I. "Harmony" as the Norm of Classical Chinese Poetic Beauty
Through its long historical development, Chinese classical poetry built up its own aesthetic norms, taking "harmony" (he 和) as the criterion by which poetic beauty was measured and as the very goal of its pursuit. At the level of sound, this classical norm demanded a music of high coordination and balance; in the creation of imagery, it demanded the beauty of yìjìng—the poetic realm in which feeling and scene interfuse; in the expression of subjective sentiment, it demanded a restrained, unobtrusive beauty. From these three requirements together the poem was to attain its overall harmony.
Poetry and music share a common origin, and the ancients often paired them in analogy. Yanzi once used music to illustrate the character of "harmony": "One air, two bodies, three categories, four objects; five notes, six pitches, seven tones, eight winds, nine songs—these are mutually completing. Pure and impure, small and great, short and long, fast and slow, sad and joyful, soft and hard, slow and quick, high and low, in and out, dense and sparse—these are mutually balancing." "Mutually answering, mutually balancing" is multiplicity in unity; it is the realm of "harmony" expressed by "the eight notes are harmoniously concordant; none usurps the order of another."[1]
The pursuit of phonological harmony in poetry reached its peak in the Qi and Liang periods of the Northern and Southern Dynasties. The rise of phonology and the determination of the four tones provided the basis for poetic form's beauty: "Now the five colors enhance each other; the eight tones harmonize one another. This depends on the alternation of yin and yang, on the proper accommodation of each thing. To make the gong and yu notes alternate, the rising and falling tones interchange, then if there is an over-tone in what comes before, there must be a cut-tone in what comes after."[2] Classical Chinese regulated verse requires not only rhyme and parallelism, but pays particular attention to level and oblique tones, in order to create a great harmony of "like sounds answering one another" and "unlike notes following one another." Although Chinese classical poetry excelled at the lyrical, and emphasized that "poetry expresses what is intent within the heart" and "poetry has feeling for its source," in fact the strict prosody and the smoothness of harmonized form constituted a constraint on the expression of feeling, so much so that it became difficult to give voice to surging passion.
Corresponding to the harmonious phonic form was the pursuit of the beauty of poetic realm (yìjìng) in imagery. Zong Baihua holds that "yìjìng is the crystallization of qíng (feeling) and jǐng (scene, image)."[3] Li Zehou goes further to point out that yìjìng "not only contains both 'image' and 'feeling,' but specifically sublates the one-sidedness of its subjective ('feeling') and objective ('image') sides, constituting a complete, unified, independent artistic existence."[4] In the yìjìng of a poem, the subject of the poet has already broken through the rigid distinction between itself and the object, sublating each side's partiality, so that subject and object are fully fused: the subjective feeling thoroughly permeates and is gathered into the image, and the relation between subject and object, between the subjective and the objective, attains the very extreme of harmony.
At the same time, classical poetry took restraint and reserve (含蓄 hánxù) as an important standard of poetic beauty. To be restrained is to express things in measured form. "When pleasure, anger, grief, and joy have not yet been issued forth, that is called the centered (zhōng); when they are issued forth and yet all reach due measure, that is called the harmonious (he)."[5] Therefore "harmony" is at once the form, the content, and the effect of poetic beauty. To take "harmony" as the highest realm of beauty was, substantively, to accord with the social life and the social psychology of antiquity: it reflected a social mentality that pursued inner balance and stability, and it was at the same time a means of purifying and edifying the person, of maintaining the rigid human relations of feudal society and the great unification of imperial power.
The inner world of the human being is not single, however. It includes both stable, balanced, calm and unhurried states of harmony, and unstable, unbalanced states of intense conflict. To take "harmony" as the norm of poetic beauty, on the one hand, allowed Chinese classical poetry to develop, within its own self-defined enclosure, to a summit of perfection. On the other, it inevitably limited the expressive and individualizing functions of poetry, cleaving away an infinitely rich inner world, masking the depth of human nature, and excluding from poetry's territory the storm-and-rain of feeling and the intractable personality. Poetry thus finally became only the calm, balanced art of "grieving without injury, taking pleasure without licentiousness," "resenting without anger." And in turn, it became a fetter on the spiritual freedom of the human being.
