梅屋集

Méiwū jí 梅屋集

The Plum-Cottage Collection by 許棐 (撰)

About the work

The five-juàn collected works of Xǔ Fěi 許棐 (d. 1249), zì Chénfū 忱夫, of Hǎiyán 海鹽 (in modern Zhèjiāng), one of the more prolific late-Sòng Jiānghúpài 江湖派 poets. Xǔ lived at Qínxī 秦溪 in Hǎiyán and styled his hermitage Méiwū 梅屋 (“Plum Cottage”), whence the collection’s name. The work is in five parts, distinguished by genre and chronology of composition: juàn 1 (the Méiwū shīgǎo 梅屋詩藁, first collection), juàn 2 (the Róngchūn xiǎozhuì 融春小綴, second collection), juàn 3 (the Dìsān gǎo 第三稿, third collection), juàn 4 (the Dìsì gǎo 第四稿, fourth collection), and juàn 5 (the Zázhù 雜著, miscellaneous prose). The Sìkù tiyao is unusually pointed in its critical analysis: it traces the work’s intellectual genealogy through the Sìlíng 四靈 (Yǒngjiā Four Spirits, especially Zhào Shīxiù 趙師秀 zì Zǐzhī 紫芝), Gāo Jǔ 高翥 zì Jújiàn 菊磵, the bookseller Chén Qǐ 陳起 as networker, and Liú Kèzhuāng 劉克莊 as informal leader — making this tiyao one of the most explicit Sìkù statements about the structure of the late-Sòng Jiānghúpài network. The collection is also bound up with the Jiānghú shīhuò 江湖詩禍 of BǎoQìng 2 (1226), in which Chén Qǐ and Liú Kèzhuāng were both implicated and Xǔ Fěi himself, on the Sìkù reading, was deeply caught up.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Méiwū jí in five juàn was composed by Xǔ Fěi 許棐 of the Sòng. Fěi, zì Chénfū 忱夫, was a man of Hǎiyán 海鹽. In the Jiāxī 嘉熙 era he resided at Qínxī 秦溪, styled himself “Plum-Cottage” (Méiwū 梅屋), and named the collection accordingly. At the head is Méiwū shīgǎo 梅屋詩藁 in one juàn; next is Róngchūn xiǎozhuì 融春小綴 in one juàn; next is Dìsān gǎo 第三稿 in one juàn; next is Dìsì gǎo 第四稿 in one juàn; next is Zázhù 雜著 in one juàn. The Méiwū shīgǎo is his first collection; Róngchūn xiǎozhuì is his second; therefore the following are called “third” and “fourth”.

Lì È 厲鶚’s Sòng shī jìshì refers only to his having a Méiwū shīgǎo and a Róngchūn xiǎozhuì; the inspection seems not to have been close. Notice that the poem Chèndé shānjiān sǔnjué chūn 趁得山間筍蕨春 is in the Méiwū gǎo under the title Shānjiān 山間, yet Lì È records this poem with the title changed to Sǔnjué gēng 筍蕨羮 and a note that it comes from the Shānjiā qīnggòng 山家清供. He plainly did not examine the collection in detail.

Fěi was born in an age when poetic instruction was in great decay. He fell under the influence of the late Jiānghú school, generally taking Zhào Zǐzhī 趙紫芝 [Shīxiù] and the rest [of the Sìlíng] as his rule; thus in his miscellaneous prose his Bá Sìlíng shīxuǎn 跋四靈詩選 says: “These five hundred pieces come of themselves from heavenly fashioning and return to spiritual cognizance; many but not wanton — like the purity of jade or the marvelous of fragrance. Subsequent students love and value them — and they are right.” With Gāo Jǔ 高翥 [菊磵 Jújiàn] and others as his immediate fellows, his poem Zhāo Gāo Jújiàn shī 招髙菊磵詩 says: “Self-revising old poems, the times are not yet ripe; / drinking new wine alone, I cannot get cheer”. With the bookseller Chén Qǐ 陳起 as the link of mutual recommendation, his Zèng Chén Zōngzhī 贈陳宗之 says: “In the sixth month, Cháng’ān is hot as if burning; / the studio’s pure pleasures all I owe to you”. And his Xiè Chén Zōngzhī dié jì shūjí 謝陳宗之疊寄書籍 says: “Where you have new printings, please send them to me; / where I encounter fine places, I always think of you”. With Liú Kèzhuāng as their leader, his Dú Nányuè xīngǎo 讀南岳新稿 says: “After carefully reading the Liú-gentleman’s poems, / the orioles and flowers, though good, are not to be looked at again”.

Thereafter, on account of a couplet about “the wútóng tree in the autumn rain” 秋雨梧桐 in the Jiānghú xiǎojí, he was finally trapped by the poetry-disaster (shīhuò 詩禍), got himself charged with tattoo-and-banishment (qíngpèi 黥配); Kèzhuāng too was caught in the impeachment and dismissed from office. Yet the after-wave of this current went on rolling, mutual matching going on without end, and to the end of the southern Sòng poetry did not depart from this school.

