enhance his own. Tu Fu by no means conceals his desire to have not only the basic food derived from the millet but the delicacies that will add relish to the table of an epicure. He petitions for the one and in addition smacks his lips at thought of the other. This, almost as much as the tactful understatement, relieves the poem from any suspicion of being a harsh or heated complaint and graces the lines with cool, sparkling humor. Inconsequential as the piece may at first appear, it is a masterpiece of light verse according to the peculiar genius of the scholar-poets of the T’ang period. Some persons may well hold that poetic art has attained greater heights; civilization, one presumes, has not.
Floating clouds must have darkened the afternoon hills
And I fear that bad roads have caused you some harm
And birds must have silenced their musical bills
When at last you re-entered your tree-shaded farm.
Uncle Tu Fu, who is lazy and calm
In disaster, stays here with his children and spouse.
They have traveled rough roads and now long for the balm
Of your aid to maintain this impoverished house.
The millet we gleaned in early September
You promised to share when it first should appear.
It must be ground fine, for I seem to remember
It’s been over a month now in reaching me here.
We hardly need wait for the peak of the year,
When the golden chrysanthemums come into flower.
I hold green-mallow soup with fresh millet most dear,
My mouth waters to taste it at this very hour.
What turbulent freshets of spring must have been
In your garden where so many eatables grow!
Those sturdy fall shrubs must by this time be thin;
You’ll see more high clouds as the autumn leaves go.
Fragrant plants must be lush where the pond-waters flow
And the dodder vines rich in the neighboring wood.
Your frost-covered shallots are ripe now, I know.
Do send me some, please, if you will be so good!
As already indicated at some length, the word humor, which has enjoyed so long and checkered a history, is even today understood with a considerable variety of meanings. One phase of our understanding of it tends to merge with another. Good humor is a state of mind, comic humor a factor in the arts. The two have a brotherly relation. Life or art may be amusing without being patently comic. There is a tendency in the poems quoted above to be decreasingly robust or hilarious and increasingly muted and refined. Along the same line of coordinates but representing approximately the minimum of assertiveness in humor is a poem, To Prefect Chang, where the humorous point of view is certainly maintained but outright jesting is reserved for only the last line or two. The poet is amused throughout but certainly not hilarious. He moralizes in his final utterance but to the discerning reader his moralizing will certainly be taken with a grain of salt.
Tu Fu, a man with Shakespearean breadth of vision, sympathized with the miseries of the myriad Chinese who were poor and wretched, suffering above all from the wounds of civil war. Despite the long continuity of social and political institutions in China, the continuity of the language and the Empire, the country has suffered more than most lands from war, since its wars have been for the most part civil rather than foreign, fought on its own soil. Tu Fu also had a fellow feeling with the gay and dazzling life of the Court, its outrageous luxury and display. He obviously enjoyed its brilliance. Yet he knew clearly what this lavishness cost the common people. There was a weight of irony here that at times lay heavily on his heart. All this appears in his poems. Some are almost entirely gay and epicurean, others almost entirely satirical or tragic. A few, such as the astonishing Poem on Seeing the Sword Pantomime Dance, are both.
For the present discussion only the poems that are more gay than sad are relevant. To Prefect Chang sufficiently answers this description. Although something of his moral reservations may be assumed behind the picture of the revelry by the Meandering River, with its loud festivities lasting deep into the night, not until the very last phrases is there any literal or unmistakable sign of them. All appears gay, even to excess. At the end he warns his friend, the Prefect, that on his return by the river he should take no example from the amorous ducks that swim in pairs but should remember his wife, who awaits him anxiously at home. The sudden, wholly unexpected burst of moralizing, even if it is to be taken with a degree of irony, has an unmistakably humorous effect. Without it the poem could not be placed in the category of poems of humor. With it the contrary becomes true. It should further be noted here that Tu Fu, the supercraftsman, gave great attention to the last lines of his poems. They were the rudders by which he steered his course. A bantering tone is, in fact, maintained throughout the entire poem. It is betrayed, for example, in the mention of the coquettish eyes of the courtesans, that not only bear witness to the pride of youth but betray young men. May they not betray the poet’s friend, the Prefect Chang!
