标题: 1949.8 中国的画笔 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-5-31 03:11 标题: 1949.8 中国的画笔 The Chinese Brush
American poet and playwright, WITTER BYNNERtraveled widely in the Orient in the golden days of security, and there developed a thoughtful interest in Chinese poetry, painting, and jades. His translation, with Dr. Kiang Kang-hu, of the poems included in The jade Mountain (1929) was the first volume of Chinese verse to be translated in full by an American poet. Mr. Bynner’s most recent books include The Way of Life According to Laotzu (1944) and Take Away the Darkness (1947),
By Witter Bynner
AUGUST 1949 ISSUE
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by WITTER BYNNER
1
SOON after my arrival in the Orient in 1917, I , asked a Chinese friend why he preferred writings on his walls to paintings, of which he apparently owned none and this at a time when good originals, as well as almost equally desirable copies, were often found by a watchful seeker with small means. “In this one poem on my wall,”he answered, “there are several paintings.” He referred not only, as I thought then, to scenes or figures or actions visualized through the poem. I believe now that he referred quite as much, or even more, to details of brushwork combined, like parts of a painting, in the whole composition.
It is no wonder then that Chinese calligraphy — whether used merely for signature and date and place or more fully for record, comment, homily, poetry, philosophy — should have become an inherent part of paintings for its own sake, its own forms, its placing and brushwork, as well as to convey informational data or literary significance. In brush strokes almost always seeming to be part and parcel of the painting, there are countless such inscriptions as “Painted at his home, Three Friends, in the summertime.” There are inscriptions also by copyists, disciples, admirers: —
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“Lung Yu’s brush was quick as a wind, flowing as a cloud —
I have had him in mind and tried to be like him.”
“Copied from the Sung painting, with a dragonfly added.”
Bound into a book of small landscapes and fragments attributed to Wang Men are separate pages of script telling how that painter, like Lung Yu’s follower, continued not slavishly but creatively the tradition and spirit of the predecessor: —
“Wang Men studied with Li Kao-tze and drew trees as vigorous as spears in a camp, and rocks not dead but changing with life. Though Wang learned the ancient manner, he was able to adapt it, using only its virtues.”
This reverence for the work of past masters by no means precluded new zest and new inspiration. On a four-panel screen of “Pines and Storks” Ch’ang Hsung, for example, has versified: —
“Drunk with my subject, I have painted hard enough
To shake the roots of the Five Sacred Mountains.”
Such balance and fitness between painting and writing are not customary in the Occident. Here a signature is often a blemish. It rarely participates in the composition but seems to have been perfunctorily added, and in most cases badly written, at the lower corner of the canvas like a scrawl at the end of a business letter. Occasionally Western artists have used careful lettering, such as the Holbeins’, or have signed their work with a decorative monogram, such as Dürer’s. Whistler, under the spell of Japanese charm, used for signature his butterfly symbol — which, however, was an alighting decoration, a butterfly entering from outside rather than a bud stemming from the design or a bird echoing it.
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Chinese custom is different and here is an extreme instance. In my private collection of paintings is a scroll attributed to Huang Shen (c.1720-1760), “Two Fishermen” is drawn with a minimum of broad, bold strokes. Above them the artist has affixed his brush name, Ying-piao, in strokes so similarly broad and bold that they less resemble writing than they do his wen and the gourd he always carried in his sash. The ideographs for wen and gourd, which were the actual characters of his painting name, are so roughened in this instance to conform with the style of the painting that they long baffled a Chinese friend who tried to decipher them for me and thought them possibly but a whimsical echo of strokes used in the figures of the fishermen.
One notes that in lama paintings, which crowd the space full of line and color, a signature — even if allowed by ecclesiastical regulation — could find no resting place, no perch, no air to breathe; and it is possible that in the usual solidity of Western painting not enough air is left for lettering.
