Since the Opium War, Daimon Masaru, China, has opened, and China people who have been devastated by external forces admire Western learning. 1905, the Qing court abolished the imperial examination, opened a wide range of schools, and all the educational systems and courses were westernized. Western missionaries also contributed to this, trying to replace Confucianism with Christianity. After the May 4th New Culture Movement, all directions in the society regarded the old school as a lost thing and wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. 1920, the government of the Republic of China officially announced the replacement of classical Chinese with vernacular Chinese. Today, a century is about to pass. For the vast majority of China people, ancient books have become sacred books, and the cultural barrier between traditional cultural resources and the value of the new era is about to form.
Ye Jiaying, a famous lyricist, is deeply worried about this situation. She said: "It is the sorrow of modern young people to guard a treasure mountain without knowing it, or even to do illegal things for pleasure." Do China's classical poems really contain profound cultural connotations that can inspire people, or have nothing to do with modern people's daily life and must be abandoned in that pile of old paper?
In her new book "Fine print is elegance-the cultivation and realm of Ye Jiaying's characters", I saw her effective way to save people.
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This book is a compilation of Ye Jiaying's lectures at Nankai University. The content of the same topic was also given in the National College of Renmin University of China and Peking University, and published in Journal of Peking University. It is about how words reflect the cultivation and realm of life and how readers view this cultivation and realm. Such a grand generalization will inevitably make readers misunderstand that the content of this book is false and empty. But the spiritual guidance is really like an awakening, which hits people's hearts directly and cannot be impregnable.
The name "fine print" comes from the literati in the early Song Dynasty. Qian Ceng, a minister in the early Song Dynasty, said: "Read the history of classics when you sit down, read novels when you lie down, and read fine print when you go to the toilet." (Ouyang Xiu's Record of Returning to the Field, Volume II) Wang Anshi once laughed at Yan Shu and said, "Is it okay to write fine print for the Prime Minister?" (Wei Tai's Dong Xuanlu, Volume 5) Fa Yunxiu asked Huang Tingjian not to write. Huang Tingjian said, "Empty words will kill and steal. If you don't sit here, you will fall into evil." (Hui Hong's Cold Zhai Night Talk) Although Su Shi's bold ci works advocate the style of ci, in his letters to his friends, he said it was a "rather small word" (Yu Yu Zijun). All these show that literati despise words.
Why are words despised by literati? Words are leisure products from the beginning, and they are used for entertainment when drinking, so the origin of words is not good. Song Yan Ci has established a gaudy style tradition for itself since it came into being. The beauty of words is completely different from that of poetry. If poetry is serious because it expresses ambition and the poet's ideals and feelings are reflected in it, then the words are mainly about beauty and love, not serious. Poetry is serious, words are narrow and evil. How can elegance exist in such a flashy and narrow-minded small print? This actually involves the elegant process of words.
Elegance of Ci is a case-solving problem in the history of Ci studies. From the late Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, the efforts of literati to refine Ci never stopped, and the voice of the dispute between elegance and vulgarity always echoed in the history of Ci. In essence, the process of elegance of words is from writing beauty and love directly to the literati expressing their feelings through writing beauty and love. To put it bluntly, it reminds readers of beauty and love, which can reflect the unique political ideal and personality pursuit of literati.