The Complete Works of Xu Zhimo's Classical Prose

Chapter 42 Laughing at Life's Hibiscus Bird (14)
The Chinese do not recognize the soul, deny consciousness, and the unique will that is active under the original force, partly through restraint, partly through sublimation, is introduced into a "safe" and effective way.The Chinese become such a creature that there is no religion, no love, not even any kind of spiritual adventure.Sincere friends such as Rose Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, and Miss Irene Ball praised our sober attitude to life, love of moderation, common sense and politeness, and so on.But for me, accepting this compliment comes with a bit of biting irony.Because of a calm attitude towards life, what else can it do but obviously deny life and suffocate the flame of emotion?What else can love of the mean be but a beautiful excuse for cowardice in thought and action, and a shallow and monotonous life?The so-called flattering rationalism and self-effacing spirit produce only a common habit and that absurd monster we call the government of the Republic of China!Ah, do our friends know at what cost we have maintained an apparently peaceful way of life?And this way of life has lately been the envy of an extremist and turbulent West. Mr. HG Wells once said to me that what we want today is peace, peace, peace, but not a timid, monotonous, suffocating, lazy peace. I mean proactive, lively, A creative peace, such as the one achieved in ancient Athens.Therefore, we are indeed too rational for passionate love and passionate religious thought.Plato's "divine madness" love is irrational. Those who are familiar with Catholic teachings should have heard that love is regarded as "the great sacrament" in Catholic teachings, which is similar to the incarnation. The reason why it is not Rational simply because it is beyond reason.Coventry Patmore writes, "This radically irrational emotion, which provides a justification for invective, is one of the surest guarantees of love, and its chief source of inexhaustible interest and power. Apart from scientists, Who else is so valued and deeply moved by that which is less than our own and can be understood by us? Therefore, love is like religion, for religion is divine universal love, transcendent and sanctified. Because of its Sanctified by a mystical power that the human eye can see, and thus see pictures that belong to the spiritual realm, but these pictures are not usually considered the norms of reality. The human ear will be conquered by the majestic and sublime music. This Music is like a vast wave from the sky. This spiritual transcendence enables the previously dead creative potential to begin to liberate itself and to strive to realize its own volume and shape through any avenue it can choose." Love is deeper than any other emotion The earth is rooted in the earth, so its head rises to heaven like a holy tree.Giving them substance and believability, the height demands and demonstrates depth.It is by no means a cliché to speak of love as the most vital and potential source of creativity, and if you take away sexual passion and all that goes with it, you will be astonished to find that European culture and art are irretrievably bankrupt.Any man or woman who does not deny or distort life and truth, need not be a Freudian, will admit, or at least feel, that love, though not serious, is the most meaningful of all things.However, this simple truth has never been recognized in the long and sick Chinese history.Even today, my personal experience has led me to discover only two types of people in this respect: the cynic who despises love and the coward who fears it.Had the tree of knowledge grown in the center of the Chinese Empire instead of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve would have remained pure creatures, blinded and insensitive to their inner calling of life.God is not too angry at the trouble caused by the heroism of the serpent and the curiosity of Eve.

The implications of the destiny that this saint has drawn out for us as an almost dry series of ethical platitudes rob and stifle our imagination.You have only to look at our novels and poems to believe how limited the role of the imagination is.None of our poets, except perhaps Li Bai, is considered cosmopolitan.Isn't this worth thinking about?Is it not astonishing that we have no one in our literary roster to rival Goethe, Shelley, Wordsworth, let alone Dante and Shakespeare?Speaking of other arts, who can compare with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, Correggio, Will Esquith, Wagner, Beethoven and many other geniuses? ?By analogy, is it the nature of our race that we will always be different from the rest of the world?Since the difference is one of degree, not kind, is our imagination born undernourished and underdeveloped?The artistic heritage we have cannot encompass life as a whole. Does that mean that we are inherently inferior to the West?For all great works of art claim to contain life.From an early age we are trained by sight and will to fit the practical details, to the lifeless rituals of life, instead of revealing the mysteries of the great life, and awakening the hope of the great life.This is a great failure of Chinese education. It leads to the death of real personality and endlessly creates outstanding mediocrity.

The very source of life, the source of joy, and the faculties of imagination, these natural springs are relentlessly thwarted, and our existence is indeed pitiful.The poverty of life will inevitably lead to the poverty of art.A fulfilling and beautiful life will spontaneously blossom into real species, and will eventually affect our understanding of eternity.A tree full of vitality must have luxuriant branches and leaves, and the fruits it bears are colorful.Likewise, a life imbued with self-awareness naturally bears fruit in the crystallized art of thought, or in deeds worthy of nostalgia.So enrich, amplify, multiply, intensify; above all spiritualize your life so that art is born.

As for the stagnation and superficiality of Chinese art and life, I have already said that I have condemned enough.Now, let us temporarily turn our attention to the consistency of art and life expressed in Western history.Here, as elsewhere, it is best to turn to ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy for enlightenment and wisdom.

