The Yuan Dynasty of Mongol rulers was a very powerful one and extended the Chinese frontiers to include Korea, Yünnan, Annam, and Burma. The rulers proved themselves very tolerant of Chinese religions and institutions; the emperor Jen Tsung even reëstablished the Hanlin Academy and the official examinations. But though the government of these foreigners was fairly efficient yet it was by no means popular, and frequent rebellions occurred. Finally, the Chinese under the leadership of a former Buddhist monk, Chu Yuan-chang, drove the Mongols beyond the Great Wall and founded the Ming Dynasty. The ex-monk ascended the throne in 1368 and is known in history as Emperor Hung Wu.

The Ming Dynasty is known as a period of prosperity in which industry and commerce, as well as the arts of poetry and painting, flourished. It was also a great period for the drama. Over six hundred Ming dramas are still extant or are at least known by title, and many of them were written by well-known authors of high literary standing and great scholarship. The drama was so much appreciated at this time that many high officials and wealthy families had private troupes of actors, a large number of the dramas being specially written for these troupes. Since the audiences were composed of the élite, the language of the dramas could be of a highly literary character.

A development took place at this time that altered considerably the form of the drama. Instead of the compact and unified three, four, or five-act plays of the Yuan period, playwrights began to produce dramas of thirty-two, forty, or even forty-eight acts. The name of this new form is ch’an ch’i (literally “novel”) in distinction to the tsa ch’i of the Yuan Dynasty. Doctor Hu Shih, writing to me about these two forms, suggests that one might call the former “play” and the latter “drama.” “Technically the new form seems to be a degradation,” he says, “but aside from the aspect of literary economy the Ming dramas were superior to the Yuan plays in many respects, viz. (1) profounder conception, (2) far better characterization, (3) more even distribution of parts among the characters. In the Yuan plays only one character had a ‘singing’ part and the others were completely subordinated; while in Ming dramas the rôles are more evenly balanced. In many cases the same theme was treated by Yuan and Ming dramatists, and in most cases the Ming version is far better.”

In this chapter I am presenting an example of this new variety of drama, a 24-act piece called “Pi-Pa-Chi” (The Story of a Lute). Except for the fact that dialogue and stage directions are used the work might well be called a novel. Aside from the technical interest of the drama it is most significant as a presentation of Confucian ideals, a revival of which was typical likewise of the Ming Dynasty. Such ideals are embodied in the family system with the selfishness—as it appears to us—of old age. After reading about the adventures of the hero, Tsai Yung, the Westerner can understand why in Confucian writings along with widows and orphans there are enumerated “son-less fathers.” The conflict in the drama centers about the “higher” and the “lower” obedience—service to the state or to the family. But the problem is not a clear-cut one, as the son is to serve the state in the interest of the greater prosperity of his own family; nor can it be said that it is solved in any way. The drama, however, is full of Chinese moralizing along lines far removed from the thinking of the “practical” Westerner.

Indeed, much of the famous mystery of the East or the inscrutability of the Orientals might be less baffling to the average American if he were better acquainted with the literature of China. I have known, for example, a young Chinese politician who was none too scrupulous in the manner in which he went about earning his living, who drank, supported a number of concubines, and in fact was what might be called by the vulgar a “rounder.” In the course of a dinner one evening he told me between the sharks’ fins and the Peking duck that he had been offered a post in Washington, but, lucrative though it was, he could not accept it because of “filial piety”—his very words. Now piety in any sense of the word was the last thing I associated with this youth, and therefore his statement seemed to me surprising. There was another Chinese, the owner of an excellent stable, with whom I went riding frequently in the Temple of Heaven. He was a vigorous young man, educated in Paris, very businesslike and progressive in all his ideas. One day I received an invitation to his wedding, and, on going, found a merry throng in the gaily decorated courtyard, with dancing in European fashion going on in full blast. I noted the groom among the dancers, congratulated him and remarked, “Well, I’m sure you’re very happy to-day!” But he shook his head and, as tears came into his eyes, he told me that the bride was not of his choice but had been selected and forced on him by his elder brother, the head of the family. Again, in speaking one day with a progressive young student who talked a great deal about reforms in politics and who participated eagerly in parades and other demonstrations staged for that end, I mentioned a certain official who had flagrantly stolen funds collected for the famine sufferers. The student expressed perfunctory disapproval of the official’s conduct, but added, “Still, if I were in his position, I’d probably do the same.” Such is the manner in which the Chinese act and as such they show themselves in their literature.