Eminent guests dismounting from their horses
Are welcomed by fair women near the stream.
Broad fans are mirrored in the water-courses,
Loud songs re-echo as bright costumes gleam.
Robes sweep widely as they dance and whirl;
Wine pots refract each shimmering sunbeam.
Just note the face of each sweet-smiling girl,
Each bright glance glowing in keen competition,
Each coquettish eye betraying youth’s ambition!
With song and dance the shining sun is downed;
Still loud flute-tones pierce the darkening sky;
Gleaming eyebrows move to choric sound;
Each headdress to its neighbor makes reply.
Horses are standing back to back in file.
At dusk far hills glow as the night is nigh;
Perfumed boats drift homeward mile on mile.—
My friend, you have a wife who waits and wakes;
Don’t take a wrong example from wild ducks and drakes!
The analysis of the mood of the foregoing poems concludes this evidence of the strong undercurrent of humor giving such distinction to so much of Tu Fu’s art and good evidence of an important phase of Chinese poetry, maintained throughout its classical period. A poem typical of humor in his brief, epigrammatic pieces shows humor in another vein. In the epigrammatic form almost to the same degree as in his odes or more truly lyric pieces Tu Fu shows his tendency to take himself humorously, to deal in humorous hyperbole and celebrate the irrational. His Taoistic praise of drunkenness and wine has been seen in several of his well-known poems. But his intoxication may also arise from other sources, producing humorous effects so commonly associated with inebriation. He holds that he can be drunk even on flowers and fancifully implores the blossoms to show him some mercy.
Flowers in confusion by the river shine;
Awed, I likewise stagger as I can;
I can subsist on poetry and wine;
But try not to undo a white-haired man!
The foregoing quatrain suggests one of Tu Fu’s most brilliant pieces with a strong humorous flavor, Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, where the irrational moods created by wine itself are the basic theme. This poem has always been one of its author’s most popular works. Contrary to the type of humor commonly found in Tu Fu’s poems, the vein here is extravagant and even exuberant. Eight scholar-courtiers of the imperial establishment are celebrated not for their contributions to good government but for their superiority in deep drinking and for the sensational effects that wine has upon them. If the outlook were not so clearly hilarious, the poem might even be seen as satire. But the unmistakable inference is that the poet himself would be only too happy to join these brilliant revelers in their potations. He places himself on the side of intoxication. Drink, it seems, brings about the most varied states of mind but all are essentially blissful. One drinker enjoys a luxurious sense of relaxation, another an illusion of possessing divine powers, another a conviction that he has attained supreme wisdom, one exalts in the experience of pure beauty, a sixth finds that wine enhances the relish that he derives from delicately prepared food, a seventh discovers that under its influence he gains incredible powers as calligrapher and poet, the eighth that he becomes master of profuse and spontaneous eloquence. As the testimony of this octet of drinkers draws to its close the testimonials, interestingly enough, turn increasingly to the realm of verbal creation, which is obviously that of the poet himself and his production. The entire work may be described as a bacchic litany, a sequence of beatitudes, a chant in praise of the twin factors of irrationality and joy which are themselves the chief ingredients of humor itself. There are, of course, countless bacchanalian hymns, in the East as well as in the West, as certain Indian chants in praise of the vision-inducing soma and the Japanese songs in honor of the joy-producing sake. Beside Tu Fu’s poem all others seem pale abstractions. The personal and historical interest here, the allusions to real individuals, leading figures in a single environment, each sharply distinguished from the others, gives the poem peculiar force. Behind it lies the hint of parody that in no way diminishes the power of the poem itself. Chinese history and legend tell of several groups of worthies denominated “immortals”; hence Tu Fu s allusions to well-known contemporaries gain a religious aura. The worthies in question are equally erring men and demi-deities.
