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Nobel Lecture - The Chinese Novel Famous Speech by Pearl Buck
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Nobel Lecture - The Chinese Novel Famous Speech by Pearl Buck
December 12, 1938 Stockholm, Sweden
When I came to consider what I
should say today it seemed that it would be wrong not to speak of China.
And this is none the less true because I am an American by birth and by
ancestry and though I live now in my own country and shall live there,
since there I belong. But it is the Chinese and not the American novel
which has shaped my own efforts in writing. My earliest knowledge of
story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China. It would be
ingratitude on my part not to recognize this today. And yet it would be
presumptuous to speak before you on the subject of the Chinese novel for a
reason wholly personal. There is another reason why I feel that I may
properly do so. It is that I believe the Chinese novel has an illumination
for the Western novel and for the Western novelist.
When I say Chinese novel, I mean the indigenous Chinese novel, and not
that hybrid product, the novels of modern Chinese writers who have been
too strongly under foreign influence while they were yet ignorant of the
riches of their own country.
The novel in China was never an art and was never so considered, nor did
any Chinese novelist think of himself as an artist. The Chinese novel its
history, its scope, its place in the life of the people, so vital a place,
must be viewed in the strong light of this one fact. It is a fact no doubt
strange to you, a company of modern Western scholars who today so
generously recognize the novel.
But in China art and the novel have always been widely separated. There,
literature as an art was the exclusive property of the scholars, an art
they made and made for each other according to their own rules, and they
found no place in it for the novel. And they held a powerful place, those
Chinese scholars. Philosophy and religion and letters and literature, by
arbitrary classical rules, they possessed them all, for they alone
possessed the means of learning, since they alone knew how to read and
write. They were powerful enough to be feared even by emperors, so that
emperors devised a way of keeping them enslaved by their own learning, and
made the official examinations the only means to political advancement,
those incredibly difficult examinations which ate up a man's whole life
and thought in preparing for them, and kept him too busy with memorizing
and copying the dead and classical past to see the present and its wrongs.
In that past the scholars found their rules of art. But the novel was not
there, and they did not see it being created before their eyes, for the
people created the novel, and what living people were doing did not
interest those who thought of literature as an art. If scholars ignored
the people, however, the people, in turn, laughed at the scholars. They
made innumerable jokes about them, of which this is a fair sample: One day
a company of wild beasts met on a hillside for a hunt. They bargained with
each other to go out and hunt all day and meet again at the end of the day
to share what they had killed. At the end of the day, only the tiger
returned with nothing. When he was asked how this happened he replied very
disconsolately, «At dawn I met a schoolboy, but he was, I feared, too
callow for your tastes. I met no more until noon, when I found a priest.
But I let him go, knowing him to be full of nothing but wind. The day went
on and I grew desperate, for I passed no one. Then as dark came on I found
a scholar. But I knew there was no use in bringing him back since he would
be so dry and hard that he would break our teeth if we tried them on him.»
The scholar as a class has long been a figure of fun for the Chinese
people. He is frequently to be found in their novels, and always he is the
same, as indeed he is in life, for a long study of the same dead classics
and their formal composition has really made all Chinese scholars look
alike, as well as think alike. We have no class to parallel him in the
West - individuals, perhaps, only. But in China he was a class. Here he
is, composite, as the people see him: a small shrunken figure with a
bulging forehead, a pursed mouth, a nose at once snub and pointed, small
inconspicuous eyes behind spectacles, a high pedantic voice, always
announcing rules that do not matter to anyone but himself, a boundless
self-conceit, a complete scorn not only of the common people but of all
other scholars, a figure in long shabby robes, moving with a swaying
haughty walk, when he moved at all. He was not to be seen except at
literary gatherings, for most of the time he spent reading dead literature
and trying to write more like it. He hated anything fresh or original, for
he could not catalogue it into any of the styles he knew. If he could not
catalogue it, he was sure it was not great, and he was confident that only
he was right. If he said, «Here is art», he was convinced it was not to be
found anywhere else, for what he did not recognize did not exist. And as
he could never catalogue the novel into what he called literature, so for
him it did not exist as literature.
Yao Hai, one of the greatest of Chinese literary critics, in 1776
enumerated the kinds of writing which comprise the whole of literature.
They are essays, government commentaries, biographies, epitaphs, epigrams,
poetry, funeral eulogies, and histories. No novels, you perceive, although
by that date the Chinese novel had already reached its glorious height,
after centuries of development among the common Chinese people. Nor does
that vast compilation of Chinese literature, SsuV Ku Chuen Shu, made in
1772 by the order of the great Emperor Ch'ien Lung, contain the novel in
the encyclopedia of its literature proper.
