Page:A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919).djvu/173

 conveys no moral whatever. He admits, indeed, that among his "miscellaneous stanzas" many were inspired by some momentary sensation or passing event. "A single laugh or a single sigh were rapidly translated into verse."

The didactic poems or "satires" belong to the period before his first banishment. "When the tyrants and favourites heard my Songs of Ch'in, they looked at one another and changed countenance," he boasts. Satire, in the European sense, implies wit; but Po's satires are as lacking in true wit as they are unquestionably full of true poetry. We must regard them simply as moral tales in verse.

In the conventional lyric poetry of his predecessors he finds little to admire. Among the earlier poems of the T'ang dynasty he selects for praise the series by Ch'ēn Tzŭ-ang, which includes "Business Men." In Li Po and Tu Fu he finds a deficiency of "fēng" and "ya." The two terms are borrowed from the Preface to the Odes. "Fēng" means "criticism of one's rules"; "ya," "moral guidance to the masses."

"The skill," he says in the same letter, "which Tu Fu shows in threading on to his lü-shih a ramification of allusions ancient and modern could not be surpassed; in this he is even superior to Li Po. But, if we take the 'Press-gang' and verses like that stanza:

what a small part of his whole work it represents!"

Content, in short, he valued far above form: and it was part of his theory, though certainly not of his practice, that this content ought to be definitely moral. He aimed at raising poetry from the triviality into which it had sunk and [ 167 ]