胡适英文论著:中国文学(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)


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胡适英文论著:中国文学

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A Literary Revolution in China

The Peking LeaderFeb. 12, 1919. pp. 116-118.so-called Chinese literary revolutiont; which has aroused so much opposition in conservative quarters Thebut which certainly has all promises of success, means simply a conscious demand for a living literature—a literature which shall be written in the spoken tongue and shall truly represent the life and needs of the people.

It is obvious to all critical observers that the literature of modern China does not represent the real life of the nation: it is mostly imitative of the literature of the past. Classicism is no fitting epithet for this literature: it is a dead literature—a literature which persistently excludes the language of everyday conversation and is only vaguely intelligible to the classically trained few but is totally inaccessible to the vast number of the people.

It is against this literature that the literary revolutionists direct their attack. While the conservative literatus takes great pride in calling his writings ku-wen (ancient prose) and ku-shih (ancient poetry), they propose to give China king-wen (modern prose) and king-shih (modern poetry). They contend that the literary language of China is no longer a sufficient medium for creative literary productions, and that the plain language (白话) or vulgate Chinese is full of literary possibilities. They maintain that the literature of modern China can only be produced in this spoken tongue. Only a living language, they say, is fit for the production of a living literature. And they strongly believe that vulgate Chinese is in every sense a living language.

How the First Shot Was Fired

The movement for the adoption of the spoken language for educational purposes has long been in existence, and a number of short-lived periodicals have been published in vulgate Chinese for popular dissemination of useful knowledge. But the advocacy of the vulgate tongue as the only legitimate literary medium is a movement of quite recent origin. The immediate stimulus to this movement was an article by the present writer entitled Suggestions for the Reform of Chinese Literature, first published in La Jeunesse (新青年 Vol. II, No. 5) in January, 1917. In this article, the present writer advocated the abolition of classical allusions, literary conventions, and the strict parallel structure. It also attacked the practice of slavishly imitating ancient writers and argued that modern China ought to create a living literature of its own. Finally he discussed the historical significance of the spoken language and championed its adoption as the fitting medium for literary expressions.

Following this article, Mr. Chen Tu-hsiu (陈独秀), dean of the College of Letters in the Government University, published another article entitled For a Revolution in Literature (La Jeunesse , Vol. II, No. 6), in which he vigorously supported the present writer's suggestions, especially the one on the adoption of vulgate Chinese in literature.

These two articles aroused much valuable discussion which was suspended only by the temporary cessation of publication of La Jeunesse , in the summer of 1917. This monthly magazine which had from its inception been the organ of radical ideas, was soon reestablished, but this time with a new resolution to help bring about the literary revolution which it had advocated. Accordingly, its new issues have all been published in the vulgate tongue. It not only contains prose compositions in the vulgate, but also publishes a number of poems written in the spoken language of the people.

That the spoken language can be effectively employed in prose composition has been sufficiently proved by the great novels of the last seven centuries, and he must be an incorrigible reactionary who refuses to recognize this undeniable fact. But the idea of producing poetry exclusively in the spoken language has repulsed many a critic. How can poetry, the essence of which is beauty, be produced in a language which has long been the language of the lowly and the vulgar and has never been polished by the usages of a refined literature?

New Experimental Poetry

Of course there is no way of dispelling such doubts except by actually producing good poetry in the vulgate tongue. When two years ago the present writer resolved to write no poetry save in the spoken language, he called his new verses experimental poetry. This experimental attitude is shown by most of the vulgate poets. For it is by means of experiments only that we may judge a thing by its fruits. We are merely experimenting on the possibility of the spoken language as a poetical medium. The time of experimentation has been too short for us to say anything definite on our results. It may be safe to say that at least some of the vulgate poems, notably those by Mr. Shen Yin-mo (沈尹默), professor of Chinese literature in the Government University, possess a richness both in form and in content which one rarely finds in poetry written in the literary style. At any rate, we are sure that this is an experiment well worth all the trouble and ridicule to which we may be subjected.

