Tu Fu, whom his countrymen called the God of Verse, was born in the province
of Hu-Kuang, and this was his portrait from contemporaries:
He was tall and slightly built, yet robust with finely chiselled features;
his manners were exquisite, and his appearance distinguished.
He came of a literary family, and, as he says of himself,
from his seventh to his fortieth year study and letter occupied
all his available time. At the age of twenty-seven he came to the capital
with his fame in front of him, and there Li Po the poet and Ts`en-Ts`an
became his friends, and Ming Huang his patron. He obtained a post at Court
somewhat similar to that of Master of Ceremonies in our own Court.
Yet the poet had few sympathies outside the artistic life.
He was so unworldly and so little of a courtier that when the new Emperor
Su Tsung returned in triumph to the capital and appointed him Imperial Censor,
he fulfilled his new duties by telling his majesty the whole unpalatable truth
in a manner strangely free from ornamental apology, and was promptly rewarded
with the exile of a provincial governorship. But Tu Fu was no man of affairs,
and knew it. On the day of his public installation he took off
his insignia of office before the astonished notables, and, laying them
one by one on the table, made them a profound reverence, and quietly withdrew.
Like his friend Li Po, he became a homeless wanderer, but, unlike him,
he concealed his brilliant name, obtaining food and patronage
for his delightful nameless self alone, and not for his reputation's sake.
Finally, he was discovered by the military governor
of the province of Ssuch`uan, who applied on his behalf
for the post of Restorer of Ancient Monuments in the district,
the one congenial appointment of his life. For six years he kept his post;
then trouble in the shape of rebel hordes burst once more upon the province,
and again he became an exile. The last act of this eventful life
took place in his native district: some local mandarin gave a great banquet
in honour of the distinguished poet, whom he had rescued,
half drowned and famishing, from the ruined shrine by the shore
where the waters had cast him up. The wine-cup brimmed again and again,
food was piled up in front of the honoured guest, and the attendant who waited
was Death. The end was swift, sudden, and pitiful. The guest died
from the banquet of his rescuer.
Of all poets Tu Fu is the first in craftsmanship. It is interesting to add
that he was a painter as well, and the friend of painters,
notably the soldier-artist, Kiang-Tu, to whom he dedicates a poem.
Possibly it is to this faculty that he owes his superb technique.
He seeks after simplicity and its effects as a diver seeks
for sunken gold. In his poem called "The Little Rain",
which I have (perhaps somewhat rashly) attempted, there is
all the graciousness of fine rain falling upon sullen furrows,
which charms the world into spring. "The Recruiting Sergeant"
has the touch of grim desolation, which belongs inevitably to a country
plundered of its men and swept with the ruinous winds of rebellion.
Li Po gives us Watteau-like pictures of life in Ch`ang-an before the flight
of the Emperor. The younger poet paints, with the brush of Verestchagin,
the realism and horrors of civil war. In most of Tu Fu's work
there is an underlying sadness which appears continually,
sometimes in the vein that runs throughout the poem,
sometimes at the conclusion, and often at the summing up of all things.
Other poets have it, some more, some less, with the exception of those
who belong to the purely Taoist school. The reason is that the Chinese poet
is haunted. He is haunted by the vast shadow of a past without historians --
a past that is legendary, unmapped and unbounded, and yields, therefore,
Golcondas and golden lands innumerable to its bold adventurers.
He is haunted from out the crumbled palaces of vanished kings,
where "in the form of blue flames one sees spirits moving through
each dark recess." He is haunted by the traditional voices
of the old masters of his craft, and lastly, more than all,
by the dead women and men of his race, the ancestors that count
in the making of his composite soul and have their silent say
in every action, thought, and impulse of his life.