II. Early Attempts at Breakthrough: Lu Xun, Huang Zunxian, Hu Shi
Against this norm that took "harmony" for beauty, Lu Xun, well before the Xinhai Revolution, had launched his attack: "Since one speaks of expressing what is intent within the heart, how can such expression be sustained by maintenance?" He held that poetry should give direct utterance to what it believes, "like a raging wave or a violent wind breaking through a stagnant calm."[6] Although Lu Xun's critique focused on the content of old poetry, in fact it attacked, at the level of overall outlook, the classical aesthetic view of beauty-as-harmony. Under the concrete historical conditions of that moment, Lu Xun's call for the "Mara poet" remained only a thin-voiced call; it could not break poetry's long silence. The replacement of the old by the new in poetic norms had to wait upon the appearance of poetry with a wholly new aesthetic bearing before it could become a reality. Whether Huang Zunxian, who earlier advocated a "Poetry Revolution" and held that "my hand writes what my mouth speaks," or Hu Shi, the later "first to write vernacular poetry" with his "Eight Don'ts," both boldly challenged the old poetry but, unfortunately, remained confined to the old aesthetic outlook; their creations were only a piecemeal reform of classical poetry, lacking both thoroughgoing destruction and thoroughgoing construction. The figure who truly, with a distinctive bearing, broke through the classical norms of poetic beauty was Guo Moruo.
III. Guo Moruo's Pursuit of the Sublime
Inspired by the storm-and-stress (kuángbiāo) spirit of the May Fourth era, Guo Moruo of course did not entirely abandon the harmonious beauty of the classics, but he no longer regarded it as the highest realm of beauty. What he pursued was the sublime—the unconstrained eruption of passion. Guo loved Walt Whitman because "Whitman's manner of poetry, which has thrown off all the old conventions, marries entirely with the storm-and-stress spirit of the May Fourth era"; the poet could not but "be moved to his depths by Whitman's vast, free-handed, broadly resounding tones."[7] The grand sweep and the surging passion expressed in his Goddesses (Nǚshén), Xiang Lei, and Nirvana of the Phoenixes can no longer be governed by the classical harmonious beauty. The cry of "Ah, ah! Power, oh! Power, oh! / Painting of power, dance of power, music of power, poetry of power, rhythm of power!" in Standing at the Edge of the Earth and Shouting—with its violent rhythms, its torrential melody—constitutes a "masculine, brutal poetry." This may be called a contempt for, and a transcendence of, the regularities of classical poetic beauty: it is pure eruption of passion, a flying release of power. As the poet himself put it: "I feel, in the end, that only the sense of life at the highest tide is most worth tasting."[7]
In the May Fourth period, Guo Moruo inherited the Western Romantic tradition, no longer holding, in the classical manner, that harmony was the criterion and the end of poetic beauty, but taking instead the feeling and force expressed by the poem as the important standard, and the naked exposure of the self's individuality as the goal. "The literature of life is the literature of individuality"; "that which is given forth—in things, as sound, light, electricity, heat; in human beings, as feeling, impulse, thought, consciousness—the pure expression of feeling, impulse, thought, consciousness is, in the narrow sense, the literature of life."[7] Human individuality is supremely rich; the states of feeling are complex and changeable. This determines, of necessity, the contradiction between rich content and the rigid prosodic form of classical poetry, between rich content and a merely harmonious beauty. Especially at the moment of creative passion, the feeling is precisely not harmonious; on the contrary, it is the very imbalance, the very disharmony, the sharp inner clash of opposites. Such unbalanced, disharmonious feeling cannot be borne by harmonious form. To force passion into harmonious form, to grind down its edges, is to lose its original wild abundance, to lose its world-shaking force and its true face.
