PREFACE
Yün, I think, is one of the loveliest women in Chinese literature. She is not the most beautiful, for the author, her husband, does not make that claim, and yet who can deny that she is the loveliest? She is just one of those charming women one sometimes sees in the homes of one's friends, so happy with their husbands that one cannot fall in love with them. One is glad merely to know that such a woman exists in the world and to know her as a friend's wife, to be accepted in her household, to be able to come uninvited to her home for lunch, or to have her put a blanket around one's legs when one falls asleep while she is discussing painting and literature and cucumbers in her womanish manner with her husband. I dare say there are a number of such women in every generation, except that in Yün I seem to feel the qualities of a cultivated and gentle wife combined to a greater degree of perfection than falls within our common experience. For who would not like to go out secretly with her against her parents' wish to the Taihu Lake and see her elated at the sight of the wide expanse of water, or watch the moon with her by the Bridge of Ten Thousand Years? And who would not like to go with her, if she were living in England, and visit the British Museum,where she would see the medieval illuminated manuscripts with tears of delight? Therefore, when I say that she is one of the loveliest women in Chinese literature and Chinese history—for she was a real person—I do not think I have exaggerated.
Did Shen Fu, her husband, perhaps idealize her? I hardly think so. The reader will be convinced of this when he reads the story itself. He made no effort to whitewash her or himself. In him, too, lived the spirit of truth and beauty and the genius for resignation and contentment so characteristic of Chinese culture. I cannot help wondering what this commonplace scholar must have been like to inspire such a pure and loyal love in his wife, and to be able to appreciate it so much as to write for us one of the tenderest accounts of wedded love we have ever come across in literature. Peace be to his soul! His ancestral tomb is on the Hill of Good Fortune and Longevity in the neighbourhood of Soochow, and if we are lucky, we may still be able to find it. I do not think it would be wrong to prepare some incense and fruits and say some prayers on our knees to these two sweet souls. If I were there, I would whistle the melodies of Maurice Ravel's “Pavane,” sad as death, yet smiling,or perhaps Massenet's “Melodie,” tender and resigned and beautiful and purged of all exciting passions. For in the presence of these souls,one's spirit also becomes humble, not before the great, but before the small, things of life, for I truly believe that a humble life happily lived is the most beautiful thing in the universe. Inevitably, while reading and re-reading and going over this little booklet, my thoughts are led to the question of happiness. For those who do not know it, happiness is a problem, and for those who do know it, happiness is a mystery. The reading of Shen Fu's story gives one this sense of the mystery of happiness, which transcends all bodily sorrows and actual hardships—similar, I think, to the happiness of an innocent man condemned to a life-long sentence with the consciousness of having done no wrong,the same happiness that is so subtly depicted for us in Tolstoy's “Resurrection,” in which the spirit conquers the body. For this reason,I think the life of this couple is one of the saddest and yet at the same time “gayest” lives, the type of gaiety that bears sorrow so well.
The Chinese title for this book is “Fousheng Liuchi” or “Six Chapters of a Floating Life,” of which only four remain.(The reference is to a passage in Li Po's poem, “Our floating life is like a dream; how often can one enjoy oneself?”)In form, it is unique, an autobiographical story mixed with observations and comments on the art of living, the little pleasures of life, some vivid sketches of scenery and literary and art criticism. The extant version was first published in 1877 by Yang Yinch'üan, who picked it up from a secondhand bookstore, with the two last chapters missing. According to the author's own testimony, he was born in 1763, and the fourth chapter could not have been written before 1808. A brother-in-law of Yang's and a well-known scholar, by the name of Wang T'ao, had seen the book in his childhood, so that it is likely that the book was known in the neighbourhood of Soochow in the second or third decade of the nineteenth century. From Kuan Yi-ngo's poems and from the known headings of the last chapters, we know that the Fifth Chapter recorded his experiences in Formosa, while the Sixth Chapter contained the author's reflections on the way of life. I have the fond hope that some complete copy of the book is still lying somewhere in some private collections or secondhand shops of Soochow, and if we are lucky, it is not altogether impossible that we may discover it still.
LIN YUTANG
Shanghai,
May 24,1935.
