Intolerance of the Song Literati towards “Vulgarity”

Xinda Lian     Denison University

 

            The Song period witnessed significant changes in aesthetic ideal in every sphere of its intellectual life. In literature, the criterion of blandness (pingdan) became at this time a generally embraced value. In calligraphy, individual style was highly evaluated, and spontaneity and casualness were preferred to skill and technique. The same held true in literati painting. In line with the above, crudeness or clumsiness (zhuo ), a term borrowed from the Dao de jing, which had pejorative implications before the Song, was now used in the criticism of literature and art to refer to desirable qualities only. What underlay these trends were the intellectual elite’s earnest quest for an elegant high taste and its intolerance towards all forms of vulgarity. In their conscious effort to foster a strong sense of group identity, Song literati saw themselves as the privileged few who are different from “craftsmen,” and whose mission it was to capture the essence or the ineffable qualities of things with intuition and insight, and to express them in literature and art in a seemingly effortless manner. The tenacity with which they pursued this aesthetic ideal was quite comparable to their insistence on the originality of scholarship and on their independent political thinking in the public domain.

            The intolerance of the culturally refined towards vulgarity, however, was entangled with social snobbery. Song literati would not hesitate to associate vulgarity with deliberative effort and skill and fastidious perfection, which they thought belonged to the craft of hand and could be achieved through mechanical practice. Their low opinion of artifice and technique had much to do with what Jacque Garnet terms the deeply rooted contempt of the pure intellectual for the physical effort and aptitude which started from Song times and was to persist down to the modern day. The elitist amateurism of the scholar-connoisseurs (not really a paradox), together with their proud awareness of their intellectual ability to enjoy literature and art, and to engage in various kinds of elegant pastimes (art collecting and antiquarianism, art of garden, adopting elegant sobriquets with transcendental connotations, etc., to name just a few), had subtle psychological effects on the way they viewed themselves and others.