China and the West

Song, Chunfang. Jin shi ming xi bai zhong. [One hundred well-known modern plays]. [ID D27913].
Erwähnung von Saints and sinners, The liars von Henry Arthur Jones.

Song, Chunfang. Jin shi ming xi bai zhong. [One hundred well-known modern plays]. [ID D27913].
Erwähnung von The silver box, The mob von John Galsworthy.

Song, Chunfang. Jin shi ming xi bai zhong. [One hundred well-known modern plays]. [ID D27913].
Erwähnung von The Madras house von Harley Granville-Barker.

Song, Chunfang. Jin shi ming xi bai zhong. [One hundred well-known modern plays]. [ID D27913].
Erwähnung von The great divide von William Vaughn Moody.

Song, Chunfang. Jin shi ming xi bai zhong. [One hundred well-known modern plays]. [ID D27913].
Erwähnung von My ladies dress von Edward Knoblock.

George Bernard Shaw in China : Allgemein.
Wendi Chen : To many Chinese intellectuals, the public face of George Bernard Shaw corresponded to their elevated image of a socially responsible scholar ; they unconsciously transformed him into a culturally more familiar type of scholar and found in him what modern China needed – a public spokesperson with all the necessary attributes : moral conscience, courage, a sense of justice, and great talent. He was regarded first and foremost as a moralist, whose principal purpose in writing was to serve social causes.
Shaw was already widely known in China as an expert in humor by the time of his visit, as is clear from Chinese journalistic and literary writings produced during that time. Shaw's witticisms and jokes were told and retold in print ; essays exploiting the public craze for 'humor' were numerous.
Since the majority of Chinese writers and artists of the time still came from bourgeois families, they were continually pressured to remold their thinking, - that is, to change their political outlooks and adopt proletarian attitudes – in order to serve the proletariat. The Party urged that they adopt two principles : 1) to go among the broad mass of the people in order to understand and learn from them, and 2) to conscientiously study Marxism-Leninism. Shaw was seen as a bourgeois intellectual who had already experiences ideological remolding by actively participating in various revolutionary activities and seriously studying Marx's Das Kapital. In this respect, Shaw was an exemplary figure for Chinese bourgeois intellectuals.
Armed with Mao's thought, critics first of all assessed Shaw's political outlook. In this respect, Shaw passed the Maoist test.
Mao Zedong's theory of the source of literary creation also strongly influenced Chinese critics' discussions of Shaw, whose advocacy of working-class causes was viewed as the determining condition for his dramatic success.

Kay Li : When Shaw's works were first introduced in to China, he was regarded as a mentor showing the Chinese how to modernize Chinese drama and social life, how to enable China to join an imaginary world civilization or global culture, an integrative single entity that encompassed the world and included all nations and cultures. While Shaw's texts were regard4ed as authoritative, the Chinese intellectuals introducing Shaw's works had no intention of debasing China and elevating the West. His translators made use of the cultural gap between East and West less to widen the geographical distance between the two poles than to draw analogies and create assumed similarities between Shaw's Western world and China.
The young Chinese intellectuals hailed Shaw as a naturalist and a realist who presented 'real life'. Shaw did not present real Chinese life, but the intellectuals felt that he presented real life in a general sense, thus showing their assumption of a global homogeneity.
The call for social reforms made Shaw's realism and didacticism especially attractive.
The young Chinese intellectuals were attracted to the idea of exposing unpleasant social facts and to the form of the problem play, but the kind of social facts exposed had to be social facts relevant to Chinese rather than to English society.
The reception of Shaw's plays in China was in part responsible for a reaction against the importation of Western literature generally. Some intellectuals opposed the importation of Western-style-drama, especially the problem plays, because the problems presented in those plays were not completely relevant to the Chinese situation.
Shaw's plays helped to globalize rather than Westernize modern Chinese drama because the underlying concerns surrounding the introduction of Western drama were to centrifugally enable China to join world drama and to centripetally make use of world drama to develop a Chinese theater that could realistically address the country's social problems.
The young Chinese intellectuals were attracted to Shavian methods such as the discussion play and the problem play and to certain concepts Shaw advocated such as individual will and freedom from family control that echoed the ideology promoted in the Chinese Intellectual Revolution. However, the Chinese found some Shavian issues irrelevant or unimportant, the most notable of these being Shaw's intense advocacy of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, and the Chinese responded to these ideas with little att4ention or understanding. So the Chinese were faced with the dilemma of giving Shaw the power of interpretation, of interpreting Shaw themselves, or of rewriting Shaw.