“Pi Pa Chi” was written by an otherwise unknown author, Kao Tsi-ch’ing, about the end of the fourteenth century. The first performance of the play is known to have taken place in 1404, in the reign of Yung Loh, the ruler who, as every tourist knows, has the most prominent monument among the Tombs of the Ming Emperors north of Peking. The play is typically Chinese inasmuch as the hero is not a warrior or a prince, but a poor scholar who rises to fame through his knowledge of literature. It abounds in sad situations and is praised by Chinese critics because it makes the spectators or readers weep. Furthermore, it conforms to the demand made on all Chinese dramas by being strictly ethical in its tendency. The moral lesson inculcated is that of the chief virtue of the Chinese—veneration of parents. This is done with such devotion and force that the play might well be called the Song of Songs of Filial Piety.

The first scene introduces a young scholar, Tsai-yung, face to face with the alternatives of remaining in his village to take care of his aged parents or of going to the capital in search of honors and lucrative posts. His own wishes are to remain at home, less for his parents’ sake than because of the beautiful wife whom he has married but two months ago. But his father urges him to go to Ch’ang An, to use his talents, and to gain fame and wealth. “At fifteen one must study, at thirty a man must act.” A friend of the family, an elderly gentleman called Chang, sides with the father against the mother, who wishes to keep her son at home. She tells the story of a young man who had left his family to take the examination at the capital, but who, when at last his learning had gained him a post as superintendent of an almshouse, found his parents as inmates in the very institution. The young wife takes no part in the discussion at all; in fact, the elderly gentlemen seem to consider affection for her an unmanly weakness on the son’s part. “He thinks of nothing but love and the sweet pleasures of the nuptial couch,” says his father. “Here it’s two months that he is married, and yet one cannot tear him away from this place.” This represents a very common attitude in China—I remember reading in a Peking paper in 1917 in an attack on the vice-president of Tsing Hua College that one of his faults was that he occasionally went walking with his wife! One of my students from Shansi told me one day that he had been married during the summer vacation. I asked whether his wife was with him in Peking, and when he answered in the negative, whether he was writing to her. “Oh, no,” he said shamefacedly, “I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

The father calls on the son to state what he understands by filial piety. The son answers by quoting the “Book of Rites,” “It is the duty of the son to take every care that in summer as well as in winter his parents should enjoy all comforts of life. He must every evening himself arrange the bed on which they are to sleep; every morning at the first crowning of the cock he must inquire in affectionate terms about the state of their health; then, in the course of the day, he must ask repeatedly whether they are suffering from the cold or whether the heat incommodes them. The duty of the son is to watch over his parents wherever they go, to love those whom they love, honor those whom they honor; he must even love the horses and dogs whom his father loves.” And he adds from the “Sayings of Confucius”: “A son should not leave the home of his father and his mother so long as they are still living.”

To this the father retorts with a quotation from “The Book of Filial Piety”; “The first degree of filial piety consists in serving one’s parents; the second in serving one’s prince, and the third in seeking after honors.” The father persuades the son to go. His son will soon be a mandarin, he says, and then, “The three kinds of meat (beef, mutton and pork) and the rare foods which are offered up in the great sacrifices will be served to me three times a day in tripods of elegant form or in dishes of fine porcelain. That will be better than eating beans and drinking water.”

But the mother gives expression to her grief in a metaphor praised by Chinese commentators: “In a moment they will tear away the pearl I was holding in my hand.” Forebodings of evil fill her heart. “Go then, my son, but if during your absence your father and mother should die of hunger and cold, your honor will not therefore be smirched when you return in an embroidered robe.”

The second scene of the play transfers the action to Ch’ang An, the old capital. With the symmetry so characteristic of all Chinese art the action of the drama is divided almost equally between the scenes in Tsai-yung’s native village, and those in the imperial city. We are introduced into the palace of an imperial minister, a certain Niu, and here through the words of a maidservant we learn of the dull, tedious, joyless life in the women’s apartments. The author pictures the minister’s daughter, Niu-hsi, as the model young woman who prefers working at embroidery to playing in the open air. The servant girl on the other hand is sad because spring (used symbolically for love) is passing her by. In a beautiful allegory on spring and its manifestations she gives expression to her feelings, while her mistress cites in reply the ancient Chinese rule of conduct: “Women must not leave the interior apartments.” The scene seems to be a protest on the author’s part against this cruel stunting of the lives of his countrywomen.

Into Minister Niu’s house come two rival go-betweens who make offers of marriage for Niu’s daughter in the interest of two fathers of distinguished sons. But Niu refuses; he will accept for his daughter none but the scholar who has won the very highest honors at the examinations. The two women begin to quarrel and are driven off with blows by Niu’s orders, because by fighting in his house they offend against the rites. A marriage arranged by such wrangling old hags between young people who meet for the first time on the day of their wedding certainly does not offer much in the way of romance. An even more depressing picture of the life of the young girl one gains from the manner in which Niu takes his daughter to task for having walked in the garden. “Don’t you know of what the principal merit of a young woman consists? I have told you before, men are looking for women who don’t like to leave the women’s apartments.” Everywhere the ghost of Confucius giving precepts for the regulation of the private life down to the minutest details!

