II
With all these as background knowledge of Confucianism, let us discuss the Chinese theory of poetry. The word shih (poetry), originally an abbreviation for shih ching (Book of Poetry) as often used in the Five Classics and Four Books, has since the second century come to mean, by extension, poetry par excellence. In the "Canon of Shun" of the Book of History, there is a definition which runs as shih yen chih, that is poetry gives expression to chih, meaning fooling, aim, wish or will. There has been some earnest controversy over the precise meaning of this passage. Different writers deduce different types of poetics from it. By emphasizing the emotive side of the word chih, Lu Ki (261-303 A.D.) held that shih, which he took as lyric poetry, should trace emotions daintily. This sounds very much like Ezra Pound's definition: "Poetry is a verbal statement of emotional values; a poem is an emotional value verbally stated." Usually, however, emphasis was laid on the volitional aspect of chih, with the result that poetry was understood to be an expression of the wishes and desires of the poet, especially when referring to the poems in the Book of Poetry. This school of interpreters would stress the politico-ethical content of the poems. Until the great neo-Confucian Chu Hsi (1130-1200) discouraged this tendency, orthodox Confucians could not see poetry for politics. The definition is important because from it stem two main schools of poetic theories in China.
"This is what Poetry teaches," says Confucius in the First Discourse of the Book of Rites (Li Ki). "The warm glow and the soft pliancy of life and the purity and simplicity of the soul" (Wenjou tunghou). Unlike Plate who denounces poets as an outrage upon the moral understanding, Confucius says a man unacquainted with the Book of Poetry is not only unable to see, put also unable to advance—"face to face with a stone wall." Like Plato, Confucius declares, without Plato's inconsistency that the character of a people depends so much more upon their songs and poems than upon anything else, that we ought to make these the chief forces in education (chiao). He is of Sidney's opinion that instruction is, if not the only, one of the functions of poetry. For Shelley as well as for Confucius, all life's idealism, all progress of spirit, all hope of high action is summed up in the word poetry. To elaborate if not to misinterpret, the soul, in Confucius' thinking, crystallizes itself in poetry and life crystallizes itself in the soul.
Like the Greek Contemporaries, Confucian sphere of aesthetics is not separated from the sphere of ethics. To Confucius, the moral life of a man is a poem, a dance or a piece of music. A passage in Yochi, the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Riles runs as follows:
"Character is the backbone of our human nature, and music is the flowering of character. The metal, stone, string and bamboo instruments are the instruments of music. The poem gives expression to our heart, the song gives expression to our voice, and the dance gives expression to our movements. These three arts take their rise from the human soul, and then are given further expression by means of musical instruments. Therefore, from the depth of sentiment comes the clarity of form and from the strength of the mood comes the spirituality of its atmosphere. This harmony of spirit springs forth from the soul and expression or blossoms forth in the form of music. Therefore music is the one thing in which there is no charlatanry (wei)."
This is well said and none can do better. In another passage in the Analecls, Confucius says: "aroused by the poems (shih), established by the rites (li) and brought into perfect focus by music (yo)." He must be understood as trying to integrate music with rites (which includes the dance) just as he tries to integrate poetry with music. In Confucius' thinking, poetry, the dance and music are a single unit. The reason why music can bring about perfection in man is that music, the harmony inherent in all nature which corresponds with what is Heavenly in man, is "what unifies." And the reason why poetry, the dance and music are identical in function is that "Virtue (or character) is more than art."
Thus, poetry, like the other two of the trio, is of high practical value. It is of value because it is not only expressive of one's emotion or will, but also conducive to the good social conduct and adjustment of the future. It is practical because poetry is imaginative realization of what is otherwise attained in history or philosophy. The function of poetry, says Confucius, is inspiration (hsin, meaning "to stir," "to arouse," "to excite," to "inspire," "to illumine" and all their gerunditive form," contemplation (kwan, meaning "to see," "to observe," "to contemplate," etc.) warmth of life (Ch'un, meaning "to ac quaint," "to associate," "to befriend," "to be social," "to serve as an art of sociability" in the Aristotlian sense that "men are social animals") and regulation of feelings (yu'an, meaning literally "to complain," "to resent," "to murmur," etc.). Let us discuss this in detail.