Zhou Zuoren schreibt über das chinesische Drama in Xin qing nian ; vol. 5, no 5 (Nov. 1918).
"On the constructive side, there is only adopting European-style New Drama. Now there are people who make a fuss over the European style and are afraid to talk about “Westernization”. Actually, transferring the literature, art, and academic studies to our country does not mean to be conquered by another country. It is only that civilized things evolving from the barbaric stage are first discovered in Europe. Therefore we make a leap and bring these things here to save much effort on our part. These things brought to our country become ours, and there is no question of Westernization or not."

Meeting about elementary education in Tianjin.
Cai Yuanpei recommended John Dewey and his educational philosophy.

Notebook 'Reincarnation' by Eugene O'Neill : "Idea for long play – reincarnation – oldest civilization, China 1850 – modern times during war – South Sea Island, 1975 – same crises offering a definite choice of either material success or a step toward higher spiritual plane – Failure in choice entails immediate reincarnation and eternal repetition in life on this plane until spiritual choice is made."

O'Neill, Eugene. Beyond the horizon : a play in three acts. (Provincetown, Mass. : 1918).
http://www.bartleby.com/132/11.html.
ROBERT [Mayo]. "No, I oughtn't. You're trying to wish an eye-for-business on me I don't possess. Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East, which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on—in quest of the secret which is hidden just over there, beyond the horizon ? Suppose I told you that was the one and only reason for my going ?"

Letter from Irving Babbitt to Stuart P. Sherman. (April 1918).
Babbitt wrote that he was 'trying to recover my respect for human nature at present by immersing myself in the sages of the Far East – for the moment Confucius and Mencius. No one ever had a firmer faith in the final triumph of moral causes than these old boys'.