Ho Chih-chang rides his horse like a sailor sculling a sluggish boat,
Half asleep and yet willing to fall in a well, sink or float.
Ju-yang drank three gallons, then going to Court and seeing a brewer’s cart,
Declared: “To be Lord of the Wine Spring I’d give the rich blood of my heart.”
Our Minister spends ten thousand a day which he gulps down like a whale,
Then explains: “I love things philosophic and whole, where severance may not prevail.”
Ts’ui Tsung-chih is a handsome young man with bland, blue eyes;
A jade-tree sparkling in wind, he lifts his cup to the azure skies.
At prayer at a Buddha’s shrine, Su Chin is a vowed vegetarian,
But how he enjoys his lapses when turned a mad bacchanalian!
Li writes a hundred poems to a gallon, then sleeps at a vintner’s shop.
When the Emperor bids him mount a barge, he cries: “No, sir; I’m God of the Cup!”
Give Calligrapher Chang but three cupfuls, he dances crazy capers
Before the worthies themselves, making clouds ascend from his papers.
Chiao Sui will need five gallons to keep in a conscious state,
Amazing huge crowds by his eloquence in discussion and fierce debate.
One might permit a discussion of Tu Fu’s humorous work to rest with an examination of this but the analysis might still fall short of paying full tribute to his extraordinary scope and versatility. Many shades of humor diversify his pages and spring from different aspects of the Chinese mind. In conclusion, one phase of the subject not as yet mentioned may at least suggest from how many sides Tu Fu’s achievement as humorist may be commended. Although on the whole a realist and proponent of moral and ethical responsibility, he was by no means so confirmed a representative of what might be called the Chinese “Enlightenment” as to turn aside from the superstitions of the people and the popular love among all classes of his countrymen for the strange and miraculous. This free play of imagination, so alluring to the poetic impulse, is reflected with special force in a number of his pieces. They accept the prevailing view in his country, which was neither to accept wholly nor to reject wholly the claims of the miraculous but in any case to take keen pleasure in the fertile imagination sustaining it.
Song of the Peach-Bamboo Sticks belongs in this category. Tu Fu relates that on the eve of his launching upon a journey the Prefect of Tzu-chou presented him with two sticks or canes of a special variety of bamboo. These came from plants growing in the midst of running streams. Legend records that they have magic power to repel river-ghosts and dragons. They would therefore be of service to the poet on his travels, though he would no doubt have to guard against the threat of envious and angry water-spirits to snatch them from his hands. The poem is singularly rich in imagination, reminding us of the incomparable images of river-dragons in Chinese painting. It is a remarkable piece by any account but not the least because of a somewhat unexpected humorous element. Most treatments of dragons and especially of dragons residing in tempestuous water are eminently serious. Here there is clearly a humorous touch. To be sure, the poet receives the poles with sincere and courteous thanks. He does not presume to question their magic powers. He is sure that they will prove useful on his travels by water and by land whether or not they effect miracles. But the poet prefers to assume their supernatural properties. In addition to the poem’s brilliant imagery, it has a jaunty tone.
The miraculous in medieval Europe commonly induced a sentiment of piety, that in China often evoked a delight intimately allied to humor. All Asians of earlier generations rejoiced in magicians who were known to fool their audiences but were none the less popular because the audiences were pleased to be fooled. The attitude is seen most often in prose tales, in connection with which it will be considered later in this book. Tu Fu happily struck this vein of magic gold that provided ornaments to his poetry and was destined later to be explored by countless romantic story-tellers. China became the supreme center for the circulation of strange and supernatural legends, many with a delightfully humorous temper springing from the ambivalence of their conceptions. They achieved an intensity of aesthetic conviction, often inducing shudders of the nerves and flesh, at the same time that in the back sections of the mind those who most enjoyed them doubted their literal truth. Such writing succeeds in flourishing in two worlds and by virtue of this ambivalence flourishes with an incontestable sense of humor. Restraints of reason are happily removed but those of at least a species of reality are retained. The result induces a singularly relaxed and happy smile. No better instance can be found than Tu Fu’s poem. Some of his dragons are taken far more seriously than these. An instance would be the monster inhabiting the pool within a deep ravine described in Tu Fu’s powerful poem, The Abysmal Pool. In other instances the dragons introduced seem entirely frivolous creations of fancy. Supernaturalism in this poem achieves a particularly refined variety of humor where conviction and nonconviction meet in harmony, a realm that may be described in William Blake’s words as the land where opposites become true.
The peach-bamboo grows only in midstream,
Only in blue waves is it tall and fit.
The stem is purple jade in the sunbeam.
When peeled and cut, no goddess can keep it.
The Prefect of Tzu-chou displays a group
Of sticks before his guests, a marveling crowd;
Then, because I’m elderly and droop,
He gives me two that, struck, resound aloud.
They give metallic echoes when I whack them.
Since I am going East, I can’t afford
That river-ghosts or dragons should attack them
Where I may have to guard them with my sword.
Let me tell you, sticks, each in its station
Grows sheer and straight; you are my best resort.
Beware of water and the grim temptation
To become dragons, you, my one support!
Ah, you would seal my doom and kill me then
If you should play any such knavish tricks!
Where wind and dust and tigers prey on men,
What would I do if I should lose these sticks?
Humor in one major poet will never be quite like that in another, though when two masters are fellow countrymen it may be supposed that they will share at least some qualities in common. Such is the case when Po Chü-i, Tu Fu’s most famous successor, is considered as standing beside the older man. Po Chü-i is probably the more easily approachable to Western readers although he is almost certainly in final estimate the less inspired and brilliantly artful. In almost all respects he is the less elusive, as the acknowledged difficulties encountered by Tu Fu’s translators attest. He is relatively straightforward in his expression of emotion, lucid in his descriptions, clear in his intentions, less idiosyncratic and more essentially orthodox than his rivals. No one, I think, would venture to summarize Tu Fu’s religious convictions. Moreover, his spirit often hovers between the secular and the religious, the human and the cosmological. When, on the contrary, Po Chü-i writes a poem dedicated to Buddhism it generally follows familiar highways of that religion.
Tu Fu lived a stormy life, now up and now down, at one time a captive in the hands of the barbarians, at another a counselor close to the ear of the Emperor. Much of his life was a struggle with poverty, at times also with ill health. His spirits alternately rose to heights and sank to the depths. Although in some respects a good Confucian, he was no strict follower of the sage’s doctrine of the mean. His last poems have a tragic quality, though he apparently never succumbed to despair nor lost his essential dignity.
Po Chü-i’s life presents quite another picture. He rose to a fairly secure place in public office, in his last years living comfortably on his country estate. Given these conditions, Tu Fu’s humor is more complex and less predictable than that of Po Chü-i, who is more notable for his poise and moderation. Tame it is not, for Po Chü-i is a truly great poet and an incisive reader of human nature. But his work comes closer to being social verse in the Western sense of the term. It fulfills all its intentions, is trifling or merely playful where these qualities are desired and often warm and enthusiastic where warmth and enthusiasm are consistent with the sense of humor. Po Chü-i possesses a highly refined comic sense; his smile is singularly winning, his laughter resonant and clear. One treasures his verse but somehow does not, I think, accord it the very highest laurels. His humor is singularly pure humor, rarely blended with the neighboring but still alien qualities of wit or satire.
Of course all humor and all humorists abhor dogmatism and decline to surrender to it. The purity and thoroughly Chinese quality of Po Chü-i’s humor may even be clarified from his own pages by reference to what it is not. Virtually at the end of the hundred or so pages of his poems translated by his foremost apologist and advocate, Arthur Waley, appear two very brief poems, in fact, witty epigrams. Since such wit depends on clear, semantic elements and not on the nuances of a mature poetry, these pieces need not be quoted word for word. The first consists of a simple jest amounting virtually to a stroke in logic. The piece is entitled, Lao Tzu. It presumes to catch the philosopher on the hook of a fault in reasoning. The great mystic is quoted as saying that those who speak know nothing, those who know are silent. Then why, asks the poet, did the mystic himself write a book of five thousand words? This is clearly a neat, pleasing epigram but not in the sense of the word employed in this study a work of humor. It admirably exemplifies productions of wit.
The second epigram is a witty assertion of the point of view of common sense in opposition to that of the mystics. The philosopher Chuang Tzu is termed a monist and monism is described as a doctrine that reduces all things to equality. But, objects the poet and spokesman for the common man, a phoenix does seem superior to a reptile! This is wit. It is, of course, the leading feature of much comic writing and theatre in the West. At its roots in the West is the discipline of logic, which insofar as history records arose in ancient Greece and has since never been forgotten. A classical instance is afforded by the witticism that operates to the detriment of a certain man who observed that all Cretans are liars. But the man was himself a Cretan. Hence he was a liar. This is a form of verbal or mental agility. It neither claims nor possesses the spiritual quality regarded as humor—not to mention poetry. Logic is not art.
In any culture, especially if advanced to a high degree of civilization, manifestations of wit will be found. They are allied to a still more distinctly verbal form of comic expression, the pun, found with a diverting effect in all languages. But James Joyce and even Shakespeare notwithstanding, the pun is not the highest form of comedy, indeed, it is not to be supposed that either Joyce or Shakespeare would have held the play on words to be the essence of their superb sense of humor. Nor does wit in itself qualify as humor. It is often an incident in humor but never the core. Thus Aristophanes employs both wit and puns but his humor goes far deeper than this. The literature of the East exhibits much more humor than wit and vastly less wit than that found in the West. The masters examined in these pages are all masters of humor, not of wit. Their humanity and their poetic or imaginative powers are so much the more noteworthy on this account.
In some of the pieces inspired by a scorn of the dull affairs and pompous ceremonies of court and political life Po Chü-i is a follower of the long tradition of quietists, aided by the teachings of Lao Tzu and best exemplified in verse by the much revered T’ao Ch’ien. But Po Chü-i is actually a much more amusing writer than T’ao Ch’ien or most of the figures in this school. There was not a drop of sourness in his system. He could be deeply moving and even tragic but the bitterness of satire was not his. His temperament was in these respects uncommonly favorable to expressions of true humor. In many completely delightful poems he smiles at the stupidity of public manners. His poems are never arrogant, are sometimes even directed against himself. He was himself a scholar and an examiner. But pedantic regimentation and pretentious display were alien to his better nature. Here is one of his typical pieces in which in the end one finds, perhaps, even more to love than to admire. Po Chü-i seems almost too good, virtuous, and reasonable, too singularly blest with charm. The strict aesthetic formality in his writing has, incidentally, induced me to transfer it in translation into the sonnet form.
ESCORTING THE CANDIDATES TO THE EXAMINATION HALL
What a to-do about these doctors of art!
Even before the eastern sky is gray
I see your ceremonial pageant start
As horses and coaches throng the public way.
Torches bob; far too many drums resound;
Dust and confusion trouble the city street.
At sunrise these children of earth are up with a bound
Hot on their struggle and strife with frantic feet.
I pity you all as you ride to your early levee,
Scholars and courtiers striving far too soon
For profit and fame while nothing troubles me
As I rise in peace from my cozy bed at noon.
Now that spring is here and my term of office spent
I dream of my hillside farm with new content.
