後山詩話

Hòushān shīhuà 後山詩話

The Houshan Remarks on Poetry by 陳師道 (attributed)

About the work

The Hòushān shīhuà 後山詩話, a single short juǎn of some seventy paragraphs, is transmitted under the name of Chén Shīdào 陳師道 (1053–1101, hào Hòushān jūshì 後山居士), the celebrated Jiāngxī school poet and one of the sānzōng 三宗 (“Three Patriarchs”). The attribution is, however, partly doubted: Lù Yóu 陸游 in his Lǎoxuéān bǐjì 老學菴筆記 already cast doubt on both the Hòushān cóngtán and the Hòushān shīhuà, and the Sìkù editors after careful examination conclude that the shīhuà is at least partly post-Chén — internal references include an unmistakable mention of Léi Wànqìng’s 雷萬慶 (Léi dàshǐ 雷大使) palace-dance performance, which the Tiěwéishān cóngtán of Cài Tāo 蔡絛 dates to the Xuānhé era (1119–1125), some twenty years after Chén’s death. The Wénxiàn tōngkǎo lists the book in two juǎn; the Sìkù recension is the now-standard one juǎn, presumably a later merging. Despite the attribution problem, the work circulated as Chén’s from the late Sòng onward and entered the canonical Lìdài shīhuà of Hé Wénhuàn 何文煥 under his name; its judgments on prose (“rather rough than weak; rather obscure than vulgar”), on Táo Qián 陶潛, on Hán Yù 韓愈, and on Sū Shì 蘇軾 remain widely cited.

Tiyao

Hòushān shīhuà. The transmitted text is attributed to Chén Shīdào of the Sòng. Shīdào wrote also the Hòushān cóngtán 後山叢談, already entered [in the Sìkù]. The Wénxiàn tōngkǎo lists the book in two juǎn; this recension is in one — presumably the two have been merged by later hands. Lù Yóu’s Lǎoxuéān bǐjì casts deep doubt on both the Cóngtán and this work, saying perhaps the Cóngtán was a juvenilium, but that this book cannot be by Shīdào.

Now examining the contents: there are notes critical of Sū Shì 蘇軾, Huáng Tíngjiān 黃庭堅, and Qín Guān 秦觀 — quite unlike anything Shīdào would say. One passage praises Sū Shì’s cí “like the dancing of the palace-dance master Léi Dàshǐ — capping the wonder of the age, yet not the natural manner.” Cài Tāo’s 蔡絛 Tiěwéishān cóngtán records that Léi Wànqìng 雷萬慶 served in the imperial dance bureau in the Xuānhé era (1119–1125) on the strength of his dancing — but Sū Shì died in Jiànzhōng jìngguó 1 / 6th month / 1101 and Shīdào in 11th month of the same year. How could either of them know of Léi Dàshǐ of the Xuānhé era, twenty years later, to use him as a literary simile? That the book is forged from this is clear without argument.

It says further that Táo Qián’s poetry is “close to the affair but not literary”; that Hán Yù’s 韓愈 Yuánhé shèngdé shī is “the lowest piece in his collection”; while of Péi Shuō’s 裴說 Jì biān yī 寄邊衣 — a piece in feeble and limp manner near to a cí — it speaks in high praise. These are also off. It misattributes Wáng Jiàn’s 王建 Wàng fū shí 望夫石 poem to Gù Kuàng 顧況. Various errors. Probably after Shīdào’s death in the south the original draft scattered, and some self-promoter pieced together a substitute.

That said, judgments like “in writing better rough than weak, better obscure than vulgar; better plain than ornate” (寧拙毋巧、寧朴毋華、寧麤毋弱、寧僻毋俗); and “the master writer, finding occasion, brings out the strange — the river flows downward, but where it meets the mountain or runs into a valley, the wind whips it up, things crash into it, and only then is the full variability of nature displayed” (善為文者，因事以出奇，江河之行順下而已，至其觸山赴谷風摶物激，然後盡天下之變) — these have some merit. The discussions of Dù Fǔ’s Tónggǔ gē 同谷歌 “huángdú” 黃獨, the Bǎi shé 百舌’s “chán rén” 讒人 line, the Wéi Yìngwù 韋應物 “new oranges 300” line, and the attack on Sū Shì’s Xìmǎ tái 戲馬臺 poem’s yùgōu báihè 玉鉤白鶴 also have some critical value. As the book has long circulated, it can stand as a recension among others.

