No More Learning

To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of
supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese, it is something
commonplace, obvious--a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the
_emotions_. These he reserves entirely for friendship.

Accordingly we find that while our poets tend to lay stress on
physical courage and other qualities which normal women admire,
Po Chu-i is not ashamed to write such a poem as "Alarm at entering
the Gorges. " Our poets imagine themselves very much as Art has portrayed
them--bare-headed and wild-eyed, with shirts unbuttoned at the neck as
though they feared that a seizure of emotion might at any minute
suffocate them. The Chinese poet introduces himself as a timid recluse,
"Reading the Book of Changes at the Northern Window," playing chess with
a Taoist priest, or practising caligraphy with an occasional visitor.
If "With a Portrait of the Author" had been the rule in the Chinese
book-market, it is in such occupations as these that he would be shown;
a neat and tranquil figure compared with our lurid frontispieces.

It has been the habit of Europe to idealize love at the expense of
friendship and so to place too heavy a burden on the relation of man and
woman. The Chinese erred in the opposite direction, regarding their
wives and concubines simply as instruments of procreation. For sympathy
and intellectual companionship they looked only to their friends. But
these friends were bound by no such tie as held women to their masters;
sooner or later they drifted away to frontier campaigns, remote
governorships, or country retirement. It would not be an exaggeration to
say that half the poems in the Chinese language are poems of parting or
separation.

Readers of these translations may imagine that the culture represented
by Po Chu-i extended over the whole vast confines of China. This would,
I think, be an error. Culture is essentially a metropolitan product.
Chu-i was as much _depayse_ at a provincial town as Charles Lamb would
have been at Botany Bay. But the system of Chinese bureaucracy tended
constantly to break up the literary coteries which formed at the
capitals, and to drive the members out of the little corner of Shensi
and Honan which to them was "home. "

It was chiefly economic necessity which forced the poets of China into
the meshes of bureaucracy--backed by the Confucian insistence on public
service. To such as were landowners there remained the alternative of
agricultural life, arduous and isolated.

The poet, then, usually passed through three stages of existence. In the
first we find him with his friends at the capital, drinking, writing,
and discussing: burdened by his office probably about as much as Pepys
was burdened by his duties at the Admiralty. Next, having failed to
curry favour with the Court, he is exiled to some provincial post,
perhaps a thousand miles from anyone he cares to talk to. Finally,
having scraped together enough money to buy husbands for his daughters,
he retires to a small estate, collecting round him the remnants of those
with whom he had shared the "feasts and frolics of old days. "

I have spoken hitherto only of poets. But the poetess occupies a place
of considerable importance in the first four centuries of our era,
though the classical period (T'ang and Sung) produced no great woman
writer. Her theme varies little; she is almost always a "rejected wife,"
cast adrift by her lord or sent back to her home. Probably her father
would be unable to buy her another husband and there was no place for
unmarried women in the Chinese social system. The moment, then, which
produced such poems was one of supreme tragedy in a woman's life.

Love-poetry addressed by a man to a woman ceases after the Han dynasty;
but a conventional type of love-poem, in which the poet (of either sex)
speaks in the person of a deserted wife or concubine, continues to be
popular. The theme appears to be almost an obsession with the T'ang and
Sung poets. In a vague way, such poems were felt to be allegorical.