Many of his poems, though in general similar in their humorous spirit to the foregoing, make clearer one of the most familiar features in the work of Chinese humorous writers, smiles directed against themselves. Po wonders why on earth he endures the inconveniences and trials of Court life! He ruminates on the distinction between living at Court and in the country. While, paradoxically, he suffers from the hardships of the one, his friend Ch’en enjoys the luxuries of the other. In the hands of a less amusing writer the theme could, of course, be developed in an entirely serious spirit. Not so with Po Chü-i, who draws an obviously ludicrous picture of the traffic jam at the approaches to the Court and the nipping frost covering the earth at the opening of the morning ceremonies.
In the great capital a foot of snow;
The audience scheduled for the break of day,
Its ceremonial purpose to bestow
Congratulations in the regal way.—
On the high causeway at my setting forth
My horse slipped on the ice and by like fate
My lantern failed me. Facing to the north
I waited hours at the Imperial Gate.
My hair and beard were frozen stiff and through.
Suddenly I remembered my friend Ch’en
In the quiet valley of Hsien-yu.
Blest with warm bed-socks in his bed he lies
Dozing, while the sun ascends the skies.
Po Chü-i, experiencing a more merciful old age than Tu Fu, wrote of it with a more genial comic spirit. Both poets have much to say of baldness. Po Chü-i’s poem explicitly on this subject is unusually light-hearted and emphatically humorous. This is certainly not a high form of comedy but the piece serves its purpose well. It may be recalled that men’s baldness has elicited humorous expression at many times and in many places. It provided considerable ribald jesting on the commedia dell’arte stage and in the great Elizabethan playhouses. Baldness in the sixteenth century provided a favorite subject for jocose debates at drinking parties. At that time the attribution of loss of hair to veneral disease added a certain piquancy to these rhetorical flights of fancy. One champion would defend baldness, another revile it. Po Chü-i is not as exuberant in spirit as the bravos of the European Renaissance. Nevertheless, for graceful statement and clipped speech on this universal theme few have at any time equaled him. This is his panegyric:
ON HIS BALDNESS
At dawn I sighed to see my white hair go;
At dusk I sighed, noting how fast hairs fall,
A foolish fear of baldness moved me so:
Now all are gone, I do not mind at all!
I have done with washing and with rubbing dry;
The tiresome labors of my comb are sped;
Best of all, under a rainy sky
Or blistering sun, no burden tops my head.
I have no tasseled hat or massive crown;
Within a blesséd silver um I store
Water that on my pate goes trickling down
Like baptism in Buddha’s holy lore.
Now I know why old priests, sedate and grave,
Free heart and head by virtue of a shave!
The Taoists when in a serious vein lauded quietism, when in a comic vein mere idleness or laziness with the favorite inward-looking view of the subjectivists among the poets. The theme as shown in Lazy Man’s Song, is clearly a considerable step upward for Po Chü-i from the fantasy on baldness. It is more reflective, more imaginative, and more poetic and all the more humorous when one realizes what a casual opinion this poem must have expressed in the life of the writer. Po Chü-i possessed an extremely strong sense of moral responsibility. The sheer diligence with which he compiled book after book of verse shows him to have worked with seriousness and zeal. In his actual experience idleness was apparently a helpful relaxation for leisure hours. The praise of it as an entire way of life is clearly facetious. Yet how deftly it is done!
LAZY MAN’S SONG
I could have work but am too lazy for it;
I have got land but I am loth to farm;
My house-roof leaks but idly I deplore it;
My clothes are rent, yet I take no alarm.
I have got wine but through the live-long day
I shun the trouble filling glasses brings;
I have a lute but am too lazy to play
So it is just as if it had no strings.
It’s too much pain to eat and as for writing
Or reading, both are trouble. From friend and brother
Long letters come written with their inditing
But opening envelopes is too much bother.
Chi Shu-yeh would play his lute and ply
His forge; even he was not as lazy as I.