In my opinion, the greatest achievement of Greek culture lies not in politics, let alone science and metaphysics, but in discovering the dignity and beauty of the human body.Winkelmann, a great German artist during the Renaissance, said: "No nation respects beauty like the Greeks. The priest in charge of Ega, the young Jupiter god, Ismini Apollo god, and walking in Tanagra The priests at the front of the Mercury worship procession and carrying the lamb on their shoulders are young people who have won a good reputation. The Greeks are so eager for beauty and cherish beauty. Every beautiful person is willing to show beauty to everyone, especially to let artists prove it. This beauty, because they confer this honor. Because of this, the artist always has the opportunity to see the supreme beauty in front of him. Beauty can even bring prestige: we have seen the most beautiful and outstanding people in the history of Greece... The Greeks revered beauty It is so common that Spartan women hang up pictures of Narrius, Naxos, or Hyasis in their bedrooms, in the hope of bearing beautiful children." Here, of course, as in other respects, there is its important role.It is no accident that the Greeks were so willing to transform their perceptions and relations to the mundane world into sensible objects: they endowed them with beautiful bodies and intellectual understandings.The elegant air that calls for feelings lightly and sweetly, the beautiful natural scenery, the wonderful human body structure, and the delicate facial contours are all the luck that the Greeks brought into their lives.Beauty, like genius or high status, becomes an honor.Open the comparative physiology section of anthropology textbooks, and you will see naked human bodies of various races.I don't know if I remember, maybe a book by the Frenchman Courier, with an unabashed description of the Japanese nude dancers, and then you turn to the beautiful Venus or Apollo, and you have a kind of A sense of both comfort and uneasiness: how naughty and unjust the Creator was in shaping the different shapes and proportions of different peoples, not to mention the complexion and smell of black beauty.

However, the Greeks' fascination with beauty does not mean that they are an irresponsible aestheticism nation.On the contrary, the Greeks pay attention to beauty, and only dedicate beauty to the realization of a good life, and the perfect integration of different souls.It is thanks to the perfect and sound intellect of the Greeks that the ultimate good is possible and finally manifested in the form of beauty.One of the greatest documents of mankind, Plato's "Republic" is a philosophy of beauty through and through. It talks about establishing the connection between goodness and beauty, which can lead to the unity of ideal personal moral expression and good life.The uniqueness of the Greeks is that they treated life and art in the same way.For them, and only for them, art and life are a unity.The Greeks looked at art and life with the same standard, and they regarded art as the real self-consciousness of life.Significantly, their gentlemanly word "Kalos kagathos" means beautiful goodness.

If the precious heritage left to us by the Greeks is the discovery of the human body, then the gift brought to us by the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century is the discovery and embodiment of the human spirit.Like China today, the Renaissance was a great era of rebellion, a multifaceted and unified movement, which restored the independence and dignity of the people who had been oppressed and suppressed for a long time, and restored the sense of reason and imagination. The love of things restores the desire to conceive life more freely and beautifully, to make men feel themselves, to make those who have this desire seek the meaning of one intellectual or imaginative enjoyment after another, to lead them not only to discover the old new sources, new experiences, new poetic themes, new art forms.This is an era rich in personality, broad, concentrated, and complete. The era of Lorenzo is like the era of Pericles. "Here the artist, the philosopher, and those who have become sharpened in the activities of the world, do not live alone, they breathe the same air, and find each other's light and heat in each other's thoughts. There is a universal nobility of spirit The spirit of Enlightenment, which communicates with all on an equal footing. The unity of the spirit gives identity to all the different products of the Renaissance. It is this intimate alliance of spirits, sharing the most advanced ideas produced by that era, that gave fifteenth-century Italian art its uniqueness. solemn dignity and far-reaching impact."

Spiritual unity is very important, it permeates art and life.The same force that has produced so many eminent men has given their art its heyday.Their art of astonishing beauty is imbued with the zest of life and the deepest and noblest emotions the human soul is capable of expressing.This unity of spirit led them to gradually realize and eventually acquire the personal power of complete self-expression, and at the same time to make them realize the objective reality of the universe, inaugurated the scientific method and led to the numerous discoveries that followed.

I have chosen the Greek and Renaissance periods to show that, more than any other period, I have chosen the Greek and Renaissance periods to show, more clearly than any other period, the human spirit in a cultural unity, in the potential of life. A life rich, passionate, vivid, and self-conscious with the opportunity for happiness of self-realization in maximum consistent expression. "Renaissance" is not completely inapplicable to modern China. If she wants to learn something from Western history, it should be Greek culture and the spirit of the Renaissance.As for the overconfident rationalism and the materialism that originated in the eighteenth century and prevailed in the nineteenth century, they both turned in an interesting direction, and finally ended up in a self-contradictory disaster, leaving only a few pseudo-scientists embracing furiously. Hold on to the experimental tools.Then there is the general awakening of optimistic Bolshevists who worship their God of All Rightness, Karl Marx, against a new idealism that makes humanity its creed and art its religion.If China has not completely exhausted its vitality and stifled its genius, we believe that she will join this movement with a joyful heart and an awakened soul, and will eventually prove worthy of her ancient heritage.If so, it won't be long before we can get rid of the dead habits and traditional shackles that characterize Chinese culture.After a long interval, as after the "Dark Ages" gave rise to the Renaissance, we shall once again see the radiance of the ideal of humanity, though we must admit that it is difficult to find signs of it at present, but we will eventually see it in full expression. A work of art fundamental to human beings, especially our species.I have always imagined that if we had a great musician or composer who could not only revive what was lost in the past, but also play out the long-suppressed voice of our great nation, he might be able to predict the maturity of our primitive spirit.Music is different from other arts, it is a true art form, and it is the standard of perfect art.Music moves the heart more deeply, conveys thoughts and feelings more convincingly, irresistibly, forcefully and ideally to the discerning.

Let me summarize what I want to say in this speech: I have briefly explained why Chinese art has failed in understanding and explaining life in general purely through the power of the imagination, while European art has more or less succeeded.I explore the relative status of our lives and art, the latter being a reflection of the former and the former responsible for the latter.

I also enumerate the achievements of ancient Greece and the Renaissance to show spiritual unity in the form of a perfect art, which is mainly humanistic.The same is true of our art.

(End of this chapter)