四六話

Sìliù huà 四六話

Remarks on Four-Six Parallel Prose by 王銍 (撰)

About the work

The Sìliù huà 四六話, in two juǎn, is by Wáng Zhì 王銍 (zì Xìngzhī 性之, hào Xuěxī 雪溪, of Rǔyīn 汝陰; fl. 1122–1144) — and is the first systematic huà 話 (critical remarks) volume devoted to sìliù 四六, the alternating-four-and-six-character ornamental piánwén 駢文 (parallel prose) used in Sòng formal documents: biǎo 表 (memorials of submission), qǐ 啟 (announcement-letters), zhì 制 / chì 敕 (imperial commands), congratulatory and condolence-pieces, and the elaborate official correspondence of the Sòng bureaucracy. While the term shīhuà 詩話 had been established by Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修’s Liùyī shīhuà KR4i0006 (1067), the Sìliù huà extends the huà-form to a parallel and equally fashionable Sòng prose genre, and is the founding text of the sìliù huà sub-genre — followed in turn by Xiè Jí 謝伋’s Sìliù tánzhǔ 四六談麈 KR4i0027 and others. The work evaluates Sòng biǎo and qǐ writings line-by-line, often by single couplet, in the manner of jùtú 句圖 (“phrase-diagrams” — selections of admired lines).

Tiyao

Sìliù huà, two juǎn, by Wáng Zhì of the Sòng. Zhì’s Shìér xiǎomíng lù bǔyí 侍兒小名錄補遺 has already been catalogued. This book is wholly the evaluation of Sòng-era biǎo and qǐ. The Six Dynasties and Táng — the diction was already parallel and matched, but the gé (style-grade) aimed at húnchéng 渾成 (rounded completeness). At the end of the Táng and through the Five Dynasties, one progressively turned to gōngqiǎo 工巧 (skillful artifice) — for instance Luó Yǐn 羅隱’s Dài Qián Liú hè Zhāozōng gèngmíng biǎo 代錢鏐賀昭宗更名表: “right is then the zhěng 整 (whole) text of Yú Shùn 虞舜; left is then the bàn 半 (half) character of Jī Chāng 姫昌” — at the time taken as the jǐngcè 警策 (alarm-rod) of the form. Sòng’s stream-flow grew ever more competitive in fineness and exact-matching. Hence Zhì’s discussion likewise compares victory-and-defeat at the level of a single couplet, a single character. Down to Zhōu Bìdà 周必大 and others, the residual wave carried into elaborate fineness — through the end of the Sòng, the only test is the precise fit of the allusion (lìshì qièhé 隸事切合); the texture grew busy and the wéngé 文格 (writing-grade) daily fell. All this is the inheritance of Zhì’s argument. Yet read on its own terms, his book has pieces of genuine penetration; like the poets’ jùtú 句圖, one cannot dispense with it. The last item of the upper juǎn records his father Wáng Sù 王素’s Téng Fǔ biànbàng qǐjùn zházǐ 滕甫辨謗乞郡劄子 — mistakenly printed in Sū Shì 蘇軾’s collection. Zhì has it from his father’s own hand; this certainly cannot be a fabrication. The present Sū Shì collections still carry the piece — failure to weed it out is a sign of the present state of editing — and this is also an evidentiary contribution.

Abstract

The Sìliù huà was composed in the early Southern Sòng — between Wáng Zhì’s emergence around 1122 and his death after 1144 — at a moment when the high sìliù style of the Northern Sòng was being passed into the Southern-Sòng generation. The book’s evidentiary basis is overwhelmingly Northern Sòng: Wáng cites Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修, Wáng Ānshí 王安石, Sū Shì 蘇軾, Sū Zhé 蘇轍, Huáng Tíngjiān 黃庭堅, the Yáng Yì 楊億 and the Xīkūn chóuchàng jí 西崑酬唱集 of the early eleventh century, and continues into the Yuányòu generation. Its method is the granular evaluation of biǎo and qǐ couplets, often quoting just two lines and adjudicating their gōng 工 (skill), yǎ 雅 (elegance), qiè 切 (precision of allusion), and liàn 鍊 (refinement). The Sìkù editors note ambivalently that the work both crowned the genre and started its decadence: the fineness of detail that Wáng celebrates would, by the late Sòng, harden into pure mechanical lìshì qièhé and the wéngé would fall — an early diagnosis of the long Sòng decline into ossified parallelism.

The book’s principal documentary value (beyond its critical-aesthetic content) is the textual problem identified at the end of the upper juǎn: Wáng records that the Téng Fǔ biànbàng qǐjùn zházǐ — a memorial defending Téng Fǔ 滕甫 against slander and requesting a prefectural posting — was in fact composed by Wáng’s father Wáng Sù 王素 (himself a Northern-Sòng official), not by Sū Shì, although the piece had been mistakenly bundled into Sū Shì’s collected works. Wáng claims to have his father’s autograph original. The Sìkù editors confirm Wáng’s testimony as plausible and note that the piece had not been removed from Sū Shì’s transmitted collection — an interesting case of a bǐjì / shīhuà contribution to shǔmíng (authorship-attribution) scholarship.

The work is the founding text of the sìliù huà sub-genre. The Southern-Sòng continuation by Xiè Jí 謝伋, the Sìliù tánzhǔ 四六談麈 KR4i0027, explicitly takes Wáng Zhì as predecessor. Later compilations (Yáng Wànlǐ 楊萬里’s poetic interest aside, Lóu Yào 樓鑰’s bureaucratic piánwén, Sūn Yīngshí 孫應時’s notes) build on this foundation. In the Yuán and Míng the sìliù genre declined sharply, and Wáng’s work became a key textual witness for the lost Sòng practice; in the Qīng it returned to active study through the Tóngchéng 桐城 reaction.

Transmission: through the Lìdài shīhuà and the Sìkù from a Jiāngsū xúnfǔ cǎijìn běn 江蘇巡撫採進本.

Translations and research

• David Knechtges, “The Problem of the Origin of the Pien-wen”, in his collected essays.
• Christopher Leigh Connery, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) — useful background for the long history of parallel prose.
• Cài Zhèn-chǔ 蔡鎮楚, Zhōng-guó shī-huà shǐ 中國詩話史 (Hú-nán Wén-yì, 1988) — discusses the sì-liù huà sub-genre.
• Wáng Shuǐ-zhào 王水照, ed., Lì-dài wén-huà 歷代文話 (Fù-dàn dà-xué chū-bǎn-shè, 2007) — comprehensive corpus of Chinese prose-criticism; the standard modern reference for the sì-liù huà genre.
• Hé Wén-huàn 何文煥, ed., Lì-dài shī-huà 歷代詩話 (1770; rpt. Zhōnghuá, 1981) — contains an edition.

Other points of interest

The work is the principal evidence for the high estimation of Luó Yǐn 羅隱’s Dài Qián Liú hè Zhāozōng gèngmíng biǎo — “right is then the whole text of Yú Shùn; left is then the half-character of Jī Chāng” — a celebrated late-Táng / Wǔdài piánwén couplet that became, through Wáng Zhì’s quotation, the standard touchstone of the genre.

— The Wáng Sù Téng Fǔ biànbàng attribution-correction is among the earliest documented instances of bǐjì / shīhuà literature serving as evidence for the kǎozhèng 考證 work of authorship-disentanglement in the Sòng collected-works tradition.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wáng Shuǐzhào ed., Lìdài wénhuà (Fùdàn dàxué, 2007).