The Chinese genius can virtually brew something out of nothing. This alchemy, which is highly self-conscious, takes on at least a gently humorous spirit not because an inflated rhetoric is used but from a mock-heroic manner and the subtlety of the exercise itself. Life is envisaged as humorous because of its contradictions, its incongruities; its happiest moments may be to all appearances those of the least account. Po Chü-i wrote an encomium on one of the commonest of Chinese foods, bamboo shoots, especially praising those in early spring, when soft and pliant. The opening lines and, indeed, the larger number of the lines as the poem progresses, seem almost distastefully slight or even flat. But Po Chü-i is in fact a shrewd artist. His style exemplifies his theme. By the midpoint he feels that he has refuted vulgar opinion; description rises to a delicacy the equivalent of Renoir’s astonishing painting of a bowlful of softly tinted onions. In the crescendo at the end the tone totally changes. Po affects a violent distaste for elaborate dishes served at banquets and festivals. With the simple, early bamboo shoots passing down his throat he experiences all the freshness of cool, delicious spring weather. The humor, which undeniably is of a quiet nature, lies in the unexpectedly dramatic turn, the affected anger at elaborately prepared dishes and the clearly excessive praise, winged with a poetic imagination, of plain bamboo. A few readers may find no humor in the poem at all. In my own judgment such a view would overlook some of the happiest nuances of Chinese humor.
EATING BAMBOO SHOOTS
This Province is a land for bamboo groves
Whose spring shoots cover all the hills and dales.
The mountain woodsmen flock to town in droves
With armfuls for the early morning sales.
Things are cheap as they are easily got;
Two farthings for a bundle is the price.
I put the shoots in a large earthen pot
And cook them up along with boiling rice.
The purple skins outside are old brocades,
The inner skins are pearls, glossy and white.
My appetite for other viands fades,
I eat them ravenously, day and night.
Elsewhere we famish on some vile ragout
But here each south breeze makes a fresh bamboo.
No one knowing Po Chü-i’s work will deny him versatility. Although hardly as sensitive a poet as Tu Fu, he has his moments of considerable enthusiasm. There is at times a humorous undertone even in these outbursts of genuinely strong emotion. He smiles at himself even when seized by a poetic madness. Moreover, as a profoundly social being, he does not wish to be detected when caught up in an enthusiastic mood that in its very nature is unsocial. His humor is his guide, shrewdly saving him from embarrassment. Under these circumstances he is willing to confess that his passion for poetry is itself a weakness. In general he considers himself a reasonable social being, plagued with only one unsocial habit, his fanatical addiction to poetry. (How pleasantly unlike so many twentieth-century poets, from Yeats to Dylan Thomas, who profess poetry to be virtually their religion!) Thus to escape the just charge of madness and shun the crowd of reasonable men, he climbs a mountain, attains its summit, and madly sings, discovering a gratified audience only among birds and monkeys. It is a refinement and an amusing contradiction as he declares midway in his poem that not only good landscapes but good friends are the incitements to his singing. The song itself is for the silent places in the hills. Again, the imagery alone would admit a thoroughly serious or even depressing connotation. It is abundantly clear, however, that the Chinese poet intends his piece to be not only ironic but amusing.
MADLY SINGING IN THE MOUNTAINS
There is no man without some special fault;
My special failing is composing verse.
From countless ties I’ve managed to revolt
But this infirmity grows worse and worse.
On meeting with good landscapes and good friends,
I raise my voice in some ecstatic song,
Then climb a mountain where the pathway ends
And madly chant my verses, loud and long.
I pull a cassia branch about my head,
Leaning my body on a naked stone;
Monkeys and birds there flock to me instead
Of men to hear me singing all alone.
Fearing rude laughter, I’m content that then
My place is safe, unvisited by men.
