This paper is intended first as a tribute to my teacher, and second as a small contribution to the perennial discussion of the place or extent of the tragic in Chinese literature. I shall plead limited space as excuse for refraining from philosophical discussion, definition, or comparison with Classical Greek or Shakespearean manifestations of the tragic. My suggestion will be simply that P'i-p'a chi ‘Lute song’ (hereafter ‘Lute’) may be added to Kuan Han-ch'ing's Ton O yuan and the ‘Red chamber dream ‘on that select list of Chinese works which in the conflicts they present and the resolutions they propose tend towards the tragic.

“Where ideology restricts, art frees …”: the opening section of T. A. Hsia's paper provides an eloquent statement of a fundamental distinction, a distinction which is at the centre of a dilemma. How is a group of men whose inclinations and commitments are to literature as art to approach a literature which is ideological in inspiration and intent? For this, we agreed, is a fair statement of the nature of Chinese Communist literature. It is more than a matter of guidance, or direction or control. It is not at all to be taken for granted that control is disastrous for literature. Great works of literature emerged in the past from under the control of despotic monarchs and authoritarian religions. Dante did not necessarily understand the authority of the Church to impose some kind of fetter on his work; it was a measure of restricted freedom that Chinese writers of the past knew and felt at home in. Great literature endures, as Mao Tun maintains, “not because literature is independent of politics but because it serves in a way much more profound than can be assessed at the moment.”

What pessimistic observers have lamented as the collapse of Chinese civilisation is exactly the necessary undermining and erosion without which there could not have been a regeneration of an old civilisation.… The product of this rebirth looks suspiciously occidental. But scratch the surface and you will find that the stuff of which it is made is essentially the Chinese bedrock which much weathering and corrosion have only made stand out more clearly—the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilisation of the new world.

Appended to this article are two excerpts from Lao She's writings. The first comprises most of a chapter from his first novel; the second is a brief sequence from one of his latest plays. Each is concerned to establish a character, a man who has found his niche in society. Each of these men is quite peripheral to the piece in which he appears, each is a humble creature anxious only to do right by his fellows. On Chao Number Four are lavished all the colourful touches which leap from the brush of a young writer glorying in invention; Wang Jen-te is sketched with the master's economy of line. But the greater contrast appears in the resolution of the two men's respective fates: Chao, pressed down by his own ingenuousness and the cupidity of others into the trough of the “old society” as a beast of burden; Wang Jen-te, proud recipient of a new dignity as chef de cuisine to a People's Commune!

During the Yenan period the Chinese Communists built up a literature as they built up a party organisation and an army: as an instrument of policy, fashioned in accordance with Marxist principles. Like the organisation and like the army, the literature served the needs of the time. Plays, poems, stories, novels, ballads, reportages flowed in profusion from professional writers emerged from Kuomintang jails; from trainees of the Lu Hsün Academy in Yenan itself; from farmers and soldiers who after initial success were welcomed into the ranks of “art workers.” These writings whipped up popular support for the new government and established flesh-and-blood examples of behaviour-patterns for the new society. More effectively than any textbook of theory, they gave instruction in practical Communism.

In a previous article I described certain features of that form of Chinese short story which is most conveniently known as hua-pen. Illustrations were taken in the main from a number of stories of the Ku chin hsiao shuo, a collection published in Soochow in or about the year 1621.

As I indicated, however, the stories of the Ku chin hsiao shuo show wide variations in age and in the degree to which they qualify to be regarded as genuine hua-pen, that is to say, as written versions of the actual stories told by the story-tellers of the Sung, Yüan, or Ming periods.

The classification hua-pen. covers a small but important part of the A vast corpus of Chinese fiction. The term is sometimes translated ‘promptbooks ‘,and was applied first to the written texts used by the market-place story-tellers of the Sung period, and later to new versions, fashioned by writers, of the tales these men had told. The stories of the Ching pen t'ung su hsiao shuo may fairly be described as hua-pen in this second sense.1