12
TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)READING 27.
Q What aspects of this selection reflect East Asian
attitudes toward nature and the natural?
Q How does Shen Fu suggest the fragility of life?Romantic Landscape Painting
12 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature12
life history: the death of his beloved wife. The story also
functions as a reminder that all of nature is fragile and
impermanent.From Shen Fu’sSix Chapters
from a Floating Life(1809)
As a young man I was excessively fond of flowers and loved to 1
prune and shape potted plants and trees. When I met Chang
Lan-p’o he began to teach me the art of training branches and
supporting joints, and after I had mastered these skills, he
showed me how to graft flowers. Later on, I also learned the
placing of stones and designing of rockeries.
The orchid we considered the peerless flower, selecting it as
much for its subtle and delicate fragrance as for its beauty and
grace. Fine varieties of orchids were very difficult to find,
especially those worthy of being recorded in the Botanical 10
Register. When Lan-p’o was dying he gave me a pot of spring
orchids of the lotus type, with broad white centres, perfectly
even “shoulders,” and very slender stems. As the plant was a
classic specimen of its type, I treasured its perfection like a
piece of ancient jade. Yuen took care of it whenever my work
as yamen secretary^1 called me away from home. She always
watered it herself and the plant flourished, producing a
luxuriant growth of leaves and flowers.
One morning, about two years later, it suddenly withered
and died. When I dug up the roots to inspect them, I saw that 20
they were as white as jade, with many new shoots beginning
to sprout. At first, I could not understand it. Was I just too
unlucky, I wondered, to possess and enjoy such beauty?
Sighing despondently, I dismissed the matter from my mind.
But some time later I found out what had really happened. It
seemed that a person who had asked for a cutting from the
plant and had been refused, had then poured boiling water on
it and killed it. After that, I vowed never to grow orchids again.
Azaleas were my second choice. Although the flowers had
no fragrance they were very beautiful and lasted a long time. 30
The plants were easy to trim and to train, but Yuen loved the
green of the branches and leaves so much that she would not
let me cut them back, and this made it difficult for me to train
them to correct shapes. Unfortunately, Yuen felt this way about
all the potted plants that she enjoyed.
Every year, in the autumn, I became completely devoted to
the chrysanthemum. I loved to arrange the cut flowers in vases
but did not like the potted plants. Not that I did not think the
potted flowers beautiful, but our house having no garden, it
wasimpossible for me to grow the plants myself, and those for 40
sale at the market were overgrown and untrained; not at all
what I would have chosen.
One day, as I was sweeping my ancestral graves in the hills,
I found some very unusual stones with interesting streaks and
lines running through them. I talked to Yuen about them when I
went home.
“When Hsüan-chou stones are mixed with putty and
arranged in white-stone dishes, the putty and stones blend
well and the effect is very harmonious,” I remarked. “Theseyellow stones from the hills are rugged and old-looking, but if 50
we mix them with putty the yellow and white won’t blend. All
the seams and gaps will show up and the arrangement will
look spotty. I wonder what else we could use instead of putty?”
“Why not pick out some of the poor, uninteresting stones
and pound them to powder,” Yuen said. “If we mix the
powdered stones with the putty while it is still damp, the
colour will probably match when it dries.”
After doing as she suggested, we took a rectangular I-hsing
pottery dish and piled the stones and putty into a miniature 60
mountain peak on the left side of it, with a rocky crag jutting
out towards the right. On the surface of the mountain, we
made criss-cross marks in the style of the rocks painted by Ni
Tsan^2 of the Yuan dynasty. This gave an effect of perspective
and the finished arrangement looked very realistic—a
precipitous cliff rising sharply from the rocks at the river’s
edge. Making a hollow in one corner of the dish, we filled it
with river mud and planted it with duckweed. Among the rocks
we planted “clouds of the pine trees,” bindweed. It was
several days before the whole thing was finished. 70
Before the end of autumn the bindweed had spread all over
the mountain and hung like wistaria from the rocky cliff. The
flowers, when they bloomed, were a beautiful clear red. The
duckweed, too, had sprouted luxuriantly from the mud and was
now a mass of snowy white. Seeing the beauty of the
contrasting red and white, we could easily imagine ourselves
in Fairyland.
Setting the dish under the eaves, we started discussing
what should be done next, developing many themes: “Here
there should be a lake with a pavilion—” “This spot calls for a 80
thatched summerhouse—” “This is the perfect place for the
six-character inscription ‘Place of Falling Flowers and Flowing
Water’”—“Here we could build our house—here go fishing—
here enjoy the view”; becoming, by this time, so much a part of
the tiny landscape, with its hills and ravines, that it seemed to
us as if we were really going to move there to live.
One night, a couple of mis-begotten cats, fighting over food,
fell off the eaves and hit the dish, knocking it off its stand and
smashing it to fragments in an instant. Neither of us could help
crying. 90
“Isn’t it possible,” I sighed, “to have even a little thing like
this without incurring the envy of the gods?”Landscape painting originated as an independent genre
not in the West, but in the East. While the ancient
Romans had devised naturalistic settings for mythological
subjects (see Figure 6.28), it was in tenth-century China
that landscape painting first became a subject in and of itself(^2) A famous landscape painter (1301–1374) of the Yuan dynasty
(^1) A government clerk. (1279–1368).