No, happily for the Chinese novel, it was not considered by the scholars
as literature. Happily, too, for the novelist! Man and book, they were
free from the criticisms of those scholars and their requirements of art,
their techniques of expression and their talk of literary significances
and all that discussion of what is and is not art, as if art were an
absolute and not the changing thing it is, fluctuating even within
decades! The Chinese novel was free. It grew as it liked out of its own
soil, the common people, nurtured by that heartiest of sunshine, popular
approval, and untouched by the cold and frosty winds of the scholar's art.
Emily Dickinson, an American poet, once wrote, «Nature is a haunted house,
but art is a house that tries to be haunted». «Nature», she said,
Is what we see,
Nature is what we know
But have no art to say -
So impatient our wisdom is,
To her simplicity.
No, if the Chinese scholars ever knew of the growth of the novel, it was
only to ignore it the more ostentatiously. Sometimes, unfortunately, they
found themselves driven to take notice, because youthful emperors found
novels pleasant to read. Then these poor scholars were hard put to it. But
they discovered the phrase «social significance», and they wrote long
literary treatises to prove that a novel was not a novel but a document of
social significance. Social significance is a term recently discovered by
the most modern of literary young men and women in the United States, but
the old scholars of China knew it a thousand years ago, when they, too,
demanded that the novel should have social significance, if it were to be
recognized as an art.
But for the most part the old Chinese scholar reasoned thus about the
novel:
Literature is art.
All art has social significance.
This book has no social significance.
Therefore it is not literature.
And so the novel in China was not literature.
In such a school was I trained. I grew up believing that the novel has
nothing to do with pure literature. So I was taught by scholars. The art
of literature, so I was taught, is something devised by men of learning.
Out of the brains of scholars came rules to control the rush of genius,
that wild fountain which has its source in deepest life. Genius, great or
less, is the spring, and art is the sculptured shape, classical or modern,
into which the waters must be forced, if scholars and critics were to be
served. But the people of China did not so serve. The waters of the genius
of story gushed out as they would, however the natural rocks allowed and
the trees persuaded, and only common people came and drank and found rest
and pleasure.
For the novel in China was the peculiar product of the common people. And
it was solely their property. The very language of the novel was their own
language, and not the classical Wen-li, which was the language of
literature and the scholars. Wen-li bore somewhat the same resemblance to
the language of the people as the ancient English of Chaucer does to the
English of today, although ironically enough, at one time Wen-li, too, was
a vernacular. But the scholars never kept pace with the living, changing
speech of the people. They clung to an old vernacular until they had made
it classic, while the running language of the people went on and left them
far behind. Chinese novels, then, are in the «Pei Hua», or simple talk, of
the people, and this in itself was offensive to the old scholars because
it resulted in a style so full of easy flow and readability that it had no
technique of expression in it, the scholars said.
I should pause to make an exception of certain scholars who came to China
from India, bearing as their gift a new religion, Buddhism. In the West,
Puritanism was for a long time the enemy of the novel. But in the Orient
the Buddhists were wiser. When they came into China, they found literature
already remote from the people and dying under the formalism of that
period known in history as the Six Dynasties. The professional men of
literature were even then absorbed not so much in what they had to say as
in pairing into couplets the characters of their essays and their poems,
and already they scorned all writing which did not conform to their own
rules. Into this confined literary atmosphere came the Buddhist
translators with their great treasures of the freed spirit. Some of them
were Indian, but some were Chinese. They said frankly that their aim was
not to conform to the ideas of style of the literary men, but to make
clear and simple to common people what they had to teach. They put their
religious teachings into the common language, the language which the novel
used, and because the people loved story, they took story and made it a
means of teaching. The preface of Fah Shu Ching, one of the most famous of
Buddhist books, says, «When giving the words of gods, these words should
be given forth simply.» This might be taken as the sole literary creed of
the Chinese novelist, to whom, indeed, gods were men and men were gods.
For the Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common people.
And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them laugh, though
laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese novel. I mean amusement in
the sense of absorbing and occupying the whole attention of the mind. I
mean enlightening that mind by pictures of life and what that life means.
I mean encouraging the spirit not by rule-of-thumb talk about art, but by
stories about the people in every age, and thus presenting to people
simply themselves. Even the Buddhists who came to tell about gods found
that people understood gods better if they saw them working through
ordinary folk like themselves.
But the real reason why the Chinese novel was written in the vernacular
was because the common people could not read and write and the novel had
to be written so that when it was read aloud it could be understood by
persons who could communicate only through spoken words. In a village of
two hundred souls perhaps only one man could read. And on holidays or in
the evening when the work was done he read aloud to the people from some
story. The rise of the Chinese novel began in just this simple fashion.