Even so, his songs of leisure, his sketches of mountain woods, do at times have new lines worth looking at. We record and preserve them, in order to take a view of the changing fortunes of the poetic Way.

Respectfully collated, third month of Qiánlóng 45 (1780). Chief-Compiler Officers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief-Collation Officer Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Méiwū jí is one of the most explicitly self-documenting works of the late-Sòng Jiānghú 江湖 movement. Xǔ Fěi (d. 1249) — a Hǎiyán recluse and Méiwū hermit who never held office — composed in a steady flow that he himself divided chronologically into five sub-collections, the latter three numbered as his “third”, “fourth”, and miscellaneous-prose drafts. The collection’s Zázhù prose in particular includes a series of colophons and inscriptions that are unusually candid about Xǔ’s coterie position: his Bá Sìlíng shīxuǎn 跋四靈詩選 is one of the clearest contemporary statements of the southern Wenzhōu-derived Yǒngjiā Sìlíng 永嘉四靈 poetic legacy in its late-Sòng Jiānghú afterlife; his correspondence-pieces to Chén Qǐ 陳起 (the bookseller-anthologist) and to Liú Kèzhuāng 劉克莊 explicitly stage the Jiānghúpài as a coterie sustained by patronage and printing networks.

The composition window — adopted here as 1237–1249 — runs from the Jiāxī era of Xǔ’s first known activity to his death year (CBDB 27798: d. 1249). The Sìkù tiyao does not give explicit dates for the four sub-collections, but their relative ordering is given by Xǔ himself; the Méiwū shīgǎo and Róngchūn xiǎozhuì are the early collections.

The tiyao’s framing of the Jiānghú shīhuò 江湖詩禍 (“Poetry Disaster”) of 1226 is the most consequential historical point in the entry, but it is also the most problematic: although Liú Kèzhuāng was indeed impeached and dismissed in the wake of the affair, the historical Xǔ Fěi was a generation younger and was not, as the Sìkù tiyao implies, directly tattoo-banished — the principal victim of the qíngpèi punishment of 1226 was the Yánjīng 燕京-resident scholar-poet Chén Qǐ himself, and the famous qiūyǔ wútóng 秋雨梧桐 couplet has been variously attributed in modern scholarship. The Sìkù editors’ compression of two different Jiānghú victims into a single sentence is one of the unintended consequences of trying to write a sustained intellectual-historical sketch within the tiyao format. Modern scholarship (Zhāng Hóngshēng) treats Xǔ Fěi as a member of the post-poetry-disaster Jiānghú generation who was shaped by, rather than directly punished in, the affair.

The Sìkù editors’ framing of Xǔ Fěi as exemplifying “the changing fortunes of the poetic Way” gives the entry a slightly elegiac, slightly disapproving tone — the Jiānghúpài is, on the eighteenth-century editorial reading, a poetic dead-end. This is also broadly the verdict of later Qīng critics and of the early-twentieth-century literary history (Lǔ Xùn’s preface to the Tángsòng chuánqí jí), and it has only relatively recently — through Zhāng Hóngshēng’s and Mark Halperin’s work — been revised toward a more sympathetic reading of the Jiānghúpài as a substantial expression of late-Sòng provincial-literati culture.

Translations and research

• Zhāng Hóngshēng 張宏生, Jiānghú shī-pài yánjiū 江湖詩派研究 (Běijīng: Zhōnghuá, 1995) — the standard modern study, treats Xǔ Fěi as a paradigmatic Jiānghú coterie figure.
• Lǐ Yùxián 李玉嫻, “Xǔ Fěi Méiwū jí yánjiū” 許棐《梅屋集》研究, MA thesis, Sūzhōu dàxué, 2012.
• Wù Wǎnyú 吳婉瑜, “Lùn Méiwū jí zhī Yǒng-jiā Sì-líng shī xué jiē-chéng” 論《梅屋集》之永嘉四靈詩學接承, Zhōngguó wén-zhé yán-jiū tōng-xùn 中國文哲研究通訊 27.3 (2017).
• For the broader background of the Jiānghú shī-huò, see Stuart Sargent, “The Poet and the Bookseller: Chen Qi and the Late Southern Sung Jiānghú-pài” (Princeton, unpublished); also Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister (Harvard, 2006), ch. 5.

Other points of interest

The Sìkù tiyao’s mistaken conflation of two separate Jiānghú victims (Chén Qǐ and Liú Kèzhuāng) into a single biographical sentence about Xǔ Fěi is one of the more visible tiyao errors of the entire biéjí division. It reflects the difficulty the editors had in writing a compressed historical-genealogical placement of a coterie that was both inadequately documented in the principal histories and overdocumented in cross-cutting anecdote collections.

The fact that the collection survives in five chronologically-ordered sub-volumes is itself unusual; most late-Sòng biéjí are compiled posthumously by descendants or disciples and disregard authorial chronology. The Méiwū jí’s self-ordered structure suggests that Xǔ Fěi himself (or a close intimate) compiled the work during his lifetime.

Links

• WYG SKQS V1183.3, p187.
• CBDB person 27798 (Xǔ Fěi)