How the Movement Is Spreading

In spite of all opposition by defenders of the classical imitative literature, the movement for a vulgate literature is steadily spreading. There are several scientific and philosophical works now being published in the spoken language. Editors of several newspapers, such as the Kuo Min Kung Pao (国民公报) of Peking, and the Shih Shih Hsin Pao (时事新报) of Shanghai, are now writing their editorials in it. Other periodicals, notably the Weekly Review (每周评论) of Peking, and The Renaissance (新潮), a new monthly edited by the students of the Government University, are publishing almost exclusively vulgate articles and verses in their columns. Last but not least, Mr. Liang Chi-chao (梁启超), whose writings have greatly influenced the Chinese for almost twenty years, is now writing his Sunday lay sermons in the spoken language.

Historical Justification

So much for a brief account of this movement thus far. In conclusion, let me say a few words as to the historical justification of this movement. It has been truly said that the history of China best illustrates what is called the phenomenon of arrested development. Nowhere is this truth so clearly demonstrated as in the history of modern Chinese literature. As far back as in the Sung dynasty, such philosophers as Chen Yi (程子 d. 1107) and Chu Hsi (朱子 d. 1200) and many others had already felt the insufficiency of the literary language as a medium of philosophical writing. Accordingly their philosophical works were chiefly written in the style known as the conversational form (语录体) which has ever since the twelfth century been the usual style of philosophical writings. Poets of the same dynasty, notably Shao Yung (邵雍) and Loh Yiu (陆游), too, often wrote poems in a style which is much nearer the spoken than the literary language.

The phase of Chinese vulgate literature that has attained the highest development, however, is the novel. The extant specimens of novels of the Sung dynasty, such as The Story of the Five Dynasties (五代史平话) and Stories of the Hsuan-ho Era (宣和遗事), point to the fact that vulgate novels must have been fairly common even during that time. Under the Yuan or Mongol dynasty, the vulgate novel reached a very high state of perfection in such masterpieces as Shui Hu Chuan (水浒传) and Hsi Yu Chi (西游记). The student of the dramas of Yuan knows how far the vulgate tongue was used in even the most poetic pieces. Thus as early as in the fourteenth century, China had arrived at the stage of natural development when almost every branch of literature—from philosophical discourses to the popular novel—was written in the vulgate tongue. China was actually evolving a living literature!

Unfortunately this development was stunted during the Ming dynasty when, on the one hand, a very strict form of literary composition, both in prose and in poetry, was fixed by imperial decree as the standard form for all civil examinations, and, on the other hand, a wave of reactionism was sweeping over the literati themselves who deplored the degeneration of literary style and proposed to go back to the pre-Han period for literary models! From that time to this day, Chinese literature, with the exception of a very few novels, has never been able to free itself from the shackles of classical imitation and contentless formalism.

Conclusion

It is to free ourselves from these shackles that we are now proposing the adoption of spoken Chinese as our literary medium. For doubtless one of the most important causes for this deplorable retrogression of Chinese literature has been the anachronous employment of a dead language which is no longer adequate for the expression of the ideas and sentiments of the nation. In these days of intense living and modernized thinking, this linguistic inadequacy becomes more apparent than it ever was before. In order to express an enriched content, it is necessary first to secure the emancipation of the literary form. The old bottles can no longer hold the new wine. If we truly wish to give China a literature which shall not only be expressive of the real life and thoughts of our own time, but also be an effective force in the intellectual and social reforms, we must first emancipate ourselves from the fetters of a dead language which may have once been the fitting literary instrument for our forefathers, but which certainly is not adequate for the creation of a living literature of our own times.

The Literary Revolution in China

The Chinese Social and Political Science ReviewFeb., 1922. Vol. 6. No. 2. pp. 91-100.order to appreciate the full significance of the literary revolution in China, the reader will do well to recall the INhistory of the rise of the national languages of modern Europe. Hardly five centuries have passed since Latin was the recognized literary language of the whole of Europe. Italy was the first to revolt. Dante, Petrarch (in his youthful days) and Boccaccio produced their best works in the dialect of Tuscany, and the popularity of their writings succeeded in finally making the Tuscan dialect the national language of the Italian people. By that time, the dialect of Paris was fast becoming the official language of France. In 1539, Francis I ordered that all public documents should be in the French of Paris; though it was still foreign to nearly half the population of the kingdom. In the middle of the sixteenth century, there arose the group of French poets known as the Pléiade, who consciously advocated the use of the French language as a means of poetic expression. Rabelais and Montaigne achieved an even greater success in prose. Thus by the end of the sixteenth century the French of Paris became the undisputed national language of France.