Pound, Ezra. Chinese poetry [ID D29083].
It is because Chinese poetry has certain qualities of vivid presentation; and because certain Chinese poets have been content to set forth their matter without moralizing and without comment that one labours to make a translation, and that I personally am most thankful to the late Ernest Fenollosa for his work in sorting out and gathering many Chinese poems into a form and bulk wherein I can deal with them.
I do not think my views on poetry can be so revolutionary and indecent as some people try to make out, for some months ago I heard Selwyn Image talking of Christmas Carols and praising, in them, the very qualities I and my friends are always insisting on. Selwyn Image belongs to an older and statelier generation and it is not their habit to attack traditional things which they dislike, and for that reason the rather irritating work of revising our poetical canon has been left for my contemporaries, who come in for a fair share of abuse.
I shall not, in this article, attempt any invidious comparisons between English and Chinese poetry. China has produced just as many bad poets as England, just as many dull and plodding moralizers, just as many flaccid and over-ornate versifiers.
By fairly general consent, their greatest poet is Rihaku or "Li Po", who flourished in the eighth century A.D. He was the head of the court office of poetry, and a great 'compiler'. But this last title must not mislead you. In China a 'compiler' is a very different person from a commentator. A compiler does not merely gather together, his chief honour consists in weeding out, and even in revising.
Thus, a part of Rihaku's work consists of old themes rewritten, of a sort of summary of the poetry which had been before him, and this in itself might explain in part the great variety of his work. Nevertheless, when he comes to treat of things of his own time he is no less various and abundant. I confine myself to his work because I can find in it examples of the three qualities of Chinese poetry which I wish now to illustrate.
The first great distinction between Chinese taste and our own is that the Chinese like poetry that they have to think about, and even poetry that they have to puzzle over. This latter taste has occasionally broken out in Europe, notably in twelfth-century Provence and thirteenth-century Tuscany, but it has never held its own for very long.
The following four-line poem of Rihaku's has been prized for twelve centuries in China:
THE JEWEL-STAIRS GRIEVANCE
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And 1 let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
I have never found any occidental who could 'make much' of that poem at one reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, not merely by 'suggestion' but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction. Let us consider what circumstances would be needed to produce just the words of this poem. You can play Conan Doyle if you like.
First, 'jewel-stairs', therefore the scene is in a palace.
Second, 'gauze stockings', therefore a court lady is speaking, not a servant or common person who is in the palace by chance.
Third, 'dew soaks', therefore the lady has been waiting, she has not just come.
Fourth, 'clear autumn with moon showing', therefore the man who has not come cannot excuse himself on the grounds that the evening was unfit for the rendezvous.
Fifth, you ask how do we know she was waiting for a man ? Well, the title calls the poem 'grievance', and for that matter, how do we know what she was waiting for ?
This sort of Chinese poem is probably not unfamiliar to the reader. Nearly every one who has written about Chinese has mentioned the existence of these short, obscure poems. In contrast to them, in most rigorous contrast, we find poems of the greatest vigour and clarity. We find a directness and realism such as we find only in early Saxon verse and in the Poema del Cid, and in Homer, or rather in what Homer would be if he wrote without epithet; for instance, the following war poem. The writer expects his hearers to know that Dai and Etsu are in the south, that En is a bleak north country, and that the 'Wild Goose Gate' is in the far northeast, and the 'Dragon Pen' is in the very opposite corner of the great empire, and probably that the Mongols are attacking the borders of China. Given these simple geographical facts the poem is very forthright in its manner.
The Dai horse, from the south, neighs against the north wind,
The birds of Etsu have no love for En, in the north. Emotion is of habit
Yesterday we went out of the Wild Goose Gate,
To-day from the Dragon Pen.
Surprised. Desert Turmoil. Sea sun.
Flying snow bewilders the barbarian heaven.
Lice swarm like ants over our accoutrements,
Our mind and spirit are on getting forward the feather-silk banners.
Hard fight gets no reward.
Loyalty is difficult to explain.
Who will be sorry for General Rishogu, the swift-moving, Whose white head is lost for this province.
There you have no mellifluous circumlocution, no sentimentalizing of men who have never seen a battlefield and who wouldn't fight if they had to. You have war, campaigning as it has always been, tragedy, hardship, no illusions. There are two other fine war poems which are too long to quote here, one reputed to be by Bunno: a plodding of feet, soldiers living on fern-shoots, generals with outworn horses ; another by Rihaku, supposedly spoken by a sentinel watching over a long-ruined village. There are no walls, there are decaying bones, enduring desolation.
CHINESE POETRY II
There are two other qualities in Chinese poetry which are, I think, little suspected. First, Chinese poetry is full of fairies and fairy lore. Their lore is 'quite Celtic'. I found one tale in a Japanese play; two ghosts come to a priest to be married, or rather he makes a pilgrimage to their tomb and they meet him there. The tale was new to me, but I found that Mr. Yeats had come upon a similar story among the people of Aran. The desire to be taken away by the fairies, the idea of souls flying with the sea-birds, and many other things recently made familiar to us by the Celtic school, crop up in one’s Chinese reading and are so familiar and so well known to us that they seem, often, not worth translating.
If the reader detests fairies and prefers human poetry, then that also can be found in Chinese. Perhaps the most interesting form of modern poetry is to be found in Browning's 'Men and Women'. This kind of poem, which reaches its climax in his unreadable 'Sordello', and is most popular in such poems as 'Pictor Ignotus', or the 'Epistle of Karshish', or 'Cleon', has had a curious history in the west. You may say it begins in Ovid's 'Heroides', which purport to be letters written between Helen and Paris or by Oenone and other distinguished persons of classical pseudo-history; or you may find an earlier example in Theocritus' Idyl of the woman spinning at her sombre and magic wheel. From Ovid to Browning this sort of poem was very much neglected. It is interesting to find, in eighth-century China, a poem which might have been slipped into Browning's work without causing any surprise save by its simplicity and its naive beauty.
THE RIVER-MERCHANTS WIFE (A LETTER)
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo-stilts, playing horse.
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Cho-kan ;
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married you, My Lord,
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, 1 looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with your dust Forever, and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look-out ?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies. And you were gone for five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet, by the gate, when you were departing. Now the moss is grown there ; the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away.
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August,
Over the grass in the west garden.
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang
Please let me know beforehand And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-sa.
I can add nothing, and it would be an impertinence for me to thrust in remarks about the gracious simplicity and completeness of the poem.
There is another sort of completeness in Chinese. Especially in their poems of nature and of scenery they seem to excel western writers, both when they speak of their sympathy with the emotions of nature and when they describe natural things.
For instance, when they speak of mountainous crags with the trees clinging head downward, or of a mountain pool where the flying birds are reflected, and
Lie as if on a screen,
as says Rihaku.
The scenes out of the marvellous Chinese painting rise again and again in his poems, but one cannot discuss a whole literature, or even all of one man’s work-in a single essay.

