In writing the present article, the writer has profited by discussions with his former teacher Professor Y.N. Wen and his friend Dr. W. F. Wang.
The critical pendulum has once more swung back and there are signs that our old literature is coming into favour again. Knowing persons have also told us that there is just at present even a craze for our old literature among foreigners and that our old drama especially has all the cry in the West. We are quite proud to hear of these things. That our old drama should lead the way of the craze need not surprise us; for, though the real power of drama, as Aristotle says in his Poetics, should be felt apart from representation and action, drama can for that very reason appeal to the majority of persons whose interest does not rise above mere representation and spectacle. Moreover, our old drama richly deserves the epithet “artificial” which Lamb applies to the comedy of manners. To Western readers surfeited with drab realism and tiresome problem plays our old drama comes as “that breathing place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning” which must be as refreshing as (say) Barrie’s pleasant fancy and pathos after an overdose of Pinero and Jones. But whatever value our old dramas may have as stage performances or as poetry, they cannot as dramas hold their own with great Western dramas. In spite of the highest respect for the old dramatists, one cannot sometimes help echoing Coleridge’s wish as regards Beaumont and Fletcher that instead of dramas, they should have written poetry in the broad sense inclusive of tzu(词) and ch’u(曲) as well. I say this without the least prejudice, because I yield to none in my enthusiasm for our old literature and would definitely range myself on the side of the angels and the ancients, should a quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns break out in China.
The highest dramatic art is of course tragedy and it is precisely in tragedy that our old playwrights have to a man failed. Apart from comedies and farces, the rank and file of our serious drama belong to what is property called the romantic drama. The play does not present a single master-passion, but a series of passions loosely strung together. Poetic justice is always rendered, and pathetic and humorous scenes alternate as regularly as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon, to borrow a homely simile from Oliver Twist. Of the tragic sense, the sense of pathos touched by the sublime, the sense of “Zwey Seelen wohene, achl in meiner Brust, the knowledge of universal evil as the result of partial good, there is very little trace. True, there are numerous old plays which end on the note of sadness. But a sensitive reader can very easily feel their difference from real tragedies: he goes away from them not with the calm born of spent passions or what Spinoza calls acquiescentia with the workings of an immanent destiny, but, on the contrary, haunted by the pang of a personal loss, acute, disconsolate, to be hidden away even form oneself. One has only to compare Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Dryden’s All for Love with Pei Jen-fu’s Rain in the Oil Trees(白仁甫梧桐雨) and Hung Shen’s The Palace of Everlasting Life( 洪升长生殿) in order to perceive the difference. The story of Emperor Yuan Tsung of the T’ang dynasty and his ladylove Yand Kuei-fei is presented in both Chinese plays just as that of Antony and Cleopatra is presented in both English plays. And both are stories of “the world well lost” for love. The parallel between the two Chinese plays and Antony and Cleopatra is particularly close, because they all throw the unities of time and place by the board; and in the first half of all of them, tragic scenes and events are entirely absent. They all begin idyllically, but how differently they end! In reading the two Chinese plays, we are not lifted beyond personal sympathy to a higher plane of experience. The piercing lyricism of Rain in the Oil Trees and the sensuous and emotional luxury of The Palace of Everlasting Life are fine things in themselves, but they are not to be confused with tragic power. Instead of a sense of reconciliation and fruition, they leave us at the end weakened by vicarious suffering, with a tiny ache in the heart, crying for some solace or support and a scheme of things nearer to the heart’s desire. This is surely worlds away from the full tragic experience which, as Mr. I. A. Richards describes so finely in Principles of Literary Criticism, “stands uncomforted, unintimidated, alone and self-reliant.” Now, on kind of experience may be as precious as another, but one kind of experience cannot possess the same feeling as another.
These Chinese plays leave the reader yearning for a better scheme of things instead of that feeling of having come to the bitter end of everything. This impression is heightened by the structure of the plays. The curtain does not fall on the main tragic event, but on the aftermath of that event. The tragic moment with passion at its highest and pain at its deepest seems to ebb out in a long falling close. This gives the peculiar effect of lengthening-out as of a trill or a sigh. It is significant that in Rain in the Oil Trees Yang Kuei-fei dies in the third act, leaving a whole act to the Emperor to whine and pine and eat away in impotent grief the remains of his broken heart, and that in The Palace of Everlasting Life, the bereavement occours in the twentyfifth scene only to prepare us for the happy re-union (more or less after the fashion of Protesilaus and Laodamia in Wordsworth’s poem) in the fiftieth scene. What is more important still, one is unable to rise beyond a merely personal sympathy with the tragic characters because they are not great enough to keep us at a sufficient psychical distance from them. The Tragic flaw (αυρτια) is there, but it is not thrown into sharp relief with any weight of personality or strength of character. The Emperor, for example, appears in the plays as essentially a weak, ineffectual and almost selfish sensualist who drifts along the line of least resistance. He has no sense of inward conflict. he loses the world by loving Yang Kuei-fei and then gives her up in the attempt to win back the world. He has not character enough to be torn taut between two worlds; he has not even sense enough to make the best of both worlds. In Pei Jen-fu’s play he seems a coward and a cad. Pressed by rebels for Yang Kuei-fei’s life, he says to her: “I cannot help it. Even my own life is at stake.” When Yang Kuei-fei implores him, he replies:“What can I do!” When finally Yang Kuei-fei is led away by the rebels, he says to her:“Don’t blame me, my dear.” We have no love for rant and fustian, but these speeches are understatements with a vengeance. They stand self-convicted; any comment on them is superfiuous. In Hung Shen’s play, the Emperor indeed puts on a bolder front. Yang Kuei-fei meets her death bravely, but the Emperor will not let her, and talks of the world well lost for love. After a little hedging, however; he delivers her over to the rebels with these parting words:“Since you have made up your mind to die, how can I prevent you?” To do justice to Emperor. these words are spoken very feelingly with tears and much stamping of foot. But compare them with Antony’s speech in shakespeare’s play:
