[Ch'ien Chung-shu is one of China's most distinguished literary figures. A professor of English and Chinese at Kwang Hua University in Shanghai, he is the author of numerous essays, a significant body of literary criticism, and several short stories. He is probably best known for his novel Wei Cheng (1947; Fortress Besieged, 1979), a satire regarded as one of the greatest Chinese literary works of the twentieth century. Below, he comments on Su's prose poems and adds that "the interest of Su Tung-p'o for us lies in the fact that he does not share the spirit of his age."]

Of the Sung dynasty, it may be said, as Hazlitt said of himself in the words of Iago, that it is nothing if not critical. The Chinese people dropped something of their usual wise passiveness during the Sung dynasty, and "pondered, searched, probed, vexed, and criticised." This intellectual activity, however, is not to be compared with that of the Pre-Chin period, the heyday of Chinese philosophy. The men of the Sung dynasty were inquisitive rather than speculative, filled more with a sense of curiosity than with a sense of mystery. Hence, there is no sweep, no daring, no roominess or margin in their intellectualism. A prosaic and stuffy thing theirs is, on the whole. This critical spirit revealed itself in many directions, particularly in the full flourish of literary criticism and the rise of the tao-hsüeh, that mélange adultère of metaphysic, psychology, ethics and casuistry.…

The Chinese common reader often regards the men of the Sung dynasty as prigs. Their high seriousness and intellectual and moral squeamishness are at once irritating and amusing to the ordinary easy-going Chinese temperament. There is something paralysing and devitalising in their wire-drawn casuistry which induces hostile critics to attribute the collapse of the Sung dynasty to its philosophers. There is also a disingenuousness in their attempts at what may be called, for want of a better name, philosophical masquerade: to dress up Taoism or Buddhism as orthodox Confucianism. One need but look into Sketches in a Villa and Causeries on Poetry in a Garden to see what a good laugh those two coxcombs of letters, Chi Yüan and Yüan Mei have had at the expense of the Sung philosophers and critics respectively. Nevertheless one is compelled to admit that the Sung philosophers are unequalled in the study of mental chemistry. Never has human nature been subject to a more rigorous scrutiny before or since in the history of Chinese thought. For what strikes one most in the tao-hsüeh is the emphasis on self-knowledge. This constant preying upon itself of the mind is quite in the spirit of the age. The Sung philosophers are morbidly introspective, always feeling their moral pulses and floundering in their own streams of consciousness. To them, their mind verily "a kingdom is." They analyse and pulverise human nature. But for that moral bias, which Nietzsche thinks to be also the bane of German philosophy, their vivisection of the human soul would have contributed a good deal to what Santayana calls literary psychology.

The poetry of the Sung dynasty is also a case in point. It is a critical commonplace that the Sung poetry furnishes a striking contrast to the T'ang poetry. Chinese poetry, hitherto ethereal and delicate, seems in the Sung dynasty to take on flesh and becomes a solid, full-blooded thing. It is more weighted with the burden of thought. Of course, it still looks light and slight enough by the side of Western poetry. But the lightness of the Sung poetry is that of an aeroplane describing graceful curves, and no longer that of a moth fluttering in the mellow twilight. In the Sung poetry one finds very little of that suggestiveness, that charm of a beautiful thing imperfectly beheld, which foreigners think characteristic of Chinese poetry in general. Instead, one meets with a great deal of naked thinking and outright speaking. It may be called "Sentimental" in contradistinction to the T'ang poetry which is on the whole "Naïve," to adopt Schiller's useful antithesis. The Sung poets, however, make up for their loss in lisping naïveté and lyric glow by a finesse in feeling and observation. In their descriptive poetry, they have the knack of taking the thing to be described sur le vif—witness Lu Yu and Yang Wan-li. They have also a better perception of the nuances of emotion than the T'ang poets, as can be seen particularly in their tz'u, a species of song for which the Sung dynasty is justly famous. Small wonder that they are deliberate artists, considering the fact that they all have been critics in the off-hours of their inspiration. The most annoying thing about them is perhaps their erudition and allusiveness which make the enjoyment of them to a large extent the luxury of the initiated even among the Chinese.

The interest of Su Tung-p'o for us lies in the fact that he does not share the spirit of his age. He seems to be born out of his due time and is nonetheless an anachronism for being himself unaware of it. To begin with, he is not critical in the sense that his contemporaries are critical. In the excellent account of Su's philosophy of art, Mr. C. D. Le Gros Clark has shown that Su goes to the root of the matter; he turns from the work of art to the mind of the artist. A poet, according to Su, should "merge himself with reality, and not content himself with the mere polishing of literary surfaces. Compared to this conception of the ontological affinity between the artist and Nature, the most meticulous studies of Su's contemporaries in diction and technique dwindle into mere fussiness of the near-sighted over details. Again, Su has a rooted antipathy against the spiritual pedantry of tao-hsüeh, that "unseasonable ostentation" of conscience and moral sense.