Pound, Ezra. Books current : One hundred and seventy Chinese poems by Arthur Waley [ID D8884]. In : Future 2 (1918). [Review].
The book is certainly the fullest illustration of Chinese poetic subject matter available in English. There are passages undeniably beautiful. The one lack is the sense of intensity which should hold the reader's attention.

Letter from Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson ; 20 Febr. (1918). [Classic anthology].
"I am, for the time being, bored to death with being any kind of an editor. I desire to go on with my long poem ; and like the Duke of Chang, I desire to hear the music of a lost dynasty."

Eliot, T.S. A note on Ezra Pound. In : To-day ; no 4 (1918).
Cathay is an absolutely objective work ; it depends upon nothing but its own value. Here, and in the 'Wayfarer' [sic], Mr. Pound shows a matured genius. He has gained in ability to set down an emotion, using images with greater austerity, only for their contribution to the total effect. Nothing could owe less to exotic charm, indeed, than 'The Bowmen of Shu' or 'The River-Merchant's Wife.

Letter from Amy Lowell to Harriet Monroe, 19 June, 1918.
"I have made a discovery which I have never before seen mentioned in any Occidental book on Chinese poetry, but which, I think must be well known in Chinese literature ; namely, that the roots of the characters are the things which give the poetry its overtones, taking the place of adjectives and imaginary writing with us. One cannot translate a poem into anything like the proper spirit, taking the character meaning alone. It is necessary in every case to go to the root of a character, and that will give the key to why that particular word is used and not some other which means the same thing when exactly translated. Mrs. Ayscough quite agrees with me in this. This is the key to the situation, and it is the hunting of these roots that she is now doing."
Letter from Florence Ayscough to Amy Lowell, 24 July, 1918.
"My reason for suggesting that you put in the little hint of our discovery about the roots is simply and solely to knock a hole in Ezra Pound's translations ; he having got his things entirely from Professor Fenelosa [sic], they were not Chinese in the first place, and Heaven knows how many hands they went through between the original Chinese and Professor Fenelosa's [sic] Japanese original. In the second place, Ezra has elaborated on these until, although they are excellent poems, they are not translations of the Chinese poets."

Percy Thomas Etherton ist britischer Konsul in Kashgar (Xinjiang).

Stevens, Wallace. Le monocle de mon oncle. In : Others ; vol. 5, no 1 (Dec. 1918).
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/1309273668888629.pdf.
III
Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese
Sat tittivating by their mountain pools
Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?
I shall not play the flat historic scale.
You know how Utamaro's beauties sought
The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?
Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

Stevens, Wallace. Le monocle de mon oncle [ID D30308].
III
Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese
Sat tittivating by their mountain pools
Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?
I shall not play the flat historic scale.
You know how Utamaro's beauties sought
The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?
Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

Exhibitions Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Old Chinese paintings.
Chinese ceramics.