IV. Inner Rhythm in Place of External Prosody
To take the free expression of feeling as the goal of poetic creation must necessarily lead both to the abandonment of level and oblique prosody and to an emphasis on inner rhythm. "A poem's own rhythm may be said to be its emotional tone; the verbal patterning of its external form may be said to be its phonic tone. That which has phonic tone need not necessarily be a poem; but we may certainly say that that which has no emotional tone is in no case a poem."[7] Because there exists between poetic rhythm and the form of the poet's emotional movement a relation of "heterogeneous isomorphism," only rhythm, at the sonic level of poetry, can fully express the feeling of the subject. As Susanne Langer puts it: "Basic rhythm is not only the foundation of the organic whole, but also of its overall feeling."[8] The level and oblique tones of classical regulated verse do reinforce the sense of rhythm, but they are themselves not the principal factor in the constitution of rhythm. "The principle of level and oblique tones in regulated verse is only the requirement that the verse not be monotonous. In order not to be monotonous, (i) the level tones and the oblique tones must alternate; (ii) within one couplet, the level and oblique tones must oppose one another; (iii) the level and oblique pattern of the opening line of the next couplet must adhere to that of the answering line of the preceding couplet."[9] The purpose, precisely, is to create a single whole of harmonious beauty. The extreme of harmonious beauty makes "double-consonants intervening between characters" and "each separate rhyme intermixed in lines" prohibitions for the regulated verse,[10] in the one-sided pursuit of the musical beauty of "phonic tones being entirely distinct within the compass of a single line."[2] An obsession with phonic harmony cannot but cover over, indeed suffocate, the genuine feeling of poetry by formal beauty. Guo Moruo holds that "the lyric poem is the direct writing of emotion," praises the "naked beauty" of the poem, and emphasizes the substitution of poetry's inner rhythm for external phonic patterning. Substantively, this is precisely a challenge to classical harmonious beauty, a breakthrough of the classical concept of poetic beauty—greatly enriching the content of poetic emotional expression and intensifying the force of its expression.
V. Passion Breaking Through Imagery
Another characteristic of Guo Moruo's May Fourth-period poetic creation is the imbalance between subjective passion and objective scene. Passionate impulse often left the poet too pressed to seek out a fitting object, too pressed to bury his feeling without trace within imagery; instead the subjective passion breaks through the image and is directly spurted forth. So, in Nirvana of the Phoenixes, the lines that are again and again repeated as a sustained cry—"Fire is you! / Fire is me! / Fire is 'him'! / Fire is fire!"—these have a feeling that already overruns the bounds of what imagery can contain. Here the classical poetic realm in which subject and object harmonize is destroyed; and the purity of personality and the storm-spirit of the age that the directly bared passion manifests constitute a wholly new realm utterly different from the classical harmonious beauty. By the burning of pure passion, the beauty of individuality is displayed; and herein lies the distinctive charm of Guo Moruo's poetry.
To be sure, even as far back as the Ming dynasty, Li Zhi's "doctrine of the childlike heart" (tóngxīn shuō), and the Gong'an School's "doctrine of natural spirit" (xìnglíng shuō), had already come into conflict with the classical poetic norm of "harmony"; the works of Gong Zizhen, the famous Qing-dynasty poet who held that "poetry and person should be one," although praised as "like a comet sweeping across the night sky, like a storm rolling over the earth, breaking through traditional thought and traditional manner of writing," as "true poetry of distinctive countenance among Qing poetry,"[11] could not yet, under the concrete historical conditions of that time, break through the norms of classical poetic beauty. The fusion-and-collision of East and West was not yet sufficient; it could not yet stir up a tidal-wave passion of the age, could not yet set off the great upheaval of the May Fourth period. To this must be added the constraint of classical Chinese (wényán) and the weight of inherited ideas. The age of Guo Moruo, however, was an age of the liberation of the individual; it was an age suffused with Romantic passion; the collision of Chinese and Western cultures had, for the first time, fissured the closed traditional culture of the ancient nation and provided the writer with the opportunity to draw directly upon foreign literary currents and creative experience. Only in such a specific period was a thoroughgoing transformation of aesthetic outlook possible. The distinctive bearing of Guo Moruo's poetry became not only the volcano-mouth of his own passion but also the volcano-mouth of the passion of his age.
VI. The Naked Self and the "Idol-Breaker"
In Guo Moruo's poetry, what we see is no longer the feeling, polished and disedged, of "grieving without injury, taking pleasure without licentiousness," but rather an unrestrained, uninhibited venting—"the throbbing of life at its root, the cry of the soul at its core."[12] In the white heat of the creative impulse, the poet could neither manage to weave nor cared to weave the implicit, restrained beauty of poetic sentiment. He employs an "extreme of freedom, an extreme of self-mastery" to give vent to his passion—often, indeed, to passion magnified many times over. So in "Heavenly Hound" (Tiāngǒu): "I am a heavenly hound! / I have swallowed the moon, / I have swallowed the sun, / I have swallowed all the stars, / I have swallowed the whole universe, / and I have become myself!"—lines that show not a trace of concealment, and still less of reserve. The poet lays bare in his work the raging, restless self of his inner being. In classical Chinese poetry there is of course no lack of breadth and grandeur, but there is no Guo Moruo's audacity-bordering-on-extravagance of imagination, nor his blazing, externalized emotion. Whether in the creation of imagery or in the expression of feeling, in the exposure of his individuality, Guo Moruo's major works leap far from elegance and refinement, far from the equilibrium of harmonious beauty, and present a wild and grand new vision. In "Crematorium," Guo curses his own self: "This neck of mine, this head of mine—it is just like the furnace of a crematorium! / My soul has long since been burnt to death!" Newly arrived at the Shanghai Bund, the poet grieves, gasps, rages, and curses at the "loitering corpses, the wantonly noisy flesh," at the "streets full of coffins, the streets full of caskets." With his unrestrained description of, and counter-strike against, the ugly, he tears open the surface harmony of society and at the same time runs counter to the sacred maxim of "grieving without injury, taking pleasure without licentiousness"—breaking through the bounds of classical harmonious beauty.