Or does our difficulty arise from the nature of the letters themselves? Is it because our script, our print, is not beautiful? Unfamiliar letter-strokes seen apart from knowledge of their meaning may be more directly felt as design than familiar letterstrokes in which knowledge of meaning takes precedence. But that is not the point here. The Chinese, conscious of what their ideographs signify, are almost equally conscious of the graphic form with which the meaning comes through. Though Germany’s Gothic type has its chunky charm, there is no doubt that in Oriental characters lines and spaces are more agreeably related for the aesthetic eye than in any pattern of Western lettering. The Chinese ideograph is within itself, like the Egyptian hieroglyph, a compounded pictorial design. Many of the radical strokes joined into Chinese characters originated as rough illustrations or symbols, so that a character which combines such radicals is a graphic composition beyond any likeness to Western script, is literally “significant form.”
Lettering used by a Chinese artist is a part of his own skill: his signature and whatever else he inscribes on his scroll usually prove him to be as individual a creator in his handwriting as in his painting. He has not used a piece of type fixed by some other man; he has used personal calligraphy. I wonder again if our own artists might not also have been calligraphers had the forms of our script paralleled, as do Chinese characters, the directions of the creative brush, so that handwriting might have been in itself a worthy and highly esteemed art.
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2
FROM the very beginning of Oriental calligraphy, when ideographs were so different from those now in use that only the most learned scholars can still read them, the Chinese have deeply reverenced the art. The eminent T’ang scholar, poet, and calligrapher Han Yü (768-824) was prompted to write his famous Poem on the Stone Drums by an ink rubbing taken from one of the oldest known stone carvings in China, the ten stone drums which had been made and engraved with poems during the reign of the Chou Emperor Hsüan Wang (827-782 B.C.). Three of the drums still exist and were lately in the Confucian temple at Peking, together with replicas of the other seven. Han Yü tells the story: —
“Chang handed me this rubbing, from the stone drums,
Beseeching me to write a poem on the stone drums.
Tu Fu has gone. Li Po is dead.
What can my poor talent do for the stone drums?”
Then he tells of their origin, of the Emperor’s great concourse and hunt which they celebrated, and continues; —
“The event was recorded, to inform new generations.
Cut out of jutting cliffs, these drums made of stone —
On which poets and craftsmen, all of the first order,
Had indited and chiseled — were set in the deep mountains. . . .
Time has not yet vanquished the beauty of these letters
Looking like sharp daggers that pierce live crocodiles,
Like phoenix-mates dancing, like angels hovering down,
Like trees of jade and coral with interlocking branches,
Like golden cord and iron chain tied tight together,
Like incense tripods flung in the sea, like dragons mounting heaven.”
The poet laments the fact that
“Historians, gathering ancient poems, forgot to gather these,”
and recounts
“How a friend of mine, then at the western camp,
Offered to assist me in removing these old relies.
I bathed and changed, then made my plea to the college president
And urged on him the rareness of these most precious things.
They could be wrapped in rugs, be packed and sent in boxes
And carried on only a few camels: ten stone drums. . . .
We could scour the moss, pick out the dirt, restore the original surface
And lodge them in a fitting and secure place forever. . . .
But government officials grow fixed in their ways
And never will initiate beyond old precedent;
So herdboys strike the drums for fire, cows polish horns on them,
With no one to handle them reverentially.
Still aging and decaying, soon they may be effaced.
But now, eight dynasties after the Chou and all the wars over,
Why should there be nobody caring for these drums? ”
Somebody eventually cared enough to save three of them, still fairly whole; and I judge that on the replicas of the other seven the fragmentary poems and the writing thereof were reproduced from old ink rubbings. Thus, for devout Orientals, the script which Han Yü admired nearly two thousand years after it had been written has sounded its drumbeat from stone, and the echo of it from paper, through another thousand years.
