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.