After a while people took up a collection of pennies in somebody's cap or
in a farm wife's bowl because the reader needed tea to wet his throat, or
perhaps to pay him for time he would otherwise have spent at his silk loom
or his rush weaving. If the collections grew big enough he gave up some of
his regular work and became a professional storyteller. And the stories he
read were the beginnings of novels. There were not many such stories
written down, not nearly enough to last year in and year out for people
who had by nature, as the Chinese have, a strong love for dramatic story.
So the storyteller began to increase his stock. He searched the dry annals
of the history which the scholars had written, and with his fertile
imagination, enriched by long acquaintance with common people, he clothed
long-dead figures with new flesh and made them live again; he found
stories of court life and intrigue and names of imperial favorites who had
brought dynasties to ruin; he found, as he traveled from village to
village, strange tales from his own times which he wrote down when he
heard them. People told him of experiences they had had and he wrote these
down, too, for other people. And he embellished them, but not with
literary turns and phrases, for the people cared nothing for these. No, he
kept his audiences always in mind and he found that the style which they
loved best was one which flowed easily along, clearly and simply, in the
short words which they themselves used every day, with no other technique
than occasional bits of description, only enough to give vividness to a
place or a person, and never enough to delay the story. Nothing must delay
the story. Story was what they wanted.
And when I say story, I do not mean mere pointless activity, not crude
action alone. The Chinese are too mature for that. They have always
demanded of their novel character above all else. Shui Hu Chuan they have
considered one of their three greatest novels, not primarily because it is
full of the flash and fire of action, but because it portrays so
distinctly one hundred and eight characters that each is to be seen
separate from the others. Often I have heard it said of that novel in
tones of delight, «When anyone of the hundred and eight begins to speak,
we do not need to be told his name. By the way the words come from his
mouth we know who he is.» Vividness of character portrayal, then, is the
first quality which the Chinese people have demanded of their novels, and
after it, that such portrayal shall be by the character's own action and
words rather than by the author's explanation.
Curiously enough, while the novel was beginning thus humbly in teahouses,
in villages and lowly city streets out of stories told to the common
people by a common and unlearned man among them, in imperial palaces it
was beginning, too, and in much the same unlearned fashion. It was an old
custom of emperors, particularly if the dynasty were a foreign one, to
employ persons called «imperial ears», whose only duty was to come and go
among the people in the streets of cities and villages and to sit among
them in teahouses, disguised in common clothes and listen to what was
talked about there. The original purpose of this was, of course, to hear
of any discontent among the emperor's subjects, and more especially to
find out if discontents were rising to the shape of those rebellions which
preceded the fall of every dynasty.
But emperors were very human and they were not often learned scholars.
More often, indeed, they were only spoiled and willful men. The «imperial
ears. had opportunity to hear all sorts of strange and interesting
stories, and they found that their royal masters were more frequently
interested in these stories than they were in politics. So when they came
back to make their reports, they flattered the emperor and sought to gain
favor by telling him what he liked to hear, shut up as he was in the
Forbidden City, away from life. They told him the strange and interesting
things which common people did, who were free, and after a while they took
to writing down what they heard in order to save memory. And I do not
doubt that if messengers between the emperor and the people carried
stories in one direction, they carried them in the other, too, and to the
people they told stories about the emperor and what he said and did, and
how he quarreled with the empress who bore him no sons, and how she
intrigued with the chief eunuch to poison the favorite concubine, all of
which delighted the Chinese because it proved to them, the most democratic
of peoples, that their emperor was after all only a common fellow like
themselves and that he, too, had his troubles, though he was the Son of
Heaven. Thus there began another important source for the novel that was
to develop with such form and force, though still always denied its right
to exist by the professional man of letters.
From such humble and scattered beginnings, then, came the Chinese novel,
written always in the vernacular, and dealing with all which interested
the people, with legend and with myth, with love and intrigue, with
brigands and wars, with everything, indeed, which went to make up the life
of the people, high and low.
Nor was the novel in China shaped, as it was in the West, by a few great
persons. In China the novel has always been more important than the
novelist. There has been no Chinese Defoe, no Chinese Fielding or Smollett,
no Austin or Brontë or Dickens or Thackeray, or Meredith or Hardy, any
more than Balzac or Flaubert. But there were and are novels as great as
the novels in any other country in the world, as great as any could have
written, had he been born in China. Who then wrote these novels of China?
That is what the modern literary men of China now, centuries too late, are
trying to discover. Within the last twenty-five years literary critics,
trained in the universities of the West, have begun to discover their own
neglected novels. But the novelists who wrote them they cannot discover.
Did one man write Shui Hu Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape,
added to, rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a
hand, in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They lived
in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and heard, but of
themselves they have told nothing. The author of The Dream ofthe Red
Chamber in a far later century says in the preface to his book, «It is not
necessary to know the times of Han and T'ang - it is necessary to tell
only of my own times.»
They told of their own times and they lived in a blessed obscurity. They
read no reviews of their novels, no treatises as to whether or not what
they did was well done according to the rules of scholarship. It did not
occur to them that they must reach the high thin air which scholars
breathed nor - did they consider the stuff of which greatness is made,
according to the scholars. They wrote as it pleased them to write and as
they were able. Sometimes they wrote unwittingly well and sometimes
unwittingly they wrote not so well. They died in the same happy obscurity
and now they are lost in it and not all the scholars of China, gathered
too late to do them honor, can raise them up again. They are long past the
possibility of literary post-mortems. But what they did remains after them
because it is the common people of China who keep alive the great novels,
illiterate people who have passed the novel, not so often from hand to
hand as from mouth to mouth.
In the preface to one of the later editions of Shui Hu Chuan, Shih Nai An,
an author who had much to do with the making of that novel, writes, «What
I speak of I wish people to understand easily. Whether the reader is good
or evil, learned or unlearned, anyone can read this book. Whether or not
the book is well done is not important enough to cause anyone to worry.
Alas, I am born to die. How can I know what those who come after me who
read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I myself, born into
another incarnation, will think of it. I do not know if I myself then can
even read. Why therefore should I care?»
Strangely enough, there were certain scholars who envied the freedom of
obscurity, and who, burdened with certain private sorrows which they dared
not tell anyone, or who perhaps wanting only a holiday from th weariness
of the sort of art they had themselves created, wrote novels, too under
assumed and humble names. And when they did so they put aside pedantry and
wrote as simply and naturally as any common novelist.
For the novelist believed that he should not be conscious of techniques.
He should write as his material demanded. If a novelist became known for a
particular style or technique, to that extent he ceased to be a good
novelist and became a literary technician.
A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all
else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable
as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His
whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast
fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and
inherent order and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by
reading pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist
becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese novelists varied
their writing to accompany like music their chosen themes.
These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They
are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any
more than life is planned or compact. They are often too long, too full of
incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction as to
material, and a medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an
impossible event of magic or dream may be described with such exact
semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all reason.
The earliest novels are full of folklore, for the people of those times
thought and dreamed in the ways of folklore. But no one can understand the
mind of China today who has not read these novels, for the novels have
shaped the present mind, too, and the folklore persists in spite of all
that Chinese diplomats and Western-trained scholars would have us believe
to the contrary. The essential mind of China is still that mind of which
George Russell wrote when he said of the Irish mind, so strangely akin to
the Chinese,« that mind which in its folk imagination believes anything.
It creates ships of gold with masts of silver and white cities by the sea
and rewards and faeries, and when that vast folk mind turns to politics it
is ready to believe anything.»
Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of
years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels
changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names
attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no
one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through
succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands. I might mention
as an example the well-known story, The White Snake, or Pei She Chuan,
first written in the T'ang dynasty by an unknown author. It was then a
tale of the simple supernatural whose hero was a great white snake. In the
next version in the following century, the snake has become a vampire
woman who is an evil force. But the third version contains a more gentle
and human touch. The vampire becomes a faithful wife who aids her husband
and gives him a son. The story thus adds not only new character but new
quality, and ends not as the supernatural tale it began but as a novel of
human beings.
So in early periods of Chinese history, many books must be called not so
much novels as source books for novels, the sort of books into which
Shakespeare, had they been open to him, might have dipped with both hands
to bring up pebbles to make into jewels. Many of these books have been
lost, since they were not considered valuable. But not all - early stories
of Han, written so vigorously that to this day it is said they run like
galloping horses, and tales of the troubled dynasties following - not all
were lost. Some have persisted. In the Ming dynasty, in one way or
another, many of them were represented in the great collection known as
T'ai P'ing Kuan Shi, wherein are tales of superstition and religion, of
mercy and goodness and reward for evil and well doing, tales of dreams and
miracles, of dragons and gods and goddesses and priests, of tigers and
foxes and transmigration and resurrection from the dead. Most of these
early stories had to do with supernatural events, of gods born of virgins,
of men walking as gods, as the Buddhist influence grew strong. There are
miracles and allegories, such as the pens of poor scholars bursting into
flower, dreams leading men and women into strange and fantastic lands of
Gulliver, or the magic wand that floated an altar made of iron. But
stories mirrored each age. The stories of Han were vigorous and dealt
often with the affairs of the nation, and centered on some great man or
hero. Humor was strong in this golden age, a racy, earthy, lusty humor,
such as was to be found, for instance, in a book of tales entitled Siao
Ling, presumed to have been collected, if not partly written, by Han Tang
Suan. And then the scenes changed, as that golden age faded, though it was
never to be forgotten, so that to this day the Chinese like to call
themselves sons of Han. With the succeeding weak and corrupt centuries,
the very way the stories were written became honeyed and weak, and their
subjects slight, or as the Chinese say, «In the days of the Six Dynasties,
they wrote of small things, of a woman, a waterfall, or a bird.»