A slightly later T’ang poet, Li Shang-yin (813— 858), in his poem The Han Monument, tells a story about lettering on stone designed by this same Han Yü, who died when Li was eleven years old. Emperor Hsien Tsung’s premier, P’ai Tu, had written an account of the overthrow of the Huai-hsi rebels, and Han Yü, who was P’ai Tu’s secretary, was appointed to inscribe the exploit on a monument. After the monument had been installed, the Emperor, having sent envoys to India to import Buddhistic doctrines, was preparing to receive a relic, a bone of the Buddha. Han Yü, resisting imposition of a religion unsuited to China, maintained that, whatever virtue might have resided in the Buddha, there could be none in his bone which, besides, might be really that of a dog or a sheep, whereupon the Emperor angrily exiled the prolestant. The monument was then thrown down and another, with an inferior inscription, set up in its place.
Here, in part, is Li Shang-yin’s account of the original inscription, its ordering, its accomplishment, its destruction: —
“The Emperor said: ‘To you, Tu, should go the highest honor
And your secretary, Yü, should write the record of it!’ . . .
When Yü had bowed his head, he leapt and danced, saying:
‘Historical writings on stone and metal are my especial art :
And, since I know the finest brushwork of the old masters,
My duty in this instance is more than merely official
And I should be at fault if I modestly declined.’
The Emperor, on hearing this, nodded many times.
Yü retired and fasted and then, in a narrow workroom,
His great brush thick with ink as with drops of rain,
Chose characters like those in The Canons of Yao and Hsun,
A style like that in the ancient poems. Ch’ing-miao and Sheng-min,
And soon the description was ready on a sheet of paper.
In the morning he laid it, with a how, on the purple stairs. . . .
The tablet was thirty feet high, the characters large as dippers;
It was set on a sacred tortoise, its columns flanked with dragons. . . .
But jealousy entered and malice, and reached the emperor —
So that a rope a hundred feet long pulled the great slab down
And coarse sand and small stones ground away its face.
But literature endures, like the universal spirit,
And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.
The T’aug plate, the Confucian tripod, are eternal things
Not because of their fashioning but because of their inscriptions.”
3
WHEN I was in China the second time, twentylive years ago, I met several men whose skill in handwriting was an honored distinction and whose scrolls of lettering were as treasured as paintings, line of these men, a physician in the native city of Shanghai, whose grand fat her had been a calligrapher even more noted, offered through an English-speaking son to show me their family collection of paintings. After entering the house and sitting to our tea, I could feel the shadows and hear the breath of women who, though in other rooms, were yet present, peering through some crevice while Dr. Liu Chen-tung unrolled and hung landscapes, figure paintings, portraits. I remember having brought with me a landscape I considered buying, and asking him if it was good. “It is as good as you think it ” was his answer.
Later in the afternoon he showed me two small inscriptions by his grandfather, Liu Wen-ch’ao, which look my breath. The several characters on each scroll were like the changes of an assured voice. Their meanings, when translated, did not especially catch me. “Ten thousand volumes lodged in the heart” was, I believe, one of them. But I was held by the spell of sheer, pure form. They had the remote closeness of stars fixed and yet moving in space. It was the first time I had thoroughly felt the dignity and power of fine Chinese writing, and the doctor warmed to my exclamation.
His own writing, which he then showed me, was of a different order, microscopic, meticulous, admirable, but not bringing the quick whole unquestioning exhilarated “yes’ plumped out of me by the other. He presented me, however, with four of his closely written pages, which the son later translated.
The first in verse and the second in prose may have been the doctor’s own composition, but I have forgotten: —
“Under heaven are works of many kinds.
You cannot realize that things are hard to do by seeing others do them.
The time comes when you have to face them and do them yourself.”
“Even if a man is a master at his work, he listens to what other men have to say and learns thereby. It is the ignoramus who claims to know and thereby fails to learn from other men. However great or little Lis means, a man must not squander what lie has but must put it to square use; and he should think less about how much a dollar counts than about a copper’s doing a copper’s worth of good to himself or to someone.”
The third, signed by the doctor, was presumably his own neat poem: —
“Turn to all men your true face,
Tell the truth to your own heart,
Foresee the results of whatever you do,
Be as helpful to the rich as to the poor.”