The play returns to Tsai-yung, who is now on the road to the capital in the company of three other candidates for the examination. Each in turn tells of the purpose of his studies. Tsai-yung outlines his principles as follows:

“Here is the method I have adopted. When I was seated I read, when I walked I recited from memory what I had learned. I have studied thoroughly ten thousand chapters; I have carried on difficult studies and researches. But as there are two things in life that one must never lose sight of—loyalty to the prince and filial piety—I have always tried to show myself grateful for the emperor’s benefits and to return with thankfulness the kindness of my parents.” This speech is applauded by the other scholars and they in turn give their answers, some of which are of rather satirical turn, especially the one of the student who explains that with him the essential is correct pronunciation and beautiful penmanship!

The next scene presents a burlesque on the literary examinations. It recalls somewhat an entrance examination given in a “prep” school I once attended, where the older students, dressed up in frock coats and with false beards on their faces, took the part of faculty. The examination of freshmen consisted of the singing of hymns, the shining of shoes, and a guessing contest as to which of the “professors” had paddled them in the rear. The imperial examiner announces solemnly to the five hundred candidates that the present test would not be like last year’s, when they had been asked to write essays, one on literature, another on morals, and a third on politics, but that he was going to ask them first, to compose a rhyme; second, to guess a riddle; and third, to sing a song. Needless to state, Tsai-yung passes with flying colors in this test full of humorous puns which are, of course, untranslatable. The examiner is made to say at the end, “Tsai-yung, I recognize the superiority of your talents, your learning is indeed profound; you rise far above the others; your merit is most extraordinary. Immediately I am going to apprise the emperor of the outcome of the examinations!” This scene leads one to suspect that the author of the play had good reasons for venting his satire on the inane literary competitions—probably he had failed and was therefore forced to waste his talents in a life of retirement.

The real hero, or rather heroine, of the play now appears for the first time, namely Tsai-yung’s young wife Wu-niang. No news has come from the capital as to her husband’s success, a famine is ravishing the district, and the old parents of Tsai-yung are making one trip to the pawnshop after the other. But Wu-niang is determined to do her duty as daughter-in-law; she is going to show filial piety to the last in conformity with precepts such as the following, quoted from the “Book of Rewards and Punishments”, a work which is not for sale in bookshops but is distributed in the temples to the pious: “A daughter-in-law must serve the father and mother of her husband as a daughter serves her father and mother. She must show filial piety and complete obedience. If she lacks in her duty toward them she lacks at the same time filial piety. This crime always becomes known to Heaven, as the following story illustrates. In the territory of Chang-Chu there were three sisters-in-law entirely lacking in filial piety. One day they heard a clap of thunder and at the same time they were changed: one into a cow, the second into a lamb, and the third into a dog; their heads alone preserved the original form.... Chin-ing, the governor of that district, had an engraving made showing the metamorphoses and had it distributed among the people to teach them a lesson. That is how Heaven punishes!”

Wu-niang’s immediate duty is to try to make peace between her aged parents-in-law. Tsai’s wife is not slow in telling her husband “I told you so” in regard to the evils that have followed their son’s departure, while Tsai naturally enough does not become any calmer for being told what a fool he is. To appease their wrath and to supply a bit of food Wu-niang pawns the few hairpins and other ornaments that she possesses.

While his parents are slowly dying of hunger, Tsai-yung, by his brilliant record, has attracted the attention of the emperor himself. The latter orders that the daughter of Minister Niu, who has been refused to many a deserving suitor, should be given to him. Niu is overjoyed to receive as a son-in-law the candidate accorded the highest honors and immediately sends a go-between to arrange the affair. However, she returns to announce that Tsai-yung refuses, because he is married and has various obligations toward his parents. But the real reason, she whispers, is that the bride’s feet are too long. Minister Niu flies into a rage; he says that no one would any longer respect his position if he were to accept this refusal. He is going to speak to the emperor about it. Small wonder that under the circumstances Tsai-yung’s petition to the emperor to be allowed to return home is refused; instead he is again ordered to marry Niu-hsi in a mandate beginning with the words, “If filial piety is the basis of all virtues, then the perfection of all morals consists in serving one’s prince.” With tears he leaves the imperial palace and must submit to being married against his wishes to a second wife. He regrets that he cannot return to his parents (does not seem to feel any regrets about Wu-niang) and breaks out into a lamentation: “High reputation is a tie that binds; good fortune is an iron chain. Fortune and reputation are the instruments used by Heaven to inflict tortures on mankind!”

The scene again shifts to the famine-stricken province. A mandarin finds that a corrupt official has stolen the little grain that is to be distributed to the poor. This commissioner is caught in the very