He speaks disparagingly of the high talk about human nature and reason, and the inefficiency of those who model themselves upon Confucius and Mencius. He is also opposed to Ch'êng I, the leader of the tao-hsüeh party in politics, with a virulence almost incompatible with his otherwise genial and tolerant character. He is probably still in purgatory for these offences. Chu Hsi has condemned him several times in his writings—and, in a way, to be dispraised of Chu Hsi is no small praise! Finally, as a poet, he is comparatively the most "naïve" among his "sentimental" contemporaries. Though no "native wood-notes wild," his poetry smells more of the perfume of books, as the Chinese phrase goes, than of the lamp oil. His stylistic feats seem rather lucky accidents than the results of sweating toil. He is much more spontaneous and simple in the mode of feeling than (say) Huang T'ing-chien who, with Su, is the twin giant in the Sung poetry. Ling Ai-hsüan has put the contrast between Su and Huang in a nutshell, comparable to Johnson's epigram on the difference between Dryden and Pope: "Su's poetry is manly and walks in big strides, while Huang's is woman-like and walks in a mincing gait." Has not Su himself also said that simplicity and primitiveness should be the criteria of good art?

Su's strains are as profuse as his art is unpremeditated. He throws out his good things to the winds with the prodigality and careless opulence of Nature. Here's God's plenty indeed! As he says of his own style; "My style is like a spring of inexhaustible water which bubbles and over-flows where it lists, no matter where. Running its course through the plains, it may glide along at the speed of a thousand li a day. When it threads its way through cliffs and mountains, one never knows beforehand what shape it may assume to conform with these obstacles.… It flows where it must flow and stops where it must stop." Elsewhere he repeats almost verbatim what he says here with the additional metaphor that style should be like the floating cloud. It is significant that this simile of water with its association of fluidity and spontaneity recurs with slight variations in all criticisms of Su. To quote a few examples from his contemporaries will suffice: his brother Tzu-yu likens his style to a mountain stream young after rain; Huang T'ing-chien, to the sea, tractless and boundless, into which all rivers empty, Li Chi-ch'ing, to an impetuous flood; Hsü Kai, to a big river. Thus the abiding impression of Su's art is one of "spontaneous overflow." Ch'ien Ch'ien-i varies the metaphor by comparing Su's style to quicksilver and draws the conclusion that the Taoist and Buddhist Naturalism must have been the formative influence in Su's life and art—a conclusion Mr. Le Gros Clark arrives at independently four centuries later.

It is strange that this Naturalism, which exercises a liberating influence upon Su, should also form an important element in the harrowing, cut-and-dry Sung philosophy or tao-hsüeh. One is tempted to think that, whereas the Sung philosophers are only naturalistic in creed, Su is naturalistic in character. Su is a spirit apart indeed!

Famed in all great arts, Su is supreme in prose-poetry or fu. In other species of writing, he only develops along the lines laid down by his immediate predecessors; but his prose-poetry is one of those surprises in the history of literature. Here is an art rediscovered that has been lost for several centuries. The whole T'ang dynasty is a blank as far as prose-poetry is concerned. The famous prose-poems by Han Yü and Liu Tsung-yüan are all stiff-jointed, imitative and second-rate. Ou-yang Hsiu first shows the way by his magnificent Autumn Dirge, and Su does the rest. In Su's hands, the fu becomes a new thing: he brings ease into what has hitherto been stately; he changes the measured, even-paced tread suggestive of the military drill into a swinging gait, and he dispenses altogether with that elaborate pageantry which old writers of fu are so fond of unrolling before the reader. He is by far the greatest fu-writer since Yü Sin. While Yü Sin shows how supple he can be in spite of the cramping antithetical style of the fu, Su succeeds in softening and thawing this rigid style, smoothing over its angularity and making the sharp points of the rhyming antitheses melt into one another. T'ang Tzu-hsi does not exaggerate when he says that in fu Su "beats all the ancients."… [This] is not the place for a detailed discussion of the literary qualities of Su's fu. Su's usual freakishness, buoyancy, humour, abundance of metaphor are all there. But critics, while noting these, have overlooked that which distinguishes his fu from his other writings … the difference in tempo. Su's normal style is "eminently rapid," as Arnold says of Homer; in his prose-poems, however, he often slackens down almost to the point of languidness as if he were caressing every word he speaks. Take for instance the section in Red Cliff, Part I, beginning with Su's question "Why is it so?" It moves with the deliberate slowness and ease of a slow-motion picture. What is said above does not apply, of course, to such sorry stuff as Modern Music in the Yen Ho Palace, On the Restoration of the Examination System, etc., which Mr. Le Gros Clark has also translated for the sake of having Su's prose-poems complete in English. They are written in the style empesé, being rhetorical exercises borrowed from "ambulant political experts," as Mr. Waley points out.

There is, therefore, no better proof of Mr. Le Gros Clark's deep knowledge of Chinese literature than his choice of Su's fu for translation. Throughout the whole translation he shows the scruples of a true scholar and the imaginative sympathy possible only to a genuine lover of Su. His notes and commentaries are particularly valuable, and so much more copious and learned than Lang Yeh's that even Chinese students will profit by them in reading Su's prose-poems in the original. If the English reader still cannot exchange smiles and salutes with Su across the great gulf of time so familiarly as the Chinese does, it is perhaps due to a difficulty inherent in the very nature of translation. It is certainly no fault of Su's accomplished translator.