The first function of poetry is to inspire. But the question is: what is meant by "to inspire?" Confucius does not give the answer in this passage quoted. As the Book of Poetry edited and selected by Confucius contains some fifty "Leuds" (tsung), that is, hymns or lofty poems sung on formal occasions such as offering sacrifices to spirits in ancestral temples, one is inclined to believe as Ovid boasts:
Est, Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illio:
Sedibus aethereis spiritus ille venit.
In Confucius' thinking, the word hsin (which may either be used as a noun or a verb), does not mean what Aristotle calls dementise fuit, a state of madness of those possessed by the Muses, nor docs it mean what Shakespeare calls "a fine frency" in which the poet's eyes roll; it is a combination of divina aura and mota mens. In the opinion of most Confucian interpreters, what the Book of Poetry or poetry par excellence inspires in the readers is neither feeling nor thought, but mood. Thus, we have such common expressions as shih-hsin, that is, "mood for poetry" and chiu-hsin, "mood for drinking" in Chinese.
The second function of poetry is to contemplate. The original word used by Confucius is kuan which means "to see" either with the inner or the outward eye. It is an insistence on the meaning "to see with the inner eye" that makes James Legge render it into English as "self-contemplation." "Contemplation" is perhaps the word. It is used in the same sense as Plotinus uses it. Plotinus represents contemplation as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and bright vision. This is what the modern aesthetes call "the metaphysical Narcissism." For the poet Blake, there is a double vision:
"For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is given to me.
With my inward eye, 'tis an Old Man grey,
With my outward, a Thistle across my way."
But for the philosopher Confucius, he "sees more with the inner than with the out ward eye, for after quoting one of the poems which is, not included in the Book of Poetry:
"How the flowers of the aspen-plum flutter and turn!
Do I not think of you? But your house is distant."
Confucius criticizes it by saying: "It is the want of thinking. Or how is it distant?"
The third function of poetry is to give warmth to life. This is the bold translation of the Chinese word ch'un. James Legge rendered it into English as "to teach the art of sociability." Professor Achilles Fang, an eminent Chinese translator, rendered it as "to teach you how to make friends." Both of them adopted the literal meaning of the word. When they rendered it, perhaps they had in mind such a passage of Confucius as: "If you do not learn the Odes (poems in the Book of Poetry), you will not be fit to converse with." For, in the days of Confucius, the three hundred and five poems were often quoted in informal conversations, at conivial gatherings, and on diplomatic missions. The present translation is justified, because Confucius has made it clear that one of the teachings of poetry is "the warm glow of life."
The Chinese since Confucius have rejected the doctrine of "Art for Art's sake," or of "Poetry for poetry's sake." To Confucius, as to Nietzsche, poetry is a great stimulus to life. It produces joy and gives warmth as an aid to life. It possesses a usefulness, that is to say, which transcends its direct aim. The poet sees life as beauty, and the poem thus fulfills its function the more completely, the more deeply it enables men to penetrate into life. It is this "life promoting" or "life-warming" theory of poetry that makes Confucius expound, though implicitly, the idea that beauty is the art term for jen. To render the work ch'un otherwise is to commit the false dictum as Guyan has committed: "Art is, above everything, a phenomenon of sociability," for sociability is an indirect end of poetry: it cannot be its direct aim.
The fourth or the last function of poetry is, according to Confucius, to regulate feelings. This is perhaps the main gist of his theory of poetry. The original word yu'an, which the present writer translates as "regulation of feelings," means literally "resentment;" that is why many other sinologues render it as "to show the way of resentment." The present writer holds that resentment is not what Confucius has in mind: he gives it only example, for does he not mention (in passing) in the Analects: "joy not in excess, sorrow without harm," etc.?
The word yu'an used here might bear the closest resemblance to Aristotle's catharsis. Both theories resemble each other so much that no comparative literary criticism is worth its name without a comparison of these two philosophers on this point. Aristotle in defining tragedy is not prodigal of words in regard to katharsis: "A tragedy is the imitation of an action .... with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions." Confucius is even more parsimonious in words when he says the function of poetry is yu'an, that is to say, to regulate feelings. Both the Aristotle's katharsis and the Confucius' yu'an are controversial as to their respective meanings, but it may be conceded that both of them do not limit the application of their theories to poetry only. They used these theories to explain the effects of certain forms of music. It may also be agreed that the emotions or feelings in question are not limited solely, in the case of Aristotle, to pity and fear and in the case of Confucius, to resentment. There may have been an agreement also that both theories are an aesthetic specification of a psychological and physiological interpretation of either the purgation or regulation of feelings.