Abstract

The Hòushān shīhuà is transmitted under Chén Shīdào’s name and printed under that name in all standard recensions including the Sìkù. The Sìkù editors’ rigorous textual demonstration that at least one passage (the Léi Dàshǐ palace-dance simile) is chronologically impossible for either Chén or Sū Shì — Léi entered imperial service in Xuānhé (post-1119), both Chén and Sū died in 1101 — establishes that the work as transmitted contains material post-dating Chén by at least two decades. The Sìkù editors’ best hypothesis: the original Hòushān shīhuà manuscript was dispersed after Chén’s death; an editor of the early-Southern-Sòng period reconstructed a substitute, splicing genuine Chén material with anecdotes drawn from the wider tradition. The current text is therefore a Hòushān shīhuà-tradition compilation of c. 1101–1162 — the latter bracket being the Bǎichuān xuéhǎi compilation period at which the work appears in stabilized form.

The transmitted text contains some of the most-cited maxims in all of Chinese poetics. Most influential is the four-fold formula on diction:

Níng zhuō wú qiǎo, níng pǔ wú huá, níng cū wú ruò, níng pì wú sú. 寧拙毋巧，寧朴毋華，寧麤毋弱，寧僻毋俗。 “Better rough than artful; better plain than ornate; better blunt than weak; better obscure than vulgar.”

This statement of Jiāngxī aesthetic — radically pro-difficulty, radically anti-superficial — became canonical for the school and was the locus classicus for the later “méng shū” 蒙書 tradition’s discussion of poetic register. Whether the formulation is Chén’s own or a later compilation of attitudes attributed to him, it preserves accurately the Jiāngxī programme; this is why the work survived as canonical despite the Sìkù editors’ attribution warning.

The work also contains the famous (and notorious) judgment that Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 “did not like Dù Fǔ’s 杜甫 poetry” — a charge that Yè Mèngdé 葉夢得 in his Shílín shīhuà KR4i0018 elaborated and that later critics (Máo Jìn 毛晉 in his Liùyī postface) tried to refute on the basis of internal evidence in the Liùyī shīhuà itself. The text further contains the much-discussed critique of Sū Shì’s cí as “the wonder of the world but not the natural register” — the chronologically-impossible Léi Dàshǐ passage — which is the single piece of evidence proving the book’s late hand. Despite its compositional irregularity, the Hòushān shīhuà remained one of the half-dozen most-cited shīhuà of all time.

Translations and research

• Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity (Princeton, 1986) — uses the Hòu-shān shī-huà judgment of Hán Yù’s Yuán-hé shèng-dé shī extensively.
• Stuart H. Sargent, The Poetry of He Zhu (1052–1125) (Brill, 2007) — discussion of the Jiāng-xī circle and Hòu-shān shī-huà judgments.
• Michael A. Fuller, Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History (Harvard, 2013) — important on the wider transmission of the early-Sòng shī-huà including the Hòu-shān.
• Lǐ Yī-fēi 李一飞, Chén Shī-dào nián pǔ 陳師道年譜 (Zhōng-huá, 1990) — detailed annual chronology of Chén’s life and the texts attributed to him, including the shī-huà.
• 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) — chapter on the attribution problem and the Hòu-shān shī-huà’s place in the early-Southern-Sòng shī-huà tradition.
• Guō Shào-yú 郭紹虞, Sòng shī-huà jí-yì 宋詩話輯佚 (Zhōng-huá, 1980) — collation evidence and notes on Lù Yóu’s Lǎo-xué-ān bǐ-jì doubts.
• Robert Ashmore, “After the Master: Chen Shidao and the Lessons of Confucian Tradition”, T’ang Studies 20–21 (2002–2003): 209–245 — on Chén’s intellectual milieu.

Other points of interest

The book is the locus classicus of the Jiāngxī aesthetic formula níng zhuō wú qiǎo 寧拙毋巧 (“better rough than artful”) — one of the most-quoted statements in all of Chinese poetics. The Léi Dàshǐ passage is the textbook example of an internal anachronism used to date a Chinese forgery. Lù Yóu’s 陸游 explicit doubt — already in his Lǎoxuéān bǐjì — is the locus classicus of late-Southern-Sòng textual-critical thinking about shīhuà attribution.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikipedia 後山詩話