Professor Zhang Peifeng of the Department of Chinese of Nankai University
Essays on Rong Zhai, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, March 1998
Song Ren Hongmai's "Rong Zhai Continuation" Volume II "Tang Poetry Without Concealment" is said to be "Tang people's song poems, their previous lives and current events, straight words sent, slightly no avoidance", and "today's poets do not dare" Yunyun, quite a lot of citations, some people also extended it, suggesting that Song poetry is more "hidden", so Song poetry is not as good as Tang poetry. Is Tang poetry really unabashed and Song poetry more secretive? One need only look at the real historical documents to see that this claim is simply not valid.
Take the well-known model of "Tang poetry without concealment" - Bai Juyi's "Long Hate Song", which certainly describes an unbearable past in the history of the Tang Dynasty - the chaos of An Shi, and the poem also implicitly rebukes Tang Xuanzong's heavy color and misleading the country, but in general, the so-called "Li Yang love" is still more sympathetic than critical, and the end of the article "in heaven is a bird with wings, and in the earth is willing to be a branch" is proof. More importantly, it is in some of the most critical places, just "avoided"! For example, the opening paragraph says that Yang Guifei is "raised in a deep boudoir and unknown", which is actually a lie. There are a large number of historical materials that can prove that Yang Guifei was originally the daughter-in-law of Tang Xuanzong, and she was almost snatched by him, so this "love" is really incest, and it is really unbearable for the "Heavenly Son" to do such things. But can we see it in "The Long Hate Song"? These places are precisely obscured by the poet with vague verses.
Let's talk about Song Shi. Some of the poems that the So-called Song people "did not dare" are thrilling to read today. Jiang Duanyou's "Beef Crispy Line" directly rebuked those who offered beef pastry to The eunuch Liang Shicheng of the Huizong Dynasty: "There are guests and guest officials Chang'an, and the beef crisp is personally fried. Double the road galloping to the Shaoshi Mansion, looking forward to the dust and wanting to welcome Guixuan. Shou Yan did not have to come out, and there were already people who took the first place. It is more than this, and Tai Yan looks at Chu Yiran..." The directness and ruthlessness of this kind of exposure and flogging even exceeds Du Fu's "Li Ren Xing". The following is a great twist and sublimation of the poetry, all of which are the words of the gatekeeper, but it is like a scoop of cold water poured on the head of the devotee. Only to hear the gatekeeper stop drinking: "You don't have to take out that little thing, there are already people in the first place, and there are twice as many as you!" Mr. Qian Zhongshu's "Selected Notes on Song Poems" selects this poem, because through a small scene, it exposes the darkness and corruption of the official field from top to bottom in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty, and also reveals the real reason why the superficially prosperous and powerful Northern Song Dynasty suddenly collapsed.
In addition, the reflections of some poets in the early Southern Song Dynasty on the demise of the Northern Song Dynasty can not be described as profound. For example, Zhang Yuangan's "After the Devastation of the Army, The Flower Stone Rice Sorghum First" in Zhang Yuangan's "Climbing the Rainbow Pavilion" attacked the reality that the imperial court collected flowers and stones in the Jiangnan area at the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, which made people's hearts scattered and the people's grievances boiling. Liu Ziyi's "Twenty Chronicles of Beijing" is an outstanding group of poems that reflect on the history of the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, and its seventh poem issues an angry rebuke to the wrong country and the magnates and even the emperor: "The empty mourning overturns the Ding Dynasty and the previous dynasty, and the bones of the decaying world are not sold!" Night Moon Pond Tai Wang Fu House, Spring Breeze Yangliu Taishi Bridge. It should be said that these works, whether ideological or artistic, are superior, and the "direct words and letters" alone are no less than those works of the so-called "Sheng Tang".
Speaking more deeply, most of the Song Dynasty scholars adhered to Su Shi's attitude of "taking the way to save the time as the virtuous, and taking the offense as the loyalty" (Su Shi's "Collection of Residents") as su Shi's attitude toward life, and actively participated in the current politics and did not shy away from expressing their positions. It was the relatively clear political environment of the Song Dynasty for most of the time that made the Song Dynasty scholars often use poetry to reflect social problems, and even directly rebuked the courtiers and emperors. This can be proved by the many poems in Mr. Qian Zhongshu's Selected Notes on Song Poems. Many people say that the selection of "Selected Notes on Song Poems" is not very good, and it seems to be a "public theory". However, I think that the selection of "Selected Notes on Song Poems" is very good, and it has a unique eye. Mr. Qian's attention to reality and deep reflections on life are included.
Selected Notes on Song Poems, Sanlian Bookstore, October 2019
Some people may think that I am advocating Song poetry and demeaning Tang poetry. Non also! That's not my point. My point is very clear: the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty both lasted for about three hundred years, during which so many poets and poems emerged, and the development context is also very complicated, how can we draw a sharp line one or the other? In my opinion, although Tang poetry has "no secrets to avoid", but Song poetry also has, just as the Song Dynasty had traitors and mediocre officials, and the Tang Dynasty also had no shortage of people who hid swords in laughter and honey-bellied swords. We cannot make any comparisons between the Tang and Song dynasties according to a number of enumerated examples, and this way of thinking can only lead to conclusions that are partial and complete and unreliable. Taken as a whole, there are many phenomena common to many dynasties, and these common aspects are more worthy of our deep consideration. This is also the profound significance of Mr. Qian Zhongshu's "Tan Yi Lu" that begins with "Poetry Divides the Tang and Song Dynasties". Many people think that Qian Zhongshu is only talking about Tang and Song poetry, but in fact, Mr. Qian is not also talking about the history of Tang and Song Dynasties!
So, why did Hong Mai come to the conclusion in "Rong Zhai Essays" that "Tang poetry has no secrets to avoid" and "today's poets dare not"? Speaking of which, this question is also quite interesting. In fact, we can compare Tang poetry and Song poetry here today, based on the fact that we can see the whole picture of Tang Dynasty poetry and Song Dynasty poetry. And many people often forget this simple fact. In the case of quan tang poetry, the Qing Dynasty has a relatively complete book, and quan song poetry was not available until the 1990s, although they also have various problems, but at least the general picture of a dynasty poetry is still visible. In the same way, the Song Dynasty people could not read all the "Tang poems", and what they could read was nothing more than the "Tang poems" written by people around them or people who had contacts; in the same way, the Song Dynasty people could not read all the "Song poems", because they were in them, so it was difficult to observe comprehensively, which was the profound meaning of Su Shi's "ignorance of the true face of Lushan Mountain, only because he was in this mountain". Hong Mai once compiled books such as "Ten Thousand Tang Poems", indicating that he was more familiar with Tang poetry and collected them with his heart, but did he also have such a comprehensive grasp of Song poetry? There is no evidence to prove this. In other words, his so-called "Tang poems" refer at least to most of the works of the Tang Dynasty, while the "poets of the present" are likely to be only a limited number of Song poems that he can see. For example, the poems cited earlier in this article may not have been read by Hong Mai, which is a very likely thing. To borrow a common phrase, his judgment was made under a very typical "information asymmetry". Judging from his language, he was not comparing "Tang and Song poetry", but later generations replaced "poets of today" with "Song poems" according to Hong Mai's words, and Hong Mai's "partial judgment" instantly became "full name judgment", and the partial generalization was all "generalized"!
In short, in today's scientific prosperity, we must uphold a real scientific attitude, look at any problem, think deeply, comprehensively investigate, and ask a few more whys. We cannot grasp the words of the ancients to "create" something "regular" or something. This kind of "manufacturing" is still a little less as well.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Yan Zhang