If the Han dynasty was golden, then the T'ang dynasty was silver, and
silver were the love stories for which it was famous. It was an age of
love, when a thousand stories clustered about the beautiful Yang Kuei Fei
and her scarcely less beautiful predecessor in the emperor's favor, Mei
Fei. These love stories of T'ang come very near sometimes to fulfilling in
their unity and complexity the standards of the Western novel. There are
rising action and crisis and dénouement, implicit if not expressed. The
Chinese say, «We must read the stories of T'ang, because though they deal
with small matters, yet they are written in so moving a manner that the
tears come.
It is not surprising that most of these love stories deal not with love
that ends in marriage or is contained in marriage, but with love outside
the marriage relationship. Indeed, it is significant that when marriage is
the theme the story nearly always ends in tragedy. Two famous stories, Pei
Li Shi and Chiao Fang Chi, deal entirely with extramarital love, and are
written apparently to show the superiority of the courtesans, who could
read and write and sing and were clever and beautiful besides, beyond the
ordinary wife who was, as the Chinese say even today, «a yellow-faced
woman », and usually illiterate.
So strong did this tendency become that officialdom grew alarmed at the
popularity of such stories among the common people, and they were
denounced as revolutionary and dangerous because it was thought they
attacked that foundation of Chinese civilization, the family system. A
reactionary tendency was not lacking, such as is to be seen in Hui Chen
Chi, one of the earlier forms of a famous later work, the story of the
young scholar who loved the beautiful Ying Ying and who renounced her,
saying prudently as he went away, «All extraordinary women are dangerous.
They destroy themselves and others. They have ruined even emperors. I am
not an emperor and I had better give her up » - which he did, to the
admiration of all wise men. And to him the modest Ying Ying replied, «If
you possess me and leave me, it is your right. I do not reproach you.» But
five hundred years later the sentimentality of the Chinese popular heart
comes forth and sets the thwarted romance right again. In this last
version of the story the author makes Chang and Ying Ying husband and wife
and says in closing, «This is in the hope that all the lovers of the world
may be united in happy marriage.» And as time goes in China, five hundred
years is not long to wait for a happy ending.
This story, by the way, is one of China's most famous. It was repeated in
the Sung dynasty in a poetic form by Chao Teh Liang, under the title The
Reluctant Butterfly, and again in the Yuan dynasty by Tung Chai-yuen as a
drama to be sung, entitled Suh Hsi Hsiang. In the Ming dynasty, with two
versions intervening, it appears as Li Reh Hua's Nan Hsi Hsiang Chi,
written in the southern metrical form called «ts'e», and so to the last
and most famous Hsi Hsiang Chi. Even children in China know the name of
Chang Sen.
If I seem to emphasize the romances of the T'ang period, it is because
romance between man and woman is the chief gift of T'ang to the novel, and
not because there were no other stories. There were many novels of a
humorous and satirical nature and one curious type of story which
concerned itself with cockflghting, an important pastime of that age and
particularly in favor at court. One of the best of these tales is Tung
Chen Lao Fu Chuan, by Ch'en Hung, which tells how Chia Chang, a famous
cockfighter, became so famous that he was loved by emperor and people
alike.
But time and the stream pass on. The novel form really begins to be clear
in the Sung dynasty, and in the Yuan dynasty it flowers into that height
which was never again surpassed and only equalled, indeed, by the single
novel Hung Lou Meng, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, in the Ts'ing
dynasty. It is as though for centuries the novel had been developing
unnoticed and from deep roots among the people, spreading into trunk and
branch and twig and leaf to burst into this flowering in the Yuan dynasty,
when the young Mongols brought into the old country they had conquered
their vigorous, hungry, untutored minds and demanded to be fed. Such minds
could not be fed with the husks of the old classical literature, and they
turned therefore the more eagerly to the drama and the novel, and in this
new life, in the sunshine of imperial favor, though still not with
literary favor, there came two of China's three great novels, Shui Hu
Chuan and San Kuo-Hung Lou Meng being the third.
I wish I could convey to you what these three novels mean and have meant
to the Chinese people. But I can think of nothing comparable to them in
Western literature. We have not in the history of our novel so clear a
moment to which we can point and say, «There the novel is at its height.»
