A History of Chinese Literature

The poetry of the Sungs has not attracted so much attention as that of the T`angs. This is chiefly due to the fact that although all the literary men of the Sung dynasty may roughly be said to have contributed their quota of verse, there still were few, if any, who could be ranked as professional poets, that is, as writers of verse and of nothing else, like Li Po, Tu Fu, and many others under the T`ang dynasty. Poetry now began to be, what it has remained in a marked degree until the present day, a department of polite education, irrespective of the particle of the divine gale. More regard was paid to form, and the license which had been accorded to earlier masters was sacrificed to conventionality. The Odes collected by Confucius are, as we have seen, rude ballads of love, and war, and tilth, borne by their very simplicity direct to the human heart. The poetry of the T`ang dynasty shows a masterly combination, in which art, unseen, is employed to enhance, not to fetter and degrade, thoughts drawn from a veritable communion with nature. With the fall of the T`ang dynasty the poetic art suffered a lapse from which it has never recovered; and now, in modern times, although every student "can turn a verse" because he has been "duly taught," the poems produced disclose a naked artificiality which leaves the reader disappointed and cold.

The poet CH`ÊN TUAN (d. A.D. 989) began life under favourable auspices. He was suckled by a mysterious lady in a green robe, who found him playing as a tiny child on the bank of a river. He became, in consequence f this supernatural nourishment, exceedingly clever and possessed of a prodigious memory, with a happy knack for verse. Yet he failed to get a degree, and gave himself up "to the joys of hill and stream." While on the mountains some spiritual beings are said to have taught him the art of hibernating like an animal, so that he would go off to sleep for a hundred days at a time. He wrote a treatise on the elixir of life, and was generally inclined to Taoist notions. At death his body remained warm for seven days, and for a whole month a "glory" played around his tomb. He was summoned several times to Court, but to judge by the following poem, officialdom seems to have had few charms for him: "For ten long years I plodded through the vale of lust and strife, Then through my dreams there flashed a ray of the old sweet peaceful life. . No scarlet-tasselled hat of state can vie with soft repose; Grand mansions do not taste the joys that the poor man's cabin knows. I hate the threatening clash of arms when fierce retainers throng, I loathe the drunkard's revels and the sound of fife and song; But I love to seek a quiet nook, and some old volume bring Where I can see the wild flowers bloom and hear the birds in spring."