Yun, 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 Yun I seem to feel the qualities of a cultivated and gentle wife combined to a greater degree of perfection than what falls within our common experience. For who would not like to go out secretly with her against her parent’s 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.
Her life, in the words of Su Dongpo, “was like a spring dream which vanished without a trace.” Had it not been for a literary accident, we might not have known that such a woman lived, loved and suffered. I am translating her story just because it is one that should be told to the whole world; on the one hand, to propagate her name, and on the other, because in this simple story of two guileless creatures in their search for beauty, living a life of poverty and privations, decidedly outwitted by life and their cleverer fellowmen, yet determined to snatch every moment of happiness and always fearful of the jealousy of the gods, I seem to see the essence of a Chinese way of life as really lived by two persons who happened to be husband and wife. Two ordinary artistic persons who did not accomplish anything particularly noteworthy in the world, but merely loved the beautiful things in life, lived their quiet life with some good friends after their own heart—―ostensibly failures, and happy in their failure. They were too good to be successful, for they were retiring, cultivated souls, and the fact that they were disowned by their elders could not be counted against them, but was all to their credit. The cause of the tragedy lay simply in the fact that she knew how to read and write and that she loved beauty too much to know that loving beauty was wrong. As a daughter-in-law who could read and write, she had the unpleasant task of writing letters for her mother-in-law to her father-in-law away who wanted to marry a concubine, and she got so excited over a sing-song girl that she secretly arranged to have her husband take her as his concubine, and fell seriously ill because a more powerful young man snatched her away. There we see an elementary, though entirely innocent, conflict between her artistic temperament and the world of reality, a conflict further seen in her disguising herself as a man in order to see the “illuminated flowers” on a god’s birthday. Was it morally wrong for a woman to disguise herself as a man or to take a passionate interest in a beautiful sing-song girl? If so, she could not have been conscious of it. She merely yearned to see and know the beautiful things in life, beautiful things which lay not within the reach of moral women in ancient China to see. It was the same artistically innocent, but morally indecorous, urge that made her wish to travel like a man to all the famous mountains in China which, since she could not do as a moral young woman, she was willing to look forward to in her old age. But she did not see the mountains, for she had already seen a beautiful sing-song girl, and that was indecorous enough for her parents to disown her as a sentimental young fool, and the rest of her life had to be spent in a struggle with poverty, with too little leisure and money for such delights as climbing famous mountains.
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 efforts 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 outskirt of Suzhou, 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 rereading 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 “gravest” lives, the type of gaiety that bears sorrow so well.
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