Compared with Guo Moruo's poetry, which is full of indignation and the passion of destruction, Qu Yuan's Li Sao, Du Fu's "Three Officials" and "Three Departures," even Ma Liuquan's "Lament of Selling One's Son"—of which Xie Zhen said, "to read it once is to change countenance; to read it twice is to weep; to read it three times is to be heartbroken"—still belong to a poetry of resentment without sufficient anger. Resentment-without-anger is, after all, a feeling restrained by reason; it must finally proceed from regulated disharmony toward reconciliation. Anger, by contrast, is feeling released from control: it seeks the destruction of the very harmony that maintains the old order.
The challenge to tradition, the challenge to classical poetic norms, is expressed even more directly and clearly in "I Am an Idolator": "… I worship the spirit of creation, worship power, worship blood, worship the heart; I worship bombs, worship sorrow, worship destruction. I worship the idol-breaker; I worship myself: for I, too, am an idol-breaker!" Though this is no rational declaration but the spurting forth of passion at its impulse, it fully expresses the poet's contempt for traditional aesthetic norms and his clashing attitude toward traditional beauty. The poet is indeed an idol-breaker; what he breaks is not only the institutions, ideologies, and ethics of feudal society—he simultaneously breaks through the norms of classical poetic beauty, vastly enlarging the aesthetic horizon of poetry, freeing it from its constricted corner, and bringing it, by way of a wholly new mode of aesthetic contemplation, into a vast new world.
VII. May Fourth as the Age of the Sublime
Beauty is the symbol of the freedom of the soul. Guo Moruo's poetry, in breaking through the constraints of tradition, brought enormous possibilities for the free and self-mastering expression of the soul. His transcendence of classical poetic norms opened up new pathways for the creation of a brilliant and varied beauty.
The May Fourth period was a period of surging social currents and great transformation of thought. The clash of Eastern and Western thought and civilization, and the clash among the classes and strata of society, broke for the first time the frozen, unchanging state of social psychology; they broke the old patterns of thought, the old habits of perception, the old systems of value. This is what supplied both the possibility and the necessity for the breakthrough of aesthetic outlook and of poetic norm. The awakening of the individual, in its turn, induced and intensified the contradictions between individual and social collective, between ideal and reality, even between the awakening reason of the individual self and the inherited "ghost-spirit" of tradition—setting off a churning passion of the age. This was already a society in the unbalanced, inharmonious pangs of fission; it demanded that the poet face it and reflect it. The inner world of the human being was, likewise, in a state of unstable and inharmonious intercrossing of contradictions and excited emotions, pressing all the more urgently upon the poet to give voice to it, to express it. Guo Moruo's broad contact with Western literature, and especially with Western Romantic literature, ignited his admiration and longing for the vast territory of artistic beauty; his accord with the storm-and-stress spirit of May Fourth; his subjective, easily impassioned, daring-to-rebel personality—all this combined finally to make him into a literary giant who opened up an era of poetry.
Wen Yiduo, in his essay "The Spirit of the Age in Goddesses," once gave this evaluation: "To speak of new poetry, only Mr. Guo Moruo's poems deserve the name 'new.' Not only is his work, in artistic terms, the most remote from the old verse and lyric forms; what is most essential is that his spirit is wholly the spirit of the age—the spirit of the twentieth century. Some have said that literary works are the children of the age. Goddesses truly does not unworthily merit the title of a child of the age."[13] Wen Yiduo's evaluation is most apt. That Goddesses is a child of the age—besides the reasons given above—lies also in this: that it broke through the norms of classical poetic beauty with an aesthetic countenance unprecedented in the history of Chinese literature, providing for the development of modern Chinese new poetry an ample freedom.