歲寒堂詩話

Suìhántáng shīhuà 歲寒堂詩話

Poetry-Talks from the Hall of the Cold of the Year by 張戒 (撰)

About the work

The Suìhántáng shīhuà 歲寒堂詩話, in two juǎn (67 entries: 34 in the upper juǎn, 33 in the lower), is one of the most independent-minded shīhuà of the Southern Sòng. Its author, Zhāng Jiè 張戒 (zì Dìngfù 定復, fl. 1135–1157), was an upright official of the Shàoxīng reign whose career rose and fell with that of Zhào Dǐng 趙鼎 in the long quarrel with Qín Huì 秦檜’s peace party. The hào “Hall of the Cold of the Year” (an allusion to Lúnyǔ 9.28, “only when the year grows cold do we know that pine and cypress are the last to wither”) signals the moral stance of the book: a conservative Shījiào reading of poetry that ranks Lǐ Bái 李白 and Dù Fǔ 杜甫 at the head and Táo Yuānmíng 陶潛 and Ruǎn Jí 阮籍 just behind them, while taking aim at the SūHuáng aesthetic — Sū Shì 蘇軾 and Huáng Tíngjiān 黃庭堅 — for substituting cleverness and dexterity for moral substance. The book divides past poets into five grades and offers thirty-odd entries devoted exclusively to Dù Fǔ, the most extensive Dù-criticism in any Sòng shīhuà before Hú Zǐ 胡仔.

Tiyao

Suìhántáng shīhuà, by Zhāng Jiè of the Sòng. Qián Zēng’s 錢曾 Dúshū mǐnqiú jì 讀書敏求記 writes him as Zhào Jiè 趙戒 — a copyist’s error. Examination shows that Jiè’s name is preserved incidentally in the Sòng shǐ biography of Zhào Dǐng 趙鼎, but with no detail of his life. Only Lǐ Xīnchuán’s 李心傳 Jiànyán yǐlái xìnián yàolù 建炎以來繫年要錄 records that Jiè was a man of Zhèngpíng 正平 and that in the fourth month of Shàoxīng 5 (1135), on Zhào Dǐng’s recommendation, he was summoned for audience and appointed Guózǐ jiān chéng; Dǐng said of him that he had “passed the examination more than ten years before and had once held office as xiànlìng”, so he must have been a jìnshì candidate. The Yàolù further records that in the third month of Shàoxīng 8 (1138) Jiè was Bīngbù yuánwài láng acting as Jiānchá yùshǐ; in the eighth month of that year acting Diànzhōng shì yùshǐ; in the eleventh Sīnóng shàoqīng; thereupon dismissed to the provinces for memorialising to retain Zhào Dǐng. In Shàoxīng 12 (1142) Luó Rǔjí 羅汝楫 impeached him as an obstructor of the peace negotiations and a partisan of Zhào Dǐng and Yuè Fēi, and he was specially dismissed. In the ninth month of Shàoxīng 27 (1157) he was made Zuǒ xuānjiào láng in charge of the Chóngdào guàn in Tāizhōu; his death is not noted, and he presumably ended his days in the sinecure. Jiè was originally known to Gāozōng for his straight speech in court; he held that “peace must be the outer stance, preparation the inner substance, and war the last resort”, a view that struck contemporary opinion as sound — so at the Huáixī campaign he savagely impeached Zhāng Jùn 張浚 and Zhào Kāi 趙開, while later, when Qín Huì wanted to humble the court and sue for peace, he again blocked it, in the end being expelled together with Zhào Dǐng. He was, in short, an upright and clear-spoken official.

The book is a comprehensive critical assessment of poets ancient and modern. Tracing back from Sū Shì and Huáng Tíngjiān of the Sòng up to the HànWèi, the fēng and the sāo, he divides them into five grades. The main thrust is to honour Lǐ Bái and Dù Fǔ and to elevate Táo Qián and Ruǎn Jí; he opens with the doctrine of yán zhì 言志 (poetry as the voicing of the will) and closes with the doctrine of wú xié 無邪 (innocence of motive) — one may call him no swerver from the orthodox. His remarks that the Táng courtiers’ poems on Yáng Tàizhēn’s 楊太眞 [i.e. Yáng Guìfēi] affair were all without propriety, and that Dù Fǔ alone framed his words decorously, are particularly nourishing of public morals and rectifying of human hearts. He further devotes more than thirty entries exclusively to the poems of Dù Fǔ — most of them matter not touched on in other Sòng shīhuà. The Shuō fú 說郛 and the Xuéhǎi lèibiān 學海類編 both carry the book in only three or four sparse pages; the present edition, from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典, preserves it complete. There are however two entries lost in this Dàdiǎn copy that survive in the Xuéhǎi lèibiān; we have here respectfully added them, so that the whole work may be complete. The Mǐnqiú jì recension was in one juǎn; we have, the page-count being substantial, divided it into upper and lower juǎn.