How inveterate is his habit of smiling, though with a genial humor, at himself is further suggested by a poem showing his advanced years and susceptible heart in a humorous light. In this poem he describes himself as “an aging mountaineer.״ He was, in fact, about sixty-five when writing. The subject is a humorous, inconsequential affair of the heart taking place while he was on a trip to a mountain—quite possibly a religious pilgrimage, for these were common where the ascent of a mountain occurred. The excursion, if such was the case, seems to have borne at least some resemblance to the trip of other pilgrims taken to Canterbury. However the occasion may have shaped itself, the feature developed in the poem is the relation between the aging poet and a girl of fifteen. The first lines state, with calculated eccentricity, that the girl was half thirty, her hair still in the topknots of a child. The two climb trees together and disport themselves more or less innocently. The girl has the rapid movements and grace of a trained dancer. Her serious look shows that at least some longing has been aroused. But in the last line the poet beseeches her not to tempt the heart of an old traveler. The humor is as slight as the subject but is humor nevertheless. Some minor liberties have been taken in the translation chiefly to fit the poem into the sonnet form.
GOING TO THE MOUNTAIN WITH A DANCING GIRL, AGED FIFTEEN
Two topknots not yet plaited into one—
You would be thirty years if twice your age.
Sprig of a girl with ventures just begun,
If stationed in some courtly equipage
First among women in a social whirl,
Yet I am come, an aging mountaineer,
While you are present as a dancing girl
And fate’s caprice brings us together here.
In mountain brooks and springs we sport and play;
We climb tall trees; we sport among the leaves.
Your cheeks grow rosy as your dance grows gay,
Paced by mad gestures of your flying sleeves.
And yet your brows grow sad when the tune’s slow.—
Tempt not the heart of an old traveler so!
With the slow movements of time that have generally characterized cultural changes in China until the close of the last century, the tendency in Chinese verse was to lose much of its vividness and energy and, in particular, much of its humorous verve. As the modern reader is likely to interpret this evolution, themes were repeated with considerable monotony. Even in Chinese eyes the brilliance of older poets appeared to elude the art of their successors. Li Ho, Po Chü-i’s most accomplished contemporary, born later than he but dying before him, possessed a singularly tense nature and a macabre and dark imagination. He contributed little or nothing to the expression of humor. The comparatively minor poet, Wei Chuang, had at his command much of the charm of light verse but little of the force of major poetry. Li Ch’ing-chao possessed an even lighter touch and finer elegance but even less animated humor. The soldier-statesman, Hsin Ch’i-chi, expressed his roistering spirits in verse of considerable energy but with a relatively coarse type of humor. The truly great poet Lu Yu, active in the twelfth century, possessed a robust humor animated with a warming contact with the folk spirit. Typical of this phase of his art is his brief poem, The Old Apothecary. The poet praises a disreputable character who sells drugs to incite sexual vigor in order to buy wine and, when drunk, encourages his neighbors, young and old, in singing. The poet declares that he would gladly write a biography of the man but, unhappily, cannot discover his name!
Poets of the Yüan period wrote many exquisite lyrics, where the music ranked about equally in value with the words. Such poems show much refined art but prefer elegance to vigor of imagination and sentimental or melancholy moods to humor. When humor is indeed present, the old themes are likely to be reworked with relatively little fresh or truly creative art. A favorable specimen of a Yüan song with an attractive but still derivative type of humor may conclude the survey in this section of our investigation. The poem is by the thirteenth-century poet, Chang Yang-hao.
Who is it understands Ch’ü Yüan’s poem,
“Encountering Sorrow”? Truly, there is none
Who comprehends it, yet its meaning lies
Firmly written on the moon and sun.
His sorrow lingers but the man is gone
We know not where unless, lost in his dream,
He floats among the fish and crabs and shrimps
Happily where he plunged in Hsiang’s stream.
Truly, he misbehaved. He should have chosen
Green hills and shaded valleys as his friend.—
Let us drink madly and sing lustily!
May our frantic pleasure never end.
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