These three are the vindication of that literature of the common people,
the Chinese novel. They stand as completed monuments of that popular
literature, if not of letters. They, too, were ignored by men of letters
and banned by censors and damned in succeeding dynasties as dangerous,
revolutionary, decadent. But they lived on, because people read them and
told them as stories and sang them as songs and ballads and acted them as
dramas, until at last grudgingly even the scholars were compelled to
notice them and to begin to say they were not novels at all but
allegories, and if they were allegories perhaps then they could be looked
upon as literature after all, though the people paid no heed to such
theories and never read the long treatises which scholars wrote to prove
them. They rejoiced in the novels they had made as novels and for no
purpose except for joy in story and in story through which they could
express themselves.
And indeed the people had made them. Shui Hu Chuan, though the modern
versions carry the name of Shi Nai An as author, was written by no one
man. Out of a handful of tales centering in the Sung dynasty about a band
of robbers there grew this great, structured novel. Its beginnings were in
history. The original lair which the robbers held still exists in
Shantung, or did until very recent times. Those times of the thirteenth
century of our Western era were, in China, sadly distorted. The dynasty
under the emperor Huei Chung was falling into decadence and disorder. The
rich grew richer and the poor poorer and when none other came forth to set
this right, these righteous robbers came forth.
I cannot here tell you fully of the long growth of this novel, nor of its
changes at many hands. Shih Nai An, it is said, found it in rude form in
an old book shop and took it home and rewrote it. After him the story was
still told and re-told. Five or six versions of it today have importance,
one with a hundred chapters entitled Chung I Shui Hu, one of a hundred and
twenty-seven chapters, and one of a hundred chapters. The original version
attributed to Shih Nai An, had a hundred and twenty chapters, but the one
most used today has only seventy. This is the version arranged in the Ming
dynasty by the famous Ching Shen T'an, who said that it was idle to forbid
his son to read the book and therefore presented the lad with a copy
revised by himself, knowing that no boy could ever refrain from reading
it. There is also a version written under official command, when officials
found that nothing could keep the people from reading Shui Hu. This
official version is entitled Tung K'ou Chi, or, Laying Waste the Robbers,
and it tells of the final defeat of the robbers by the state army and
their destruction. But the common people of China are nothing if not
independent. They have never adopted the official version, and their own
form of the novel still stands. It is a struggle they know all too well,
the struggle of everyday people against a corrupt officialdom.
I might add that Shui Hu Chuan is in partial translation in French under
the title Les Chevaliers Chinois, and the seventy-chapter version is in
complete English translation by myself under the title All Men Are
Brothers. The original title, Shui Hu Chuan, in English is meaningless,
denoting merely the watery margins of the famous marshy lake which was the
robbers' lair. To Chinese the words invoke instant century-old memory, but
not to us.
This novel has survived everything and in this new day in China has taken
on an added significance. The Chinese Communists have printed their own
edition of it with a preface by a famous Communist and have issued it anew
as the first Communist literature of China. The proof of the novel's
greatness is in this timelessness. It is as true today as it was dynasties
ago. The people of China still march across its pages, priests and
courtesans, merchants and scholars, women good and bad, old and young, and
even naughty little boys. The only figure lacking is that of the modern
scholar trained in the West, holding his Ph.D. diploma in his hand. But be
sure that if he had been alive in China when the final hand laid down the
brush upon the pages of that book, he, too, would have been there in all
the pathos and humor of his new learning, so often useless and inadequate
and laid like a patch too small upon an old robe.
The Chinese say «The young should not read Shui Hu and the old should not
read San Kuo.» This is because the young might be charmed into being
robbers and the old might be led into deeds too vigorous for their years.
For if Shui Hu Chuan is the great social document of Chinese life, Sa Kuo
is the document of wars and statesmanship, and in its turn Hung Lou Meng
is the document of family life and human love.
The history of the San Kuo or Three Kingdoms shows the same architectural
structure and the same doubtful authorship as Shui Hu. The story begins
with three friends swearing eternal brotherhood in the Han dynasty and
ends ninety-seven years later in the succeeding period of the Six
Dynasties. It is a novel rewritten in its final form by a man named Lo
Kuan Chung, thought to be a pupil of Shih Nai An, and one who perhaps even
shared with Shih Nai An in the writing, too, of Shui Hu Chuan. But this is
a Chinese Baconand-Shakespeare controversy which has no end.