Ingram Bywater in Aristotle on the Art of Poetry interprets katharsis from the politico-ethical standpoint. He infers katharsis is the reduction of emotion to "just measure" but his main thesis does not concern so much the reduction as the control by external means of violent emotion in a citizen throughout his civic life as offered by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. E. Zeller in Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics interprets katharsis from the medical standpoint. The German historian explains that as a medical term katharsis means "the expulsion from the body of burdensome or injurious matters." However, he infers that Aristotle's meaning is not that katharsis applied to "any purification within the soul of permanent affections, but is the removal from it of unhealthy ones". S. H. Butcher in his essay on the function of tragedy in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts proposes neither reduction of feeling to "just measure" nor an "expulsion" of "unhealthy" emotion. He tends to interpret katharsis as a process of "clarification" to signify a transformation of emotional fear into what would be precisely called an "aesthetic emotion". Henri Bremond, in Priere et poesie interprets katharsis by what he calls connotation reliqieuse as to mean purification and goes further to say: "La rime, les alliterations, la repetition des phrases, les refrains produisent chez le lecteur un apaisement, une purification analogue. So far these are the various interpretations of Aristotle's theory of katharsis. It is significant that neither Bywater nor Zeller, neither Butcher nor Bremond believes that katharsis is the purgation of the soul from a feeling or that a feeling is purged, for katharsis has the explicit meaning of purgation in Greek. It seems to the present writer that all interpreters of Aristotle's term, while trying to avoid using the word "purgation" to explain it, are reading many other meanings into it, which are not there in the original.
In the sphere of Confucian ethics, there is no such thought as the purgation of feelings. To Confucius, men are naturally born with desires and passions, which are not to be purged, or extirpated. Confucius recognises the faults of our conduct to be largely the result of the assertion of our desires, but taken in and of themselves, they are not subversive of our higher life. It is the undue assertion of these desires that arrests the development of our real self. The way to deal with them is therefore not completely to purge them, but properly to co-ordinate or regulate them. When they are properly regulated, they are made to live and have their being only at the behest of something which holds them in control. What would otherwise arise if that organizing principle did not exercise sufficient power over them is thereby subdued; and instead of militating against the nurture of the higher self, the desires may be made even to contribute something of value.
A fine passage from the Great Learning runs as follows:
"The cultivation of our moral life consists in the maintenance of a complete balance of our being. When we are infested with passions, then that balance and equilibrium is lost. So also when we have fear, when we are particularly attracted to some object which has for us an unusually strong appeal, when we are overcome with grief. Under such circumstances our mind wanders away from the objects which should occupy our attention. We look but see not, we hear but comprehend not, we eat but taste not," and we have another passage from the Central Harmony:
"While there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy, the mind may be said to be in the state of equilibrium. When those feelings have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of harmony. This equilibrium is the great reality of universal existence, and this harmony is the eternal law of the universe."
Such an idea of the harmonization of our desires and of the regulation of our feelings is a much more wholesome idea than the somewhat austere and uncompromising view of Buddhism, and to a certain extent also of Christianity, that our natural self must be eliminated. The natural self is a part of our real self, and one cannot do injury to the natural self without also at the same time doing some injury to the real self. Scientific researches seem to have discovered that man is a bundle of instincts and complexes, and to preach the idea of utter renunciation would only bring greater confusion of lust into the world. It is best, therefore, as does Confucius to accept the reality of natural facts and sublimate them, to use a modern term, so as to make them contributory to the total welfare of our moral life. The law of measure is the law of all laws. It is what is known in Confucius as li.
But li in Yochi, a Confucian treatise in the Book of Rites, is inseparable from music. In more than one passage, however, it is pointed out that music is superior to li. mainly because music consists of heavenly harmony, li of earthly harmony. "Music is the harmony of heaven and earth, li constitutes the graduation of heaven and earth. Through harmony all things are brought forth through graduation all things are properly classified." "Music points to what all beings have in common; li to that in which all beings differ. What is common leads to mutual love; what is different leads to mutual respect." "For this reason the kings of olden times instituted li and music in order to regulate human emotions."