Abstract

The Suìhántáng shīhuà was composed in the middle decades of the twelfth century — the date cannot be tied to a single year, but the political quarrels with Qín Huì recorded in the Yàolù place Zhāng’s last active years between 1138 and 1157, and the book is plausibly the product of that long retirement. It is the principal Southern-Sòng counterweight to the dominant SūHuáng aesthetic of the late Northern Sòng. Where Sū Shì had championed kū dàn 枯淡 (austere flavor) and Huáng Tíngjiān technical ingenuity, Zhāng goes back behind both to insist on the Shījīng doctrine of yán zhì — poetry as moral self-articulation — and on the canonical formula sī wú xié 思無邪 (Lúnyǔ 2.2). The opening entry of the upper juǎn sets out his five-grade ranking, with Lǐ Bái and Dù Fǔ at the top, Táo Yuānmíng and Ruǎn Jí next, and so on. His scattergun critique of Sū and Huáng — that they “could write only with skill, not with feeling” — was directly answered by Yán Yǔ’s 嚴羽 Cānglàng shīhuà KR4i0035 half a century later, where the same charge is reframed as the celebrated distinction between cí lǐ and yì xìng.

The textual transmission is unusual. The book had largely vanished by the early Míng — the Shuō fú and Xuéhǎi lèibiān preserved only three or four pages each. The Sìkù editors recovered an essentially complete two-juǎn recension from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn and supplemented it with two further entries from the Xuéhǎi lèibiān; this is the form transmitted in the WYG. Qián Zēng’s Dúshū mǐnqiú jì, which listed the work in one juǎn and (in transcription) confused 張戒 with the surname 趙, was the principal pre-Qing bibliographic notice. The Sìkù editors’ division into upper and lower juǎn is a redactional decision; the original numbering of entries appears to have been continuous.

The book’s most-cited passage is the Lùn Dùshī entry on Dù Fǔ as the jí dàchéng 集大成 (“collected great culmination”) of the entire poetic tradition — a formulation that would echo through later Dù-criticism — and the contiguous attack on Sū and Huáng for “having ruined poetry by treating it as a kind of literary game.” Zhāng’s reading of Táo Yuānmíng as second only to LǐDù is also significant: it pushes Táo a grade higher than Zhōng Róng 鍾嶸 had ranked him in the Shīpǐn KR4i0003 and helps consolidate the Sòng reassessment of Táo that runs from Sū Shì through Zhū Xī 朱熹.

Translations and research

• Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), 421–424 and 596 — partial translation of selected passages, with critical commentary placing the work against the Sū-Huáng aesthetic.
• Chén Yīng-luán 陳應鸞, Suìhán-táng shīhuà jiào jiān 歲寒堂詩話校箋 (Sìchuān: Bā-Shǔ shū-shè, 2000) — the standard modern Chinese critical edition with full annotation.
• Zhāng Bó-wěi 張伯偉, Quán Sòng shīhuà jiào kǎo 全宋詩話校考 (Zhōnghuá, 2009), includes Zhāng Jiè among the principal Southern-Sòng critics.
• Adele Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (Princeton, 1978) — broader context for Zhāng’s yán zhì doctrine.
• Guō Shào-yǔ 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), 80–84 — the standard bibliographical study of the work’s transmission.

Other points of interest

The book is the most extensive single Sòng shīhuà of Dù Fǔ (~30 entries devoted to him), and its reading of Dù as the jí dàchéng of the tradition anticipates the canonical valuation of the MíngQīng period. Zhāng’s polemic against SūHuáng’s jiāngxī aesthetic places him alongside Lǚ Běnzhōng 呂本中 (KR4i0015) on the conservative wing of Southern-Sòng poetic theory; together they prepare the ground for Yán Yǔ’s 嚴羽 sterner attack in the Cānglàng shīhuà KR4i0035.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikipedia 歲寒堂詩話