The case of modern English, being more similar to that of modern Chinese, is all the more instructive. As late as the latter part of the fourteenth century, there were three main dialects competing for supremacy in England. The Southern dialect, spoken south of the Thames, was the most conservative, being full of old forms and inflections. The Northern dialect which extended from the Humber to Aberdeen, was, owing to the Danish settlements, undergoing such rapid and radical changes that it became almost an entirely new language. Between these extremes stood the Midland dialect which was more or less comprehensible to the speakers of both dialects. This Midland dialect, being the language of London and of the two great universities, soon came to be adopted as the standard speech. Chaucer, the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, wrote his poetry in this dialect; and his great contemporary Wycliffe, too, used it in his English translations of the Bible. The immense popularity of their writings and the introduction of the printing press in the following century made the Midland dialect the undisputed national tongue of England.

The lesson taught by such recent history seems to have been forgotten by those who now look upon the Chinese literary revolution with disfavor and suspicion. But a little unbiased reflection and historical study will readily lead us to the conclusion that what is now called the literary revolution is no more than the culminating stage in a long process of historical evolution.

The story is indeed a long one, but the salient facts are simple. As early as the second century B.C., the classical language had already become unintelligible to the people. Thus about the year 120 B.C., in a memorial to the emperor, Premier Kung-sun Hung said: The imperial edicts and laws that have been proclaimed,—while they are most elegantly worded and containing benevolent instructions, are not generally understood by the public officers who are too inadequately educated to explain them to the people. In order to meet this most serious difficulty the government hit upon a system under which public offices were conferred upon those who had studied the classic writings. This system which was later perfected into the great system of literary examinations, has succeeded in maintaining to this day the supremacy of the classical language which had become unintelligible to the public officers over two thousand years ago.

But no governmental power, however great, can prevent a language from undergoing the inevitable processes of phonetical change and grammatical levelling gradually and unconsciously brought about by the common sense of the people. In China, these processes have by a stroke of good fortune been allowed to go on unimpeded and uninterfered with by the literary class which was busily occupied with the task of mastering the subtleties of the dead classical language. For a long period of over twenty centuries, the dialects have been permitted to keep on changing and modifying until some of the dialects have become as distinct from the classical language as any two cognate languages can possibly be different from each other. As in the case of the English dialects, the dialects of Northern China, owing to the influence of numerous barbarian conquests and settlements, have undergone the most radical changes both in pronunciation and in tonation and in grammar. It is the Northern and Middle dialects, generally classed as the Mandarin dialects, which now form the kuo yu or national language of China.

While conservative Chinese scholars still look down upon the living spoken language as the degraded jargon of the vulgar and the illiterate, the student of comparative languages can easily convince himself that the living national tongue is the culmination of over twenty centuries' linguistic revision and reform, and is consequently by far superior to the long dead classical language. I have elsewhere tried to prove this point by numerous illustrations but the limitations of this paper does not allow me to take up a subject of such technical nature. So I shall confine myself to the development of literature in the spoken language.

The first barbarization of Northern China which took place during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries A.D., and its concomitant event of the shift of the centre of Chinese civilization to Southern China, are the two factors which have combined to produce a large amount of popular poetry both in the North and in the South. The new races in the North made their heroic and warlike songs, but the popular literature of the Southern peoples chiefly consisted in little lyrics of love. The unmistakable beauty and simplicity of these songs of the people gradually came to be appreciated by the literary men of the time and they soon became models of poetic composition under the general name of Ku yo fu (古乐府) or Old Songs. In this way, the literature of the literati was influenced by the poetry of the people; and the greatness of the poetry of the Tang dynasty (c. 620-900) owes much to the influence of the popular songs of the pre-Tang period. It is safe to say that the best poems of Tang are written either in the popular tongue or in a style nearest to it. It is said of Po Chu-i, the greatest poet of the mid-Tang period, that his poems were often shown to an old woman whose inability to understand a certain poem would cause its rejection or revision.