Music (good music which differs from the "lewd notes" of Cheng, the "Lydian airs" of China condemned by Confucius), together with poetry, the dance, and all that is gracious and beautiful, is both for Confucius and for the contemporaries in Greece a potent instrument in the formation of character, the development of the mind, and the establishment of high ethical standard, since it arouses in the mind an appreciation of all that is good, true and beautiful. The law of measure in conduct is li; that in sound is music; that in language is poetry comes Kultur. The function of li is to regulate conduct; that of music is to regulate emotions; that of poetry is to regulate feelings. With regard to emotions or feelings in poetry or music, expression rather than suppression, harmonization rather than purification, regulation rather than purgation is the tao, the way. In a word, regulation is a better term than the Aristotlian term katharsis.
It is the boast of the Chinese that they have the first treatise on aestheticism. Liu Hsieh, an eminent critic of the late fifth century and the early sixth century, first classified in his Literary Mind the belle-lettres into hsin-wen, seng-wen and chino-wen which are precisely what Ezra Pound calls phanopoeia, melopoeia and logopoeia respectively. He further distinguishes the dream-inspiration from the Bacchanalian revelry, which prosupposes Nietzche's distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian arts and Max Eastman's distinction between the sleep and wine in poetry. It is Chuangtze (born 400 B. C.) and Mencius (born 372 B. C.) and the Confucian scholars of the Sung dynasty who first distinguished between mind and soul nous and psyche animus, and anima, Geist and Seels, and consilium and vita. Chung Hung who lived about the same time as Liu Hsieh was the first exponent of the school of historical criticism, and Ssu-Kung Tu (834-908 A. D.) was that of the school of impressionistic criticism. It is strange to say that while the modern Chinese looked to the West for enlightenment, the Western writers such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and G. L. Dickinson looked to the old Cathay for inspiration. More strange is the fact that the West which the modern Chinese looked up to was not the new West, but the old pre-war one, and that the Cathay the modern Westerners looked up to was a terra incognita, exotic and alien even to the Chinese. It is rather in our traditional theories that one finds some hint of the typically modernist attitude in Europe and in America: the emphasis on emotional subtlety, on musical suggestiveness, the trick of far-fetched allusiveness, the belief in "severe and serene control of the emotions by reason," and the art of eloquent or pregnant silence in poetry, to "leave something to the willing intelligence of the reader." When Yen Yu of the Sung dynasty says: "Poetry is the expression of emotion: it has nothing to do with learning, with reasoning, or with rhetorics. Even if there is any as such it is like the antelope hanging its horns somewhere and no trace can be found. The beauty of poetic style lies in the transparent purity, like the music in the air, the colour in a picture, the moonlight on the water and the image in a mirror" he seems to anticipate T. Fontanes: "Es has eigentlich Keinen rechten Inhalt und ist bloss eine Situation und kein Gedicht, aber des tut nichts. Es hat den Ton, und wie das Kolorit des Bild macht, so macht, der Ton das Gedicht" and Joubert who says: "Les beaux vers sont ceux qui s'exhalent comme des sons ou parfums." When T. S. Eliot says that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; that it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality; he is only repeating what Lo Chung-chao of the Ming Dynasty has said in "The miirror of Poetry: "The fault with poetry is not the lack of wit, but the overshining of wit; not the wanting of emotion, but the overflowing of emotion." When prose writers of the early Manchu dynasty teach the secret of prose style is to convey power through sound, they seem to anticipate in a sense the view that literary art should approach to the condition of music. When Edith Sitwell, the British Surrealist poetess, expounded the idea of "poetic texture," she did not know that such had been vieux jeu in old China since the fourth century! Indeed "old" Chinese poetry is perhaps the nearest possible approach to what Henri Bremond calls "La poesie pure." We can cite many lines from our poets to match, for example, Ra cine's "La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae," which to translate is to be a traitor.
The present writer has long in mind to write a brief history of Chinese literary criticism and this short article can at most serve as one of its chapters. As a Confucianist, the present writer has the intellectual honesty that Confucius expounds: "When you know a thing, say that you know it; when you do not know, say that you don't know—this is true knowledge." In dealing with the Chinese critics of the past throughout this survey, he has tried his best "not to insist on their rhetorics so as to distort their language, nor to insist on their language so as to distort their intention," as Mencius has counselled.