And to the fourth was signed, in the doctor’s hand, the name of his distinguished grandfather, who must therefore have been its author: —
“To be contented with your means is to be happy.
With such contentment you can often smile,
For you are trained to meet all circumstance.
To live above fame and to think above what happens.”
The Liu family must have been well trained in Tao, well founded in Laotzu who said: —
“A man who knows how little he knows is well.
A man who knows how much he knows is sick";
“A man’s work, however finished it seem,
Continues as long as he live”;
“Content need never borrow ”;
and
“Only he who contains content
Remains content.'
Upon taking leave and being asked by Dr. Liu what I had liked best of all I had seen, I was candid in naming his grandfather’s two scrolls. That evening, when I returned home late from a theater, the scrolls were in my room at the hotel.
The rest of the story may be digression and does me doubtful credit, but is worth telling. I knew the Oriental gesture of making a present of what is admired, but with little or no expectation of the gift’s being finally accepted. I would be Oriental too. I told the doctor that I was going north and should be pleased if he would let me take the scrolls to hang in my rooms its I traveled, and presently to hang in my memory, but that I was borrowing them, not keeping them. On the other hand I should be happy to accept, if he would write it out for me, a copy of a four-line poem by Wang Wei of which I was particularly fond. I showed him my Chinese calling card. Because I so admired this poet, Dr. Kiang Kang-hu had enjoyed translating my name, Witter, into Chinese characters which mean a devotee of Wêi. Fond himself of Wang Wei both as painterand as poet, Dr. Liu told me which of the shorter poems was his own favorite. Before I left Shanghai he sent me, in his small perfect script, the lines I had asked for, A Parting. Having found out meantime from young Liu that a metal ink box from Peking would be a gift acceptable to his father, I took one to an expert craftsman in the northern city and had him engrave on it Wang Wei’s My Retreat at Mount Chung-nan, the doctor’s favorite.
The day before I was to sail from Shanghai for America I went again with the son to call on the doctor, taking with me the ink box and the borrowed scrolls. The boy commended me for returning them, inasmuch as they were the only formal examples left in the family of his great-grandfather’s writing, a fact I had not known till then. “The rest,” he said, “were burned.”And he added frankly and not, it seemed to me, quite Orientally though politeness is an odd bird anywhere — “I am sure that my father would prefer their coming finally to me, so you are acting well to return them to my father.”
When I handed them back to Dr. Liu I expressed my appreciation of his entrusting them to me awhile, especially since he had no others by his grandfather. “My son should not have told you that” Wits the severe answer, which I understood from his expression, even before the son dutifully interpreted. But the doctor laid the scrolls aside on a table and bowed. Then he look the ink box and, bowing again, read the Chung-nan poem aloud to me with a delicacy of intonation comparable to the delicacy of his script. He gave me a beautiful small landscape which I accepted. And as I bade him farewell, I felt that I had correctly and courteously met the delicacy of the situation.
The son had said little, walking back with me to the hotel. Next day when he came to see me off on the steamer, he handed me a package from his lather.
“Here are the scrolls.”
“But no,” I exclaimed, “I can’t take them.”
“My father wishes it.”
“No,” I persevered, against a firm look in his eye. “They were a present from him to me and now they are a present from me to you. There is no other way. And now, not later — now before I sail, I must leave them with you, lest they be lost in sending.”
“It would not be right,” he held his ground gravely.
“But tell me what would be right, what I can do.”
“Nothing more,” he concluded and then the quiet bomb, “because you did wrong.”
I sailed with the scrolls and without being told how I had done wrong. Nor shall I ever quite know. The son and I corresponded for some years, but friends in Shanghai cannot tell me what has become of him or of his family. Perhaps he has been lost in the wars. Perhaps, if I had persuaded him to keep his great-grandfather’s scrolls, they would have been lost too. When I look at them now, they are more than poised and beautiful abstractions. They are the presents and presence of friends lo whom I innocently “did wrong.”