Lo Kuan Chung was born in the late Yuan dynasty and lived on into the
Ming. He wrote many dramas, but he is more famous for his novels, of which
San Kuo is easily the best. The version of this novel now most commonly
used in China is the one revised in the time of K'ang Hsi by Mao Chen Kan,
who revised as well as criticised the book. He changed, added and omitted
material, as for example when he added the story of Suan Fu Ren, the wife
of one of the chief characters. He altered even the style. If Shui Hu
Chuan has importance today as a novel of the people in their struggle for
liberty, San Kuo has importance because it gives in such detail the
science and art of war as the Chinese conceive it, so differently, too,
from our own. The guerillas, who are today China's most effective fighting
units against Japan, are peasants who know San Kuo by heart, if not from
their own reading, at least from hours spent in the idleness of winter
days or long summer evenings when they sat listening to the storytellers
describe how the warriors of the Three Kingdoms fought their battles. It
is these ancient tactics of war which the guerillas trust today. What a
warrior must be and how he must attack and retreat, how retreat when the
enemy advances, how advance when the enemy retreats - all this had its
source in this novel, so well known to every common man and boy of China.
Hung Lou Meng, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, the latest and most modern
of these three greatest of Chinese novels, was written originally as an
autobiographical novel by Ts'ao Hsüeh Ching, an official highly in favor
during the Manchu regime and indeed considered by the Manchus as one of
themselves. There were then eight military groups among the Manchus, and
Tstao Hsüeh Ching belonged to them all. He never finished his novel, and
the last forty chapters were added by another man, probably named Kao O.
The thesis that Ts'ao Hsüeh Ching was telling the story of his own life
has been in modern times elaborated by Hu Shih, and in earlier times by
Yuan Mei. Be this as it may, the original title of the book was Shih T'ou
Chi, and it came out of Peking about 1765 of the Western era, and in five
or six years, an incredibly short time in China, it was famous everywhere.
Printing was still expensive when it appeared, and the book became known
by the method that is called in China,
«You-lend-me-a-book-and-I-lend-you-a-book».
The story is simple in its theme but complex in implication, in character
study and in its portrayal of human emotions. It is almost a pathological
study, this story of a great house, once wealthy and high in imperial
favor, so that indeed one of its members was an imperial concubine. But
the great days are over when the book begins. The family is already
declining. Its wealth is being dissipated and the last and only son, Chia
Pao Yü, is being corrupted by the decadent influences within his own home,
although the fact that he was a youth of exceptional quality at birth is
established by the symbolism of a piece of jade found in his mouth. The
preface begins, «Heaven was once broken and when it was mended, a bit was
left unused, and this became the famous jade of Chia Pao Yü.» Thus does
the interest in the supernatural persist in the Chinese people; it
persists even today as a part of Chinese life.
This novel seized hold of the people primarily because it portrayed the
problems of their own family system, the absolute power of women in the
home, the too great power of the matriarchy, the grandmother, the mother,
and even the bondmaids, so often young and beautiful and fatally
dependent, who became too frequently the playthings of the sons of the
house and ruined them and were ruined by them. Women reigned supreme in
the Chinese house, and because they were wholly confined in its walls and
often illiterate, they ruled to the hurt of all. They kept men children,
and protected them from hardship and effort when they should not have been
so protected. Such a one was Chia Pao Yü, and we follow him to his tragic
end in Hung Lou Meng.
I cannot tell you to what lengths of allegory scholars went to explain
away this novel when they found that again even the emperor was reading it
and that its influence was so great everywhere among the people. I do not
doubt that they were probably reading it themselves in secret. A great
many popular jokes in China have to do with scholars reading novels
privately and publicly pretending never to have heard of them. At any
rate, scholars wrote treatises to prove that Hung Lou Meng was not a novel
but a political allegory depicting the decline of China under the foreign
rule of the Manchus, the word Red in the title signifying Manchu, and Ling
Tai Yü, the young girl who dies, although she was the one destined to
marry Pao Yü, signifying China, and Pao Ts'ai, her successful rival, who
secures the jade in her place, standing for the foreigner, and so forth.
The very name Chia signified, they said, falseness. But this was a
farfetched explanation of what was written as a novel and stands as a
novel and as such a powerful delineation, in the characteristic Chinese
mixture of realism and romance, of a proud and powerful family in decline.
Crowded with men and women of the several generations accustomed to living
under one roof in China, it stands alone as an intimate description of
that life.
In so emphasizing these three novels, I have merely done what the Chinese
themselves do. When you say «novel», the average Chinese replies, « Shui
Hu, San Kuo, Hung Lou Meng.» Yet this is not to say that there are not
hundreds of other novels, for there are. I must mention Hsi Yü Chi, or
Record of Travels in the West, almost as popular as these three. I might
mention Feng Shen Chuan, the story of a deified warrior, the author
unknown but said to be a writer in the time of Ming. I must mention Ru
Ling Wai Shi, a satire upon the evils of the Tsing dynasty, particularly
of the scholars, full of a double-edged though not malicious dialogue,
rich with incident, pathetic and humorous. The fun here is made of the
scholars who can do nothing practical, who are lost in the world of useful
everyday things, who are so bound by convention that nothing original can
come from them. The book, though long, has no central character. Each
figure is linked to the next by the thread of incident, person and
incident passing on together until, as Lu Hsün, the famous modern Chinese
writer, has said, «they are like scraps of brilliant silk and satin sewed
together.»
