A Lute of Jade | Page 5

not set our hearts
at rest, ceasing to trouble whether we remain or go? What boots it to
wear out the soul with anxious thoughts? I want not wealth; I want not
power: heaven is beyond my hopes. Then let me stroll through the
bright hours as they pass, in my garden among my flowers, or I will
mount the hill and sing my song, or weave my verse beside the limpid
brook. Thus will I work out my allotted span, content with the
appointments of Fate, my spirit free from care."* For him enjoyment
and scarcely happiness is the thing.
And although many of his
word-pictures are not lacking in charm or colour, they have but little
significance beyond them. They are essentially the art works of an
older school than that of the Seven Sages. But we must have due regard
for them, for they only miss greatness by a little, and remind us of the
faint threnodies that stir in the throats of bird musicians upon the dawn.
--
* Giles, `Chinese Literature', p. 130.
--
The Poets of the T`ang Dynasty
At last the golden age of Chinese poetry is at hand.
Call the roll of
these three hundred eventful years,
and all the great masters of song
will answer you. This is an age of professional poets, whom emperors
and statesmen delight to honour. With the Chinese, verse-making has
always been a second nature. It is one of the accomplishments which no
man of education
would be found lacking. Colonel Cheng-Ki-Tong,
in his delightful book `The Chinese Painted by Themselves', says:
"Poetry has been in China, as in Greece, the language of the gods. It
was poetry that inculcated laws and maxims; it was by the harmony of
its lines that traditions were handed down at a time when memory had

to supply the place of writing; and it was the first language of wisdom
and of inspiration." It has been above all the recreation of statesmen
and great officials, a means of escape from the weariness of public life
and the burden of ruling. A study of the interminable biographies of
Chinese poets and men of letters would reveal but a few professional
poets, men whose lives
were wholly devoted to their art; and of these
few the T`ang dynasty can claim nearly all. Yet strange as it may seem,
this matters but little when the quality of Chinese poetry is considered.
The great men of the age were at once servants of duty and the lords of
life. To them official routine and the responsibilities of the state were
burdens to be borne along the highway, with periods of rest and
intimate re-union with nature to cheer the travellers. When the heavy
load was laid aside, song rose naturally from the lips. Subtly
connecting the arts, they were at once painters and poets, musicians and
singers. And because they were philosophers and seekers after the
beauty that underlies the form of things, they made the picture express
its own significance, and every song find echo in the souls of those that
heard.
You will find no tedium of repetition in all their poetry,
no
thin vein of thought beaten out over endless pages. The following
extract from an ancient treatise on the art of poetry called
`Ming-Chung' sets forth most clearly certain ideals to be pursued:
"To make a good poem, the subject must be interesting,
and treated in
an attractive manner; genius must shine throughout the whole, and be
supported by a graceful, brilliant, and sublime style. The poet ought to
traverse, with a rapid flight, the lofty regions of philosophy, without
deviating from the narrow way of truth. . . .
Good taste will only
pardon such digressions as bring him towards his end, and show it from
a more striking point of view.
"Disappointment must attend him, if he speaks without speaking to the
purpose, or without describing things with that fire, with that force, and
with that energy which present them to the mind as a painting does to
the eyes. Bold thought, untiring imagination, softness and harmony,
make a true poem.
"One must begin with grandeur, paint everything expressed,
soften

the shades of those which are of least importance,
collect all into one
point of view, and carry the reader thither with a rapid flight."
Yet when due respect has been paid to this critic of old time, the fact
still remains that concentration and suggestion
are the two essentials
of Chinese poetry. There is neither Iliad nor Odyssey to be found in the
libraries of the Chinese; indeed, a favourite feature of their verse is the
"stop short", a poem containing only four lines, concerning which
another critic has explained that only the words stop, while the sense
goes on. But what a world of meaning is to be found between four short