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Being Mild and Gentle, Sincere and Broadminded 139

used poetry to consolidate their rule, departing from the aesthetic interest of the
idea of being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded.
In fact, the aesthetic connotations of “being mild and gentle, sincere and
broadminded” in its later developments are not entirely encompassed by the six
arts of Confucianism. When Confucian scholars of the Han Dynasty stressed the
concept of being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded, they required poets to
be euphemistic and graceful in their tactful advice to the ruler, but in reality, when
poets report the hardships of people’s lives and criticized the ruler’s politics, they
often broke this pattern and expressed their political demands and feelings with
forceful language. The Han-dynasty “The Preface to The Book of Songs” talks about
the poets who composed poems in response to contemporary political turmoil:
“(Poets should be like) state historians who understand the facts of political gains
and losses, feel sorry for the corruption of human relations, and grieve at the
cruelty and harshness of penalties, so they recite poems to express their thoughts
and feelings, and thus admonish the ruler, which is a practice of understanding
the changes in current affairs while adhering to traditional customs.” So the
“Introduction” stresses that poets should shoulder historical responsibility and
when the state is at peril, they should “express their thoughts and feelings to
admonish the ruler.” This is the essence of the concept of being mild and gentle,
sincere and broadminded, which expresses Confucius’ literary idea that “poetry
can criticize injustice” and his spirit of resistance to the customs of the time.
During the Six Dynasties (referring to the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern
Dynasties, 220–589), scholars extended this aesthetic concept to the value of life.
The literati at that time believed that only in aesthetic and artistic activities could
people achieve spiritual transcendence and psychological solace. In his famous
)
“The Preface to the Critique of The Book of Songs,” (《诗品序》the Liang-dynasty
(502–557) literary critic Zhong Rong (钟嵘 ca. 468–ca. 518) cited various life mis-
fortunes as triggers for a poet’s creation: “Where all these things touch the soul,
how can one exhibit their meaning without writing a poem? How can one express
emotions without singing aloud? Therefore, it is said: ‘Poetry can help you
communicate with others and criticize injustice.’ So poetry is the best way to ease
the mind of those who are in a difficult situations, and to relieve the depression of
those who live in seclusion. Therefore, all poets love to write poems.” (Zhong, 1998,
pp. 20–21) Zhong Rong believed that authors at that time liked to write poems,
precisely because poems could relieve the worries of those who had suffered from
all kinds of misfortune in life by enabling them to express their emotions. In
contrast to the literary criticism of the Pre-Qin period and the Han Dynasty, which
mostly considered literary issues from a theoretical and discursive perspective, the
approach to literary criticism pioneered by Zhong Rong’s The Critique of Poetry (《诗
品》focuses more on human life experiences and analyzes the characteristics and
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