And there is Yea Shou Pei Yin, or An Old Hermit Talks in the Sun, written
by a famous man disappointed in official preferment, Shia of Kiang-yin,
and there is that strangest of books, Ching Hua Yuen, a fantasy of women,
whose ruler was an empress, whose scholars were all women. It is designed
to show that the wisdom of women is equal to that of men, although I must
acknowledge that the book ends with a war between men and women in which
the men are triumphant and the empress is supplanted by an emperor.
But I can mention only a small fraction of the hundreds of novels which
delight the common people of China. And if those people knew of what I was
speaking to you today, they would after all say «tell of the great three,
and let us stand or fall by Shui Hu Chuan and San Kuo and Hung Lou Meng.»
In these three novels are the lives which the Chinese people lead and have
long led, here are the songs they sing and the things at which they laugh
and the things which they love to do. Into these novels they have put the
generations of their being and to refresh that being they return to these
novels again and again, and out of them they have made new songs and plays
and other novels. Some of them have come to be almost as famous as the
great originals, as for example Ching P'ing Mei, that classic of romantic
physical love, taken from a single incident in Shui Hu Chuan.
But the important thing for me today is not the listing of novels. The
aspect which I wish to stress is that all this profound and indeed sublime
development of the imagination of a great democratic people was never in
its own time and country called literature. The very name for story was
«hsiao shuo », denoting something slight and valueless, and even a novel
was only a «ts'ang p'ien hsiao shuo », or a longer something which was
still slight and useless. No, the people of China forged their own
literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of
what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is
dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is
often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes
often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely
stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not
expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer. My
ambition, therefore, has not been trained toward the beauty of letters or
the grace of art. It is, I believe, a sound teaching and, as I have said,
illuminating for the novels of the West.
For here is the essence of the attitude of Chinese novelists - perhaps the
result of the contempt in which they were held by those who considered
themselves the priests of art. I put it thus in my own words, for none of
them has done so.
The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces
art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest
terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an
individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living - an
energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then
in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or
whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual
keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he
relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy - an energy at
once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more
profound than another man's, and all his brain more sensitive and
quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that
actuality overfiows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from
within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which
sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his
dreams, into the circle of its activity.
From the product of this activity, art is deducted - but not by him. The
process which creates is not the process which deduces the shapes of art.
The defining of art, therefore, is a secondary and not a primary process.
And when one born for the primary process of creation, as the novelist is,
concerns himself with the secondary process, his activity becomes
meaningless. When he begins to make shapes and styles and techniques and
new schools, then he is like a ship stranded upon a reef whose propeller,
whirl wildly as it will, cannot drive the ship onward. Not until the ship
is in its element agam can lt regain its course.
And for the novelist the only element is human life as he finds it in
himself or outside himsel# The sole test of his work is whether or not his
energy is producing more of that life. Are his creatures alive? That is
the only question. And who can tell him? Who but those living human
beings, the people? Those people are not absorbed in what art is or how it
is made-are not, indeed, absorbed in anything very lofty, however good it
is. No, they are absorbed only in themselves, in their own hungers and
despairs and joys and above all, perhaps, in their own dreams. These are
the ones who can really judge the work of the novelist, for they judge by
that single test of reality. And the standard of the test is not to be
made by the device of art, but by the simple comparison of the reality of
what they read, to their own reality.
I have been taught, therefore, that though the novelist may see art as
cool and perfect shapes, he may only admire them as he admires marble
statues standing aloof in a quiet and remote gallery; for his place is not
with them. His place is in the street. He is happiest there. The street is
noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their
expression as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete
even as human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be
known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to
those who stand upon the pedestals of art.
And like the Chinese novelist, I have been taught to want to write for
these people. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I
want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few. For
story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone
else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a
novelist must not think of pure literature as his goal. He must not even
know this field too well, because people, who are his material, are not
there. He is a storyteller in a village tent, and by his stories he
entices people into his tent. He need not raise his voice when a scholar
passes. But he must beat all his drums when a band of poor pilgrims pass
on their way up the mountain in search of gods. To them he must cry, «I,
too, tell of gods!» And to farmers he must talk of their land, and to old
men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of their
children, and to young men and women he must speak of each other. He must
be satisfied if the common people hear him gladly. At least, so I have
been taught in China.
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