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六一詩話

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Text ID
KR4i0006
Date
1071–1072
Dynasty
宋

Liùyī shīhuà 六一詩話

The Six-One Remarks on Poetry by 歐陽修 (撰)

About the work

The Liùyī shīhuà 六一詩話 — a single short juǎn of 28 (occasionally 29 in some recensions) loose paragraphs of poetic anecdote, evaluation, and reminiscence — is the work that founded the entire subsequent shīhuà 詩話 tradition. Composed by Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 (1007–1072) at his retirement seat at Rǔyīn 汝陰 (modern Fùyáng 阜陽, Ānhuī) after his 1071 retirement, only a year before his death, it bears the author’s own brief subtitle: “Compiled while in retirement at Rǔyīn, for casual conversation” 居士退居汝陰而集以資閒談者. The hào “Six-One Recluse” 六一居士 (referring to Ouyang’s six “ones” — one wine vessel, one qín, one chess board, one library, one collection of inscriptions, plus himself the one old man among them) gives the title. The book invents the shīhuà form: short, episodic, untitled paragraphs combining anecdote, judgment, textual correction, and personal reminiscence — held loosely together only by the author’s voice. Wilkinson §30.5 calls this format the defining feature of the genre: “comments on particular poems rather than comprehensive treatises” — and from the eleventh century onward it became the dominant mode of Chinese literary criticism, eventually supplanting (without ever quite replacing) the treatise-form Wénxīn diāolóng KR4i0001 / Shīpǐn KR4i0003 tradition.

Tiyao

Liùyī shīhuà, by Ōuyáng Xiū of the Sòng. Xiū wrote also the Shī běnyì 詩本義, already entered [in the Sìkù]. The book has a single-line autographic title at its head: “compiled while in retirement at Rǔyīn for casual conversation” — so it was made after his retirement in Xīníng 4 (1071). Within the year after that Xiū died: this is his very last writing.

Chén Shīdào’s 陳師道 Hòushān shīhuà KR4i0009 says Xiū did not like Dù Fǔ’s 杜甫 poetry. Yè Mèngdé’s 葉夢得 Shílín shīhuà KR4i0018 says Xiū made strenuous effort to counter the Xīkūn 西崑 style. But this volume records a passage on Cài Dōuwèi 蔡都尉’s poetry and another on Liú Zǐyí’s 劉子儀 — and neither remark bears those interpretations out fully. The postface by Máo Jìn 毛晉 argues the same point, and his is a balanced view.

Of the famous couplet “fēng nuǎn niǎo shēng suì, rì gāo huā yǐng zhòng” 風暖鳥聲碎，日高花影重 (“the warm wind cuts the bird’s song; the high sun deepens the flower’s shadow”): it is found today in Dù Xúnhè’s 杜荀鶴 Tángfēng jí, yet Xiū attributes it to Zhōu Pǔ 周朴. Wèi Tài 魏泰 in his LínHàn yǐnjū shīhuà KR4i0010 attacks Xiū for this error. But Wú Yù’s 吳聿 Guānlín shīhuà KR4i0026 of the Sòng says: “Dù Xúnhè’s poetry is so vulgar, and the first piece in his Tángfēng jí, fēng nuǎn niǎo shēng suì rì gāo huā yǐng zhòng, is so unlike Xúnhè’s manner — I have long suspected it is not his. Another day I saw a Táng xiǎoshuō attributing the verse to Zhōu Pǔ; Ōuyáng Wénzhōnggōng [Xiū] says the same. The lines must have been adopted from Zhōu’s transmission and slipped into Dù’s anthology.” So Xiū’s reading does have a basis; he was not in error.

It is true that of the “Nine Monks” 九僧 Xiū could recall only one name and forgot the other eight. Sīmǎ Guāng 司馬光’s Xù shīhuà KR4i0007 supplied the missing names. That was just a momentary lapse of memory.