It was also under the Tang dynasty that vulgate prose first arose. The great teachers of the Chan or Zen (禅) school of Buddhism first used it in preaching and recording sayings and discourses. The style proved to be so effective in philosophical writings that the Neo-Confucian philosophers of Sung and later dynasties had to adopt it in most of their philosophical discussions.

Meanwhile Northern China was undergoing a second period of barbarization which began in the tenth century and lasted until the latter part of the fourteenth. The Kitan Tartars were conquered by the Nuchen Tartars who in turn were conquered by the Mongols. The latter people in the year 1239 succeeded in subjugating the whole of China. While these barbarian conquests were politically and socially disastrous to the Chinese people, it cannot be denied that they have had immense beneficial effects upon the language and literature of the people. That the language was barbarized can be easily seen in the numerous edicts and other public documents of the Mongol dynasty which have been preserved to us and which were all written in terribly barbarized Chinese, a style which is apparently Mongol syntax clothed in Chinese characters.

It was during this period of barbarian occupation that the great dramas were produced. The literary examinations were suspended for nearly eighty years (1237-1313): the authority of the classical language and literature was swept away. Even the greatest geniuses condescended to write plays for the entertainment of the people. And some of the Yuan dramas were written by members of the lowest stratum of society. This accounts for the simplicity in the content and style of the dramas of that period.

And then the necessity of educating the barbarian and barbarized population in the great Chinese tradition gave rise to a class of prose literature known as the yen yi (演义) or popular histories. These narratives soon developed into novels of all kinds. For centuries it has been thought that the several great novels of unknown authorship were written under the Mongol dynasty, but my own researches have convinced me that the novel only reached its infantile stage in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that such novels as San Kuo Chih (三国志), Shui Hu Chuan (水浒传) and Hsi You Chi (西游记) had only crude origins in the Mongol period and went through a series of collective and individual revisions until they appeared in their finished form in the sixteenth century.

With the exit of the Mongol conquerors and with the institution of a new and more rigid system of literary examinations under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the authority of the classical tradition was gradually restored. The literati took hold of the dramas and made them classical and therefore unintelligible to the mass of the people. Poetry and prose both moved towards a classical revival. The cries of the day were, Back to Tang and Sung, and Back to the Pre-Tang Periods. But the novel alone remained uncontaminated by the reactionary influences and continued to develop itself. While official recognition and literary honors continued to be eagerly coveted by the literary class, the immense popularity of the novel was also a sufficiently powerful inducement to tempt gifted authors to undertake this despised branch of literature. It is significant to note that practically all the novels written under the Ming dynasty were anonymous and that it was not until the Manchu dynasty that authors allowed real names to be attached to novels.

The last four centuries have been very productive in novels. Of the hundreds of novels that have been preserved and are being reprinted in numberless cheap editions, many are of little or no literary value. But the best of them, such as the Shui Hu Chuan, Hsi You Chi, Ju Lin Wai Shi (儒林外史 The Literati ), Hung Lou Meng (红楼梦 Dream of the Red Chamber ), and a few others, can certainly be ranked among the world's greatest masterpieces. Near the end of the Manchu dynasty, a number of social novels were produced, modelled more or less after the fashion of The Literati , a realistic and satirical novel written in the middle of the eighteenth century. Aside from the effects of their outspoken attacks on Chinese officialdom, these modern novels are significant from the fact that, while they were all written in the mandarin dialect, their authors were all Southerners to whom the Northern and Middle dialects were not at all native. This fact shows the tremendous educative effects of the great novels which have in the course of a few centuries succeeded in standardizing the national language and have been its greatest teachers and propagandists.

From the above account, it is clear that spoken Chinese as represented by the mandarin dialects is well qualified to become the national language of China. In the first place, it is the most widely spoken language in the country. In the second place, it has produced a vast amount of literature, a literature more extensive and varied than any modern European language ever possessed at the time of its establishment as a national language. It seems incredible that a language of such vitality and of so wide a currency should have had to wait so long before it was ever thought of as a possible substitute for the long dead classical language. But the explanation is really simple. The authority of the classical language and literature has been truly too

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