"The Legend of Children's Heroes" is a long vernacular novel printed in the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty. The author Wenkang, Fei Moshi, the word Tiexian, calls himself "Yanbei idler", and is a person with red flags in Manchuria. His grandfather was Jin Bao, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty, who was "incomparably prosperous". Wenkang himself was an official, once served as the prefect of Huizhou, and was reappointed as the minister in Tibet after Ding Wei, but he failed to do so due to illness. Later, due to the disgrace of his children and grandchildren, he lost all his family property, and his evening situation was embarrassing, and he had no long things except pen and ink. So, he wrote a book and wrote "The Biography of Children's Heroes". The plot design of "The Legend of Children's Heroes" is exactly the opposite of the author's own family experience - the former has gone from poverty to prosperity and prosperity, and the latter has gone from prosperity to decline. However, some scholars believe that Wen Kang's writing of "The Biography of Children's Heroes" is actually his own saying that Mei quenches his thirst and paints cakes to satisfy his hunger, trying to use fantasy to fulfill his dream of wealth and "mending the sky".
Probably because "The Legend of Children's Heroes" contains entertainment elements such as "Jianghu Hawkers" and "Children's Marriage", and the work chooses the vivid and lively form of commentary, which is popular with the public, so once the book came out, it was widely circulated, not only attracted by many readers and businesses, but also influenced drama, opera, film and television and other artistic styles, and its various interceptions and adaptations have continued to this day. However, for "The Legend of Children's Heroes", Lu Xun is clearly not optimistic. Although his "Chinese Novel History Strategy: Chivalrous Novels and Public Cases of the Qing Dynasty" talks about this work, it focuses on following the clues of history to introduce the author, version, ability, sequel and storyline. For example, when discussing the creative tendency of "The Legend of Children's Heroes", Lu Xun compared it with "Dream of Red Mansions", arguing that the author Wenkang "has fallen in glory, has a sense of sorrow, and writes a word, and his situation is quite similar to Cao Xueqin's." However, he is realistic, self-described, this is an ideal, and he is narrated for him, and his experience is different, and his achievements are very different. That is to say, in Lu Xun's view, although Wenkang and Cao Xueqin were both poor and angry in their later years, their ideological realms and creative attitudes were very different. Cao Xueqin is realistic and faces the bleakness, while Wenkang avoids reality and indulges in illusion. This determines that the overall achievements of "The Legend of Children's Heroes" cannot be compared with "Dream of Red Mansions".
It is worth noting that unlike Lu Xun's opinion, Zhou Zuoren likes "The Legend of Children's Heroes" very much. For this reason, he gave some positive comments to this work. In the article "The Biography of Children's Heroes" published in Shibao on May 30, 1939, Zhou Zuoren defended the title of the book:
I read "The Legend of Children's Heroes" more than 30 years ago, and I recently reread it and think it is really well written...... If you want to talk about the story to oppose the imperial examination, naturally no one can match it except for "The Outer History of Confucianism", but if you want to enter the prime minister, and you also want to enter the temple, you have to push "Yesu Exposed" to be elected. The author of "The Legend of Children's Heroes" just wanted to point to Hanlin, and at that time I was afraid that it was normal feelings, and it was not necessarily corrupt in the novel.
The evaluation is similar or even word-for-word, and has since appeared in the author's reading essay on the same topic published in 1949 and in "Miscellaneous Conversations on Old Novels" published in 1961. It can be seen that the love and appreciation of "The Legend of Children's Heroes" has almost run through Zhou Zuoren's life.
In the face of the same work, different readers have different opinions and mixed reviews, which is originally a normal phenomenon of literary reading. It's just that once this normal phenomenon appears between the Zhou brothers, who are also famous writers and scholars, it has a special and extraordinary significance—through its existence, we can not only find the obvious differences and great differences between Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren in terms of literary concepts and aesthetic attitudes, but also finally be able to perceive and appreciate the two completely different reading paradigms and criticism paths that occur in the process of literary acceptance, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.
Lu Xun has always advocated that literature is life. He created literary works with the aim of changing the fundamental nature of the nation, and although he saw the "Qing Confucianism" every time he saw it, he was not academic for the sake of scholarship, but at the same time "finding a clue from the chaotic works", he consciously placed it in the category of history—Lu Xun often reminded people to read history, especially the miscellaneous records of wild history. With this purpose in mind, Lu Xun read and evaluated ancient novels, attaching great importance to their true character, including the truth of the subject and the truth of the object. Because only by getting rid of the true writing of "concealment" and "deception" can it be possible for readers to learn from history and gain enlightenment. It is precisely from the scale of truth that Lu Xun praised "Dream of Red Mansions" for "daring to describe truthfully and without embellishment" and "the narration is true, and it is precisely because of realism that it turns into freshness." It is also based on the real scale that Lu Xun doesn't like "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" so much, and thinks that its character creation is quite lacking, such as "wanting to show Liu Bei's strength and pseudonym, and Zhuge Zhuge is wise and close to demons". Understanding this, we can also understand why Lu Xun is not optimistic about "The Legend of Children's Heroes": Wenkang's subjective intention to blindly wander in the air and the description of characters based on concepts are exactly contrary to Lu Xun's advocating real artistic scale. From this, it can be asserted that Lu Xun examined many classical novels with an elite, WTO accession and strict literary vision. The greatest advantage of this kind of gaze is that through the suppression and selection of works, the position of classics and the elevation of art are established, which is conducive to the aesthetic improvement and literary development of a nation. And the price it pays is often that the partial merits of some second- and third-rate works are annihilated because of their overall lack of attention.
Compared with Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren is a more contradictory and complex existence. In his literature and even in his concept of life, he often sees the conflicts and entanglements between "hooligan ghosts" and "gentleman ghosts", "cross streets" and "ivory towers". However, if we summarize its overall spiritual direction and life tone as "fighter" and then "hermit". At the turn of the twenties and thirties of the last century, with the intensification of social darkness, Zhou Zuoren began to doubt the practical use of literature, advocated "reading books behind closed doors", and then advocated "taking pleasure in the busy, having fun in the midst of suffering", removing the atmosphere of "impetuousness", and engaging in writing and appreciation with a "leisurely" and "interesting" mentality. And all of this naturally soaks into his browsing and commenting on classical Chinese novels.
Zhou Zuoren used what he called "common sense views" or "ordinary people's readings" (see Zhou Zuoren's "Dream of Red Mansions" at the end of 1949) to read and comment on "The Legend of Children's Heroes". And this kind of "view" or "reading" has been used by Zhou Zuoren in "The Biography of Children and Heroes", and then it has shown its own subtlety: it invisibly liberates the commentator from the identity of an expert and the "profound" inertia, so that he has a "normal mind", and then can naturally avoid the essence and finality of the work in the unrestrained narration, and pay more attention to the parts and details that attract and move him, so that the potential value of the work has been three-dimensional. Diverse and in-depth elucidation. Of course, it is not without risk to read and evaluate classical novels in this way, and one of the prominent problems is that if the commentator is originally unclear and blindly believes in the reins, then on the road of art appreciation, it is inevitable that he will only see the trees and not the forest, and even confuse the truth with partial generalizations and draw some conclusions that are not so in line with reality. As far as Zhou Zuoren is concerned, he has repeatedly expressed his good impression of "The Legend of Children's Heroes", "Mirror Flowers", "Fengshen Bang" and the like, respecting them as the best works of classical Chinese novels, and the crux of it is here?
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