Abstract

Ōuyáng Xiū’s Liùyī shīhuà is the foundational shīhuà — the work that brought the new genre into being, gave it its name, and supplied its formal template for the next nine centuries. The book is short (28 paragraphs of widely varying length) and miscellaneous in tone: it ranges over topics from the strict comparative judgment of couplets (Méi Yáochén 梅堯臣’s phrasing weighed against Lín Bū’s 林逋), through textual corrections (the famous Zhōu Pǔ / Dù Xúnhè attribution dispute), through dating anecdotes (the “Nine Monks” 九僧 problem), through personal reminiscence (Ōuyáng’s own memories of literary dinners with Méi Yáochén and Sū Shùnqīn 蘇舜欽 in his Kāifēng years), down to passing remarks on technical phrasing. The book’s most-cited single passage is Ōuyáng’s recording of Méi Yáochén’s principle that “the highest poetic art is to express what cannot easily be expressed — to make the reader see what lies outside the words” (含不盡之意見於言外) — a formulation that became the locus classicus for the doctrine of yánwàizhīyì 言外之意 in Chinese poetics, taken up by every subsequent generation of shīhuà writers down to Wáng Guówéi 王國維’s Rén jiān cí huà of 1908.

Composition was entirely retrospective. Ōuyáng was sixty-five, retired, and within a year of his death. The text describes itself as composed “to occupy idle conversation” — and the disconnected paragraph form reproduces that conversational rhythm. Internal evidence (the references to scholars still in office; the Xīníng 4 retirement) places the book in 1071–1072. The book was already widely circulated at Ōuyáng’s death in 1072: the Tàipíng yùlǎn-era catalogues do not reach the work, but the Chóngwén zǒngmù and Sòng provincial library catalogues from the Yuányòu era onward record it. The Sìkù recension takes the Bǎichuān xuéhǎi of Zuǒ Guī 左圭 as its base, supplemented from Máo Jìn’s 毛晉 Jīndài mìshū recension; Máo also supplied a postface defending Ōuyáng against the Hòushān’s allegation of anti-Dù-Fǔ bias.

The book founded a genre. Within fifty years there were major shīhuà by Sīmǎ Guāng (the Xù shīhuà KR4i0007, explicitly framed as a sequel), Liú Bān 劉攽 (Zhōngshān shīhuà KR4i0008), Chén Shīdào 陳師道 (Hòushān shīhuà KR4i0009), Wèi Tài 魏泰 (LínHàn yǐnjū shīhuà KR4i0010); by the Southern Sòng the genre dominated literary criticism. Hé Wénhuàn’s 何文煥 great Qing compilation Lìdài shīhuà (1770) opens with Ōuyáng’s book in pride of place as the original of the form.

Translations and research

  • Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), 359–390 — substantial annotated translation of much of the Liù-yī shī-huà with critical commentary.
  • Ronald Egan, The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge, 1984), 75–86, 234–262 — extended treatment of Ōuyáng as critic and of the Liù-yī shī-huà as the foundation of the shī-huà form.
  • Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (Harvard, 2006) — context for the Liù-yī in the wider Northern-Sòng literary-aesthetic conversation.
  • James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago, 1975), passim — early Western-language statement of the shī-huà genre.
  • Cài Zhèn-chǔ 蔡鎮楚, Sòng-dài shī-huà yán-jiū 宋代詩話研究 (Hú-nán shī-fàn dà-xué chū-bǎn-shè, 1990) — standard modern survey of the Sòng shī-huà tradition, opening with Ōuyáng.
  • Guō Shào-yú 郭紹虞, Sòng shī-huà jí-yì 宋詩話輯佚, 2 vols. (Zhōng-huá, 1980) — exhaustive collation of Sòng shī-huà including the Liù-yī.
  • Egan, “The Six Ones: Ou-yang Hsiu, the Six-One Layman, and the Critical Imagination”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51.2 (1991): 363–415.

Other points of interest

The Liùyī shīhuà is the original of an entire genre. The work also contains the locus classicus for Méi Yáochén’s poetic doctrine of píng dàn 平淡 (“level-blandness” — the unforced, austere style) — Ōuyáng’s record of Méi’s saying that good poetry must “exhaust the difficult to write so as to put it before one’s eyes; contain the inexhaustible meaning to be seen beyond the words” (狀難寫之景如在目前，含不盡之意見於言外) became one of the most-quoted statements in Chinese poetics. The work’s slimness — 28 paragraphs — is itself a feature: subsequent shīhuà writers explicitly adopted the casual, unsystematic format.

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