and all the great masters of song will answer you. This is an age
of professional poets, whom emperors and statesmen delight to honour.
With the Chinese, verse-making has always been a second nature.
It is one of the accomplishments which no man of education
would be found lacking. Colonel Cheng-Ki-Tong, in his delightful book
`The Chinese Painted by Themselves', says: "Poetry has been in China,
as in Greece, the language of the gods. It was poetry that inculcated
laws and maxims; it was by the harmony of its lines that traditions
were handed down at a time when memory had to supply the place of writing;
and it was the first language of wisdom and of inspiration."
It has been above all the recreation of statesmen and great officials,
a means of escape from the weariness of public life and the burden of ruling.
A study of the interminable biographies of Chinese poets and men of letters
would reveal but a few professional poets, men whose lives
were wholly devoted to their art; and of these few the T`ang dynasty
can claim nearly all. Yet strange as it may seem, this matters but little
when the quality of Chinese poetry is considered. The great men of the age
were at once servants of duty and the lords of life. To them official routine
and the responsibilities of the state were burdens to be borne
along the highway, with periods of rest and intimate re-union with nature
to cheer the travellers. When the heavy load was laid aside,
song rose naturally from the lips. Subtly connecting the arts,
they were at once painters and poets, musicians and singers.
And because they were philosophers and seekers after the beauty that underlies
the form of things, they made the picture express its own significance,
and every song find echo in the souls of those that heard.
You will find no tedium of repetition in all their poetry,
no thin vein of thought beaten out over endless pages. The following extract
from an ancient treatise on the art of poetry called `Ming-Chung'
sets forth most clearly certain ideals to be pursued: