Innovative or Rather Traditional? Confucianising Tragedy in May Fourth China

A key aspect of the May Fourth Movement was the critical discussion of Western tragedy. While the interest in tragedy was sparked by the assumption that China lacked an analogous genre, its interpretation and adaptation to the Chinese context suggests that a traditional ‘indigenous’ filter was applied to define its supposed ‘modernity’. Through cross-comparing Chinese conceptions of beiju 悲剧 in the May Fourth era and traditional Chinese views of bei 悲, this paper will seek to show that the Chinese reception of tragedy was informed by the rejuvenation of traditional ideas rather than the introduction of purely ‘Western’ theories.


Introduction
China's first encounter with the theatrical form of Western tragedy happened during the late Qing dynasty and more precisely in the early years of the twentieth century, albeit indirectly via the mediation of Japanese translations of European literary and philosophical works. The compound word that designates 'tragedy' in modern Chinese, namely beiju, is in fact a historical neologism as well as a loanword from the Japanese higeki. The reception of tragedy and its integration within China's emerging "discourse of modernity" Kirk Denton amply highlights that May Fourth literary theory is generally characterised by a coexistence of radical and conservative forces. These, albeit apparently in reciprocal contrast, on a closer inspection clearly belong to a common root. Although tradition was attacked iconoclastically on many fronts, it was not at all destroyed but was -perhaps unwittingly -infused with a new life. As Denton puts it: "What the radicalness of promoting fiction cannot conceal is a profoundly traditional view of the social-moral function of literature" (Denton 1995, 67). As we shall see next, what he maintains with regard to Liang Qichao and his concurrently innovative and traditional view of fiction can be applied to beiju as well.
Below, I will argue that the newly-constructed, transcultured notion of beiju does not represent a complete break with the past as it is informed by traditional ideas embedded in Confucianism. Still, it certainly expresses a new and original take on an originally Western yet now globalised dramatic genre/intellectual category. The modern concept of beiju fits the definition of 'a site of contending discourses' (Denton 1995, 5), once again corroborating the idea that "traditional philosophical and literary values played a role in shaping the reception of those Western literary concepts" (33). I will endeavour to prove that the purpose of beiju as it emerges from the conceptualisation of May Fourth intellectuals is not the representation or aestheticisation of suffering and moral pain, but the arousal of a sense of compassion and indignation meant to facilitate the overcoming of melancholy, pessimism and passivity. Furthermore, and for the avoidance of any doubt, I shall anticipate that the present study is not meant to engage in-depth the long-standing question of whether or not China has ever produced plays that can be compared to tragedies in the Western sense of the term, 3 nor is it concerned with analysing the dramatic output that emerged between the 1920s and the 1940s and which was clearly inspired by Western tragic models. The reason for excluding consideration of the latter is that the focus of this paper is on how May Fourth writers and critics interpreted and recreated the perception of a foreign literary genre by applying a culturally-embedded filter to inform their analysis. Nevertheless, to show the characteristics of such a filter, some passing reference will inevitably be made to relevant traditional works of Chinese drama.

2
Tragedy in Late and Post-imperial China: Debating the Significance of beiju The notions of tragedy and comedy are generally absent from ancient Chinese dramatic theory. The term beiju 悲剧, which represents the Chinese translation of the word 'tragedy', entered modern Chinese through the influence of the Japanese theatre reform movement of the Meiji era . 'Tragedy' stems from the Greek word tragoidia, whose literal meaning is 'goat-song' (tragos: goat and oidia: song), possibly a reminiscence of a certain kind of ritual symbolism harking back to the sacrificial killing of a goat offered to Dionysus -the patron-god of drama in ancient Greece. Here, the emphasis is on performance and betrays the theatrical origins of tragedy as an artistic genre. Beiju, instead, might better translate as 'mourning play' or 'play of grief' (bei: sadness and ju: play) and, in its original Japanese translation (higeki 悲劇) was probably coined as a calque of the German word Trauerspiel. The latter is a form of bourgeois drama which originated in the 17th century pre-Enlightenment culture and which, in the words of his most famous theorist Walter Benjamin, is separated from tragedy by 'a gulf ' (1998, 135). Although a full discussion of the alleged differences between Trauerspiel and tragedy falls outside the scope of this essay, it is worth mentioning that, according to Benjamin, the contents and structure of the Trauerspiel were influenced by the Lutheran doctrine of human nature as irremediably corrupted by original sin. Therefore, unlike tragedy, which portrays the heroic deaths of mythological/legendary heroes acting out of hybris, Trauerspiel features characters who mourn their creaturely condition and whose demise is not caused by an act of wilful transgression but by their sinking into the ruthless cycle of history, whose undisputed ruler is Satan. In other words, while tragedy extols humanity, showing a tragic hero that is ultimately "superior to the gods" (Pensky 1993, 80), Trauerspiel broods over the ruinous effects of history in determining the destiny of a community. Since it does not seek to portray an optimistic picture of the trials of earthly life, there are no individual tragic heroes in Trauerspiel and no intention of ennobling the human role in history. As we shall see next, these characteristics clash with the dominant view of beiju during the May Fourth era. One must bear in mind that tragedy for the Chinese was a doubly foreign concept and therefore beiju can be construed as a doubly 'altered' product of the Chinese imagination. The word first appeared in The Poem of The Prisoner (1892) by Kitamura Tokoku 北村 透谷 who was the leader of the Japanese Romantic movement. It is agreed that the first individuals to make use of this term in a Chinese context were scholars Jiang Guanyun 蒋观云 and Wang Guowei 王國維.
In an article published in 1903 (see Jiang 1960), Jiang encouraged his compatriots to populate the nascent huaju repertoire with trag- edies. He advocated so, primarily because he believed that, if comedy prevailed over tragedy, this could have disastrous effects over the Chinese society. 4 Furthermore, his invective was meant to defy the accusations of a Japanese journal who had condemned Chinese theatre for being 'childish, stupid and ordinary' due to an apparent lack of tragic works.
Wang Guowei's interpretation of tragedy was influenced not only by the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche but also by those of the Japanese thinker Taoka Reiun 田岡 嶺雲, one of whose essays was entitled "The Pleasure of Tragedy" and who, unlike Jiang, did not endorse an utilitarian view of literature (Li 2011, 199). Wang discussed tragedy in two of his essays. In "Hongloumeng pinglun" 红楼梦评论 (1904), he presented the Qing-dynasty eponymous novel as a 'fully-fledged tragedy' (彻头彻尾的悲剧) and 'a tragedy within a tragedy' (悲剧中之 悲剧). He further argued that there had never been any tragedies in the classical theatre of China. Almost a decade later, in his history of the Song and Yuan theatre (Song Yuan xiqu kao 宋元戏曲考, 1913), he indicated The Orphan of Zhao (Zhao shi gu'er 赵氏孤儿) and Injustice to Dou'E (Dou'E yuan 窦娥冤) as plays with some tragic characteristics. Wang Guowei's merit lies in having rectified the claim that China's classical theatre has never had any plays comparable to the great Western tragedies.
At this early stage of the debate, a thoroughly 'Chinese' view of tragedy seems to be still missing as little to no reference is made to existing Chinese dramatic concepts. Paradoxically, this situation will take a new turn with the May Fourth writers who will criticise the old theatre for his supposed un-tragicness, yet will ascribe to beiju a moral and didactic task deeply embedded in the tradition and totally affranchised from the original meaning of bei.
Below, I will summarise and comment on the views of Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Ouyang Yuqian and Xiong Foxi.
In a 1918 essay entitled "The Concept of Literary Revolution and Theatre Reform" (see Hu 1996), Hu Shi stresses the necessity for Chinese theatre to innovate itself through the adoption of Western concepts and motifs, and characterises tragedy as the next stage of an evolutionary process that should bring about the liberation of Chinese theatre from the shackles of conservatism and apathy. The adoption of tragedy, which is a genre that, according to Hu, the West has been continuously developing throughout the centuries, will instil a sense of historical consciousness in the mind of the Chinese. In this sense, Hu Shi highlights the benefits of re-assessing Chinese theatre against foreign forms of drama through the perspective of comparative literature studies. He notes that the Chinese struggle to portray real life dramatically as they tend to end their works with what he defines a 'great reunion' (da tuanyuan), which normally consists in a literal coming back together of a separated couple (principle of beihuan lihe) and/or in the punishment of wrongdoers. Hu calls this tendency to 'roundism' 'superstitious', because it implies that problems and contradictions can be solved through the intervention of a higher will, namely Heaven. He further mentions that Heaven is neither benevolent nor malevolent (like Fate in Greek tragedy), that there is no such phenomenon as karmic retribution and that good and evil are not clearly distinct categories. In his view, the problem of evil and the reality of human suffering have a social origin, therefore he urges dramatists to represent social ills credibly, honestly and realistically, and to dispense with the device of the final 'reunion'. In so doing, dramatists can act as social reformers because their works will be purified by any trace of fraudulence and will stimulate the audience to ponder concrete ways of stopping those injustices in real life and to combat the negatives of a patriarchal society. Moreover, Hu Shi thinks that tragedy is endowed with a 'deep moral force' because by representing situations of extreme suffering, and by fostering emotional engagement by the audience, it forces the latter to develop introspective skills, critical thinking skills and, most importantly, the virtue of compassion. As he puts, it is in times of hardship that "people become close to each other" (Hu 1996, 113) and put aside their natural selfishness.
In a 1925 essay entitled "On Looking with Closed Eyes" (see Lu 1973), Lu Xun laments the fact that the Chinese people lack the courage to face up the realities of human life and explains this apparent deficiency as a consequence of the old Confucian saying whereby one should not act in any way that transgresses the norms of ethical behaviour, including the act of seeing (非礼勿视). Although this has nothing to do with tragedy, it is possible to discern some veiled references to the beneficial powers of this form of drama. Later on, Lu Xun underlines the necessity to experience personally the distress generated from conflictual, contradictory situations that affect society. He strongly rejects the idea of sitting back and resign to Heaven's will, and condemns as illogical the national predisposition to explain the difficulties of the present time as a temporary training period imposed by Heaven on the individual who is tasked with an important mission to accomplish and who is predestined to a happy conclusion. In this sense, he seems to condemn, albeit indirectly, the tragicomic structure that characterises innumerable plays of the classical repertoire, where obstacles and contradictions are only a transient phase of a dramatic process that advances towards the good. In this, he sees the will of writers who encourage the whole nation to close their eyes in an act of deception and self-deception. What Hu Shi had called with more indulgence 'great reunion', Lu Xun

Innovative or Rather Traditional? Confucianising Tragedy in May Fourth China
Translating Wor(l)ds 4 19 May Fourth and Translation, 13-32 views as dishonest 'gratification' (满) and fundamentally a 'lie' (骗), something that does not only obscure the true face of reality and its underlying mechanisms but that also that relieves humankind of its social and civic responsibilities. While casting doubts on the proverb 作善降祥, which encapsulates the karmic law of retribution, another leitmotif of classical theatre, he blames the tendency to retrospectively add a great reunion to works that were originally devoid thereof, including Hongloumeng, which ends, realistically, in tragedy.
Lu Xun clearly foresees a socio-political danger in the systematic, inconsiderate usage of traditional ideas and literary techniques that tend to embellish reality and cautions against the degeneration of the Chinese society, which is too anaesthetised by these deep-seated practices. He concludes that a radical renewal of the literary arts is the only condition to aid the renaissance of the Chinese nation and pleads for a literature that can proactively teach and effect earthly justice, rather than one that celebrates the national martyrs by simply singing their virtues. In Zhongguo xiaoshuo de lishi bianqian (1924), he further argues that da tuanyuan is a means of making up for the injustices of life and history. If history does not bring any reunion, then this will be effected in fiction. He mentions that the Chinese do not like troubles and depressions.
In a 1928 essay entitled "Theory and Practice of Drama Reform", Ouyang Yuqian defines beiju as "an inevitable catastrophe" (Ouyan 1989, 213), the essence of real life and a type of drama that does not have a satisfactory, fulfilling end. In his opinion, modern beiju revolves around a conflict between the individual's will and the social circumstances, thereby excluding the concept of blind fate. Interestingly, he ascribes to this form of drama a psychological function, which consists in arousing compassion and ultimately generating "peace and consolation" (214) in the world. He also emphasises tragedy's educational role and powerful influence in directing the course of history towards a positive outcome. In Ouyang's words, tragedy describes an individual's drive to progress by seeking to attain freedom and happiness. The many hardships and obstacles that the protagonist encounters throughout the tragic plot all contribute to strengthening the audience's spirit and building up hope for the future. The main mission of tragedy is to foster in the spectators the consciousness of living in a 'transitional age' and that one should not be contented with the "status quo" (218).
Finally, in a 1933 essay entitled "Tragedy" (see Xiong 1985), Xiong Foxi further develops the above-mentioned views, as he believes that the value of tragedy lies in generating a feeling of happiness through the experience of suffering. His notion of catharsis implies that, by watching characters who agonise on stage, the spectator can purify his own passions by developing high moral qualities such as compassion and a sense of justice. In defining tragedy as "an art form that fosters human honesty and good conscience" (265), he ascribes significant ethical properties to it. He further argues that tragic dramas are particularly welcome in an age of crisis when an increasing number of people are drawn to commit suicide out of hopelessness. This is because, rather than death, he considers anguish the tragic element par excellence in a play, while 'tragic' is the struggle that a character undertakes to achieve a given objective, which, however, remains unattained.
It is evident how these May Fourth writers tried to define tragedy from the perspective of traditional Confucian values, especially benevolence (ren) and righteousness (yi), which they contributed to revitalise. However, I argue that, rather than a dramatic genre, their reflections issued in the conceptualisation of a tragic spirit (beiju jingshen), which they hoped to infuse into the Chinese society of their time. Rather than fostering individualism and iconoclasm, they placed tragedy within a communitarian dimension in which individuals feel compelled to join each other to share the same adversities and work together to resist them. It seems to me that they did not explicitly connect tragedy with modernity, except for their varied references to the topicality of the tragic genre, its suitability to an age of historical decadence like the Chinese post-imperial era and its aesthetics of anti-reunionism, which was perceived as new and innovative. By finding beauty in grief rather than in harmony (yi ai wei mei vs. zhong he wei mei), they sought to revolutionise 'old' aesthetic principles that they interpreted as the main cause of cultural backwardness and moral apathy of which they accused their compatriots to be guilty. Nevertheless, they neglected the fact that, as will be shown next, Chinese culture does have its own traditional aesthetics of bei, which however does not exactly mirror the May Fourth angle on beiju. Below, I will present and discuss the ancient roots of the term bei, which is linked not to Confucianism but to Taoist ideas on humankind and nature, and I will concurrently seek to prove that an attitude of defiance and resistance to grief and suffering is not at all absent from traditional Chinese culture. Below, I aim to carry out an in-depth etymological analysis of the term beiju from the perspective of traditional Chinese literary and dramatic theory, independently from Western tragedy. From an etymological viewpoint, the word beiju has to do with the experience of melancholic pain, as suggested by the character bei 悲, which means 'sad', 'sorrowful', 'pessimistic'. Other terms that appeared in pre-modern Chinese theatre criticism to designate this kind of drama are yuanpu 怨谱, which literally means 'expressing resentment'; aiqu 哀曲, which could be variously rendered as 'elegiac drama', 'melodrama', 'pathetic drama' or 'drama of grief', and kuxi 苦戏 or 'drama of hardships' (Xie 2010, 377). All these terms, which date back to the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing periods, emphasise the element of pain and suffering, thus suggesting that in traditional Chinese theatre particular attention was given to the portrayal of the pathetic emotion. Moreover, works such designated were also generally known as can jue bei ji zhi shu 惨绝悲极之书, namely, works imbued with a sense of extreme and absolute grief (Zhou 1991, 151). Zhu Quan's 朱权 The Supreme Harmony Chart of Correct Sounds (Taihe zhengyin pu 太和正音谱), a work of dramatic criticism published in 1398, contains a list of Yuan (1271-1368) zaju 杂剧 plays, which are categorised according to common themes and motifs. Some of these plays are listed under the category of beihuan lihe 悲欢离合. This terminology indicates dramas characterised by an alternation of "sad and joyful scenes" and of "separations and reunions", which somehow echo the notion of tragicomedy in Western dramatic culture (Falaschi 2002, 10).
According to Alexa A. Joubin (2003, 11), the birth of a Chinese poetics of the tragic should be ascribed to the poet Qu Yuan 屈原 (343-278 BC), whose poem Encountering Sorrow (Li sao 离骚) (late third century BC) is a remarkable example of "poetry of lament" (beitan shi 悲叹诗). Throughout this work, the author expresses his deep suffering for being unjustly dismissed from his position as a political counsellor of the king of Chu, whom he had always served with great loyalty and faithfulness. He was exiled twice and eventually committed suicide by drowning himself in the Milo River. The predominance of the elegiac component (ai 哀) is particularly evident in this poem, where the author's prevalent emotional state seems to be that of bei 悲, as evidenced from (Joubin's translation of) the following excerpt: "In sadness plunged and sunk in deepest gloom, alone I drove on to my dreary doom". 5 Joubin's statement resonates with the views of other contemporary scholars, such as Xie Boliang and Zhou Anhua, who maintain that the Chinese have approached and dealt with the theme of suffering and its corollary of emotions first in lyrical poetry (shi 诗), and only subsequently in the drama. Therefore, unlike tragedy, which has its origins in theatre and dramatic performance, bei( ju) would denote a kind of poetic emotion (qing 情) associated with a particular scenery ( jing 景).
In classical Chinese literary theory, the fusion of qing and jing creates what goes under the name of yijing 意境. This term refers to a higher and sublime artistic/creative/poetic dimension and is usually translated as 'creative mood', but escapes an exact theorization owing to its ethereal and rather intuitive quality. More specifically, yi means 'meaning' or 'sense' and jing means 'realm' or 'situation'. According to Libing Bai, the earliest occurrence of the term in Chinese poetry criticism is in the work of the Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling 王昌龄 (698-756), who describes it as the third stage of poetry writing after jing (nature) and qing (emotion), and which would consist in an intellectual synthesis of these in order to "attain the very essence of Truth" (Bai 2014, 416). The notion of yijing -not to be confused with the concept of yixiang 意象 (imagery), which rather indicates "individual physical objects or beings that, through the poet's artistic conception, have acquired human sentiments and can be used as 'objective correlatives' to denote the poet's feelings" (Tang 2014, 195) -is crucial to understand and demarcate the specificity of beiju in the context of world drama. In fact, although another term (dianxing 典型, or model-scenes) is generally preferred to critique those literary genres which are more focused on the imitation or re-enactment of reality such as fiction and drama, dramatic theory and criticism in China cannot dispense with the concept of yijing, which is applicable to all genres showing a strong lyrical tendency. In effect, drama in China has traditionally been intertwined with poetry, dance and music, thereby placing considerable emphasis on the representation of emotions accompanying the narrated events. In this sense, the union of bieqing 别情 (farewell sadness) and suiqing 随情(submitting to one's emotions) is very close to the idea of yijing, which still remains the main aesthetic core of classical Chinese poetry and drama (Yang 1994, 206).
In order to extrapolate the original lyrical and poetic matrix of beiju, an investigation of the sphere of lyrical emotions connected to the word bei 悲 is in order. First, is it correct to translate it simply as 'sad' or 'sadness'? Ye Zhengdao has undertaken a text-based semantic study of the emotion term bei along with other sadness-like basic emotion terms such as ai 哀and chou 愁. She notes that there is no exact equivalent of bei in English, nor is bei only about sadness per se (2001,397). Bei is usually listed among the five basic emotions in classical Chinese texts and features as a constitutive element of a few compound words such as beiliang 悲凉 (sad and dreary; somber; dismal), beitong 悲痛 (painfully sad) and beican 悲惨 (tragic; tragical; pathetic) (367). Most importantly, bei features in the compound word beiguan 悲观, which literally means "having a bei-like view/Weltanschauung" and is usually translated into English as "pessimistic". By examining specific excerpts from a selection of key texts from premodern Chinese poetry and fiction, such as Wang Wei's poem Qiu ye du zuo 秋夜独坐 (Sitting alone on an Autumn Night, 8th century BCE), and Cao Xueqin's Hong lou meng 红楼梦 (The Dream of the Red Chamber, mid-18th century), Ye argues that bei does not simply equal "sadness" but a kind of "fatalistic hence tragic sadness" (363). In order to better understand what the source of bei might be, namely its 'objective correlative', we need to refer to the theory of the interplay of qing and jing in classical Chinese literature. In this context, bei designates a specific psychological disposition (qing), which is traditionally associated to a particular landscape imagery ( jing), whose function is to evoke a particular feeling arising in the poet's heart and mind through contemplation. The yixiang (poetic imagery) that triggers off the bei-like feeling can be found in the natural changes of the autumnal season.
In Wang Wei' poem, the author contemplates the autumnal landscape and compares the falling of a fruit from a tree under the autumn rain to his whitening hair, lamenting the irreversibility of the ageing process for the human being. Jia Baoyu, the male protagonist of Cao Xueqin's novel, is immortalised whilst brooding over the imminent wedding of Xiuyan, a girl in his entourage. He reckons that marriage is an event that everyone must go through during life, thereby ascribing a sense of preordained fatality to it. Moreover, staring at an apricot tree full of fruits, he sighs over the fact that in a few years' time the bride will bear children and with the passage of time her hair will inexorably turn silver and she will lose her beauty, exactly as the tree is bound to lose its fruits in autumn.
For Ye, "what makes one bei is not just a bad happening at that moment, but an uncontrollable force pulling towards a subsequent 'tragic' happening determined by nature" (2001,364). Hence, it can be argued that the source of bei-like feelings is not linked to a single, unexpected catastrophic event somehow akin to the Aristotelian concept of 'misfortune' -but lies in the consciousness that something disagreeable is bound to happen in the near future, and which cannot be avoided because it is inscribed in the cyclical course of nature. In the concept of bei, there is no malevolent god, no transcendence, no fatal flaw that makes the human being guilty of violating some preexisting divine order, but there is rather a despondent acceptance of the natural order, of the cosmic and incessant flow of the yin and the yang. Therefore, it can be argued that, similarly to tragedy, bei too can be construed as a culture-bound emotion term, deeply root-ed in traditional Chinese literature and culture, where the tendency to associate this kind of fatalistic sadness with the autumnal imagery represents a codified poetics called beiqiu 悲秋, a lexicalized term that could be roughly translated as 'autumnal melancholia', and which Xie Boliang designates as the ancestor of beiju (2010, 556), its original aesthetic matrix.
Originally dating back to the Warring States period (5th century-221 BC), the poetics of beiqiu was formally initiated, again, by Qu Yuan in his poem Xiang Furen 湘夫人 (The Lady of the Xiang) from the anthology Chuci 楚辭 (Lyrics of Chu) and by his disciple Song Yu 宋玉, who contributed to further popularise this trend in traditional lyrical poetry (Xie 2010, 556-7). In Jiu Bian九辩 (Nine Changes or Arguments -also part of the Chu ci), Song depicts the image of the falling leaves being shaken off by the bleak and cold autumn hair, and uses it as a backdrop to express the depressive, melancholic mood stirred by the autumnal landscape where everything seems to be heading slowly and inexorably toward death. Other scenes that can be subsumed under the umbrella term of beiqiu are those focusing on the gloomy mood associated with a sorrowful separation, with the injustices suffered by a righteous scholar, with the melancholy of travelling alone. The corresponding objective-correlatives are the autumnal rain and wind, the falling leaves, the wild geese, the cooler weather and the waning plant life. The corresponding emotions are those of a lonesome and desolate mood, whereas the resulting yijing or poetic world, which is something more intuitive and should be co-created by the author and the reader, is one of relentless and irreversible decadence that affects man's life and the natural world alike and which compels the poet to engage in deep reflection about the sorrows of the human condition. One such example can be found in a ci 辞 attributed to the Han emperor Wudi 武帝(156-87 BC) entitled Gu Qiu feng 古 秋风 (Old Autumn Wind). Here, the author laments the ephemerality of the human life against the everlasting recurrence of the natural phenomena. Whilst observing that in the natural world "the past recedes, the present arrives and still they flourish and perish, these affairs" (shui liao ta, gu wang jin lai yu wang xing 誰料他,古往今來興 亡事), 6 he wonders how many years an individual can expect to live.
Premodern Chinese literature abounds in examples of beiqiu as a traditional aesthetic mode, particularly Tang poetry with the poet Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) as one of its masters. He coined the terms qiuyi 秋意, namely what hints at autumn (the slight chilly air), and qiusi 秋 思, namely the lonesome and desolate mood that autumn evokes in the poet's mind (Xie 2010, 559). As Ye Zhengdao observes, the liter-ary motif of beiqiu indicates that this close correspondence between emotions and seasons is distinctive of Chinese culture. This aspect is also codified in the earliest work of literary criticism in the history of Chinese literature, the Wen xin diao long 文心雕龙 (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) by Liu Xie 刘勰 (465-521), as follows: Springs and autumns follow on in succession, with the brooding gloom of dark Yin and the easeful brightness of Yang. And as the bright countenances of physical things are impelled in their cycles, so the affective capability of mind (xin) too is shaken… And when autumn's skies are high and the animating air takes on a chill clarity, our thoughts, sunken in the darkness of Yin, touch on far things. The year has its physical things, and these things have their countenance; by these things our emotions are shifted, and from emotions language comes. The fall of a solitary leaf finds its place in our understanding [and we know that autumn is coming]. 7 Lo Wai Luk contends that "bei" is the chief aspect of what he calls "the Chinese tragic spirit", which also entails a corollary of related emotions stirred up within the realm of beiju, leading to four different "tragic dimensions". 8 Lo terms the Chinese tragic spirit as beizhuang 悲壮, which he translates as a "tragic-heroic mood" or a "combination of sad and heroic spirit" (1994, 70) and uses compound terms containing the character bei as a linguistic basis for his theory of the four tragic dimensions of traditional Chinese drama. These are: bei'ai 悲哀 (pathetic mourning), beiyuan 悲怨 (lamentation for the irrepleceable loss), beifen 悲愤 (protest with invincible will) and the aforementioned beizhuang 悲壮 (heroic action against the odds). Moreover, he acknowledges that "the semantic space these four compound words create, however, still remains a land of subjective feeling. There is no act, in the sense of Western dramaturgy, involved" (72). This statement suggests that the analysis of the etymological origins of beiju must proceed from the concept of creative mood, yijing in Chinese literary theory. For Lo, the yijing of beiju is a "tragic spirit with a very strong Chinese flavour: lyrical, aesthetic, and intermingles the emotion (qing) and the scene ( jing)" (61). Lo extrapolates the essence of each of these four tragic dimensions by analysing a selection of Yuan zaju plays. With reference to the plays Fengyulan 冯玉兰 (The Misery of the young lady Feng) and Huolangdan 货郎旦 7 Liu Xie, cited in Ye 2001, 372. 8 It should be noted that Lo uses the term "dimension", or "spirit", almost as synonyms of 'atmosphere' and 'mood', but not as synonyms of 'consciousness' or 'structure of feeling' à la Raymond Williams. In Marxism and Literature (1977), the latter explains that he chose the word "feeling" in order to distinguish it from "more formal concepts of worldview and ideology" (132).
(Woman Singer of the Huolang Style), he defines the first dimension, or bei'ai, as "pathetic mourning". The second kind of bei-like atmosphere, or beiyuan, is translated as "lamentation for the irreplaceable loss" and defined against the plays Hangongqiu 汉宫秋 (Autumn in the Han Palace) and Shuangfumeng 双赴梦(Dream of two on a Journey).
As to the remaining two dimensions, beifen is translated as "protest with invincible will" and is elucidated against the plays Dou'e yuan 窦娥冤 (The Injustice Done to Dou'e) and Huoshao Jie Zitui 火烧介 子推 (Burning Jie Zitui Alive), whereas beizhuang is rendered as "heroic struggle against the odds" and extrapolated by the plays Zhaoshi gu'er 赵氏孤儿 (The Orphan of the Zhao Family) and Zhang qianti sha qi 张千替杀妻 (Zhang Kills His Sworn Brother's Wife). He then concludes by contrasting what he calls "the tragic mode" with the concept of beiqiu, a term that, as previously explained, encapsulates "the sentiment of autumnal grievance in Chinese literature" whereby "witnessing time's passage and nature's decay, the poet sighs for the finitude of life" (185). Furthermore, Lo concludes that only beifen and beizhuang are comparable to the tragic, 9 whereas bei'ai and beiyuan rather tend toward the pathetic.
Examples of the beifen and beizhuang spirits can be found in a series of ancient Chinese myths, which narrate episodes of resistance against the natural powers such as "Nüwa Mending the Sky" (女娲 补天), "Jingwei Filling Up the Sea" (精卫填海), "Houyi Shooting the Sun" (后羿射日), "Yu the Great Taming the Waters" (大禹治水), and "Kua Fu Chasing the Sun" (夸父追). In their attempts at confronting and opposing the natural course of phenomena, the characters portrayed in those myths show some kind of hybris, and as such they are indicated as epitomes of an active tragic spirit. With the passage of time and with the advent of the agricultural revolution, this aggressive spirit of resistance gradually subsided, being replaced by a psychology of submission, adaptability and passivity, more akin to the bei'ai and beiyuan mood.
It is evident that the notion of beiju as theorised by the May Fourth writers previously discussed does not fully align with the original meaning of bei as discerned by Ye in her study. There is in fact no fatalism and no feeling of impotence and/or inevitability involved in the May Fourth conceptualization of beiju, whereby change and revolutions are not effected spontaneously by a divine will (tianming) but are man-made. Ye has noted that the feeling of bei is embedded within the Taoist doctrines and the Yin-Yang cosmology and I would add that it reflects really well the theory of non-action (wuwei), which encourages its adepts to second the transformations of the natural order rather than aiding or opposing them, thus developing a com-munion with the natural landscape and its cycles. This decidedly untragic view of life implies the non-existence of evil and of iniquitous events. It suggests that nature is to be trusted rather than feared or defied. In this sense, in the bei of beiju there is no sense of indignation towards the source of pain and suffering. This, instead, is present in another basic emotion, namely ai 哀, which Ye defines as a form of altruistic pain of Confucian descent, which includes the feeling of compassion, the desire to eliminate what causes disruption in other people's lives and is therefore more compatible with the tragic spirit of the May Fourth era.
As we shall see next, the May Fourth idea of beiju was in many ways a product of the revivification of Confucian teachings. Its purported civilising power harks back to a shared desire to restore social harmony in a critical historical moment that was not so dissimilar from other previous transitional periods in Chinese history, such as the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 BC) in which Confucius lived and preached.

4
From the Theatre to Real Life: Confucianising Tragedy Contrary to the opinion of the May Fourth writers mentioned in this study, contemporary Chinese scholars generally agree on envisioning a given set of traditional Chinese plays as beiju. Among others, these include the already cited Orphan, Dou'E and Autumn in the Palace of Han. What these works have in common is the fact that they do not focus on an unconditional and vehement conflict but show a marked tendency to neutralise the effects of past evils and restore the original harmony. For example, Dou E, the female protagonist of the eponymous zaju play, is unjustly executed but a few years after her death, her ghost appears before her father, who decides to re-open her law case thereby managing to demonstrate her innocence. In The Orphan of Zhao, the protagonist eventually avenges his father's death by murdering the evil General Tu'an Gu. In Autumn in the Palace of Han, the ghost of the beautiful concubine Wang Zhaojun, who had drown herself to avoid marrying the barbarian Khan, visits the Han emperor in the shape of a lonely wild goose in the hope of obtaining justice for herself. The emperor, who is now aware of the evil Mao Yanshou's plotting, orders that he is punished in order to do justice to the spirit of the concubine Wang. Wan Xiaogao connects this Chinese Weltanschauung of harmony and non-aggressive resistance (duili er bu duikang 对立而不对抗) to the complementary interdependence of the yin and yang principles as reflected in the Zhou'yi 周易 (the earliest version of the Yijing 易经, The Book of Changes). Albeit opposite forces, the yin and the yang do not fight against each other for predominance but mould and transform each other into its opposite so that their mutual and pacific interchanges give birth to the natural phenomena (2004,26). As Wan explains, not only has this brought about the lack of an acute and irreducible conflict in the Chinese beiju, but has also deprived it of a soulstirring, breath-taking passion, and of other dramatic devices such as suspense (xuannian 悬念), and a shocking recognition (faxian/ zhenjing 发现/震惊). Traditional beiju lacks a tragic-heroic aesthetics whilst showing a preference for the pathetic, for a gentle aesthetic model (rouxing mei 柔性美) grounded on intimate sadness (feice 悱恻), tranquillity (pingjing 平静), moral suffering (beiku 悲 苦) and grief (aichou 哀愁). (27) For this reason, in beiju the harmony of feelings also entails a patent balance of sadness and joy, which is a direct consequence of the cyclical thinking patterns (xunhuan sixiang 循环思想) underlying ancient Chinese culture and philosophy. These patterns are not confined to the seasonal changes (ziran chunxiaqiudong 自然春夏秋冬) and the historical changes of rise, progress, decline and fall (cheng'ai xingmang 盛哀兴亡), but also involve the motions of the soul passing from joy to anger and from grief to happiness (xinu'aile 喜怒哀乐) (Zhou 1991, 221). This view of life as a combination of joys and sorrows has significant implications in the dramatic structure of beiju. The idea that "after deep misfortune comes bliss" (pi ji tailai 否极泰 来) and that "when things reach an extreme they turn into their opposite" (wu ji bi fan 物极必反) entails that most traditional beiju dramas end with the purging of the malevolent force that have caused the injustices inflicted to the tragic protagonist(s). Hence, it can be argued that dramatic mechanism leading to a more or less 'satisfactory ending' turns the dramatic conflict into a temporary confrontation where there are no absolute winners or losers. 10 This spirit of faith in the mutability of external circumstances is also a characteristic of the May Fourth interpretation of beiju. A fundamental difference, though, is that in the latter case the audience is staunchly compelled to effect those radical changes in real life, rather than finding a momentary satisfaction in the fictionality of the theatrical event. In light of this, the proposal to abolish the 'old' device of the great reunion should not be seen as a way of eradicating the alleged 'secularism' inherent to the traditional Chinese worldview, 10 Although, in Song Yuan xiqu kao 宋元戏曲考 Wang Guowei observes that not all the plays in the zaju beiju repertoire fit in the usual pattern whereby "separation is followed by reunion, hardships are followed by relief" (先离后合, 始困终亨, Wang 2001, 63), and that the da tuanyuan or happy ending still constitutes a major characteristics of bei-like plays.

Letizia Fusini
Innovative or Rather Traditional? Confucianising Tragedy in May Fourth China social good. Cheng further observes that the possibility for change and transformation ascribed to the individual who possesses the consciousness of youhuan has links with the Confucian morality, which denies a fatalistic outlook on life (2001,97). 11 He characterises Confucianism as a "dynamical and forward-looking system of ethics" (99) that provides sufficient intellectual tools for turning melancholy from passivity into action, based on the premise that social progress and the resolution of unavoidable conflicts stem from the collaboration between man and Heaven.
This takes us back to the May Fourth interpretation of beiju as the quintessence of the dynamic side of melancholy, sadness and grief. In this sense, despite its focus on misfortune, injustice and catastrophe, the experience of beiju is understood as an uplifting one because it is from conflict and oppositions that an individual's moral strength is fortified and he can apply his virtue (de 德) "to do good to all people under heaven and […] eliminate many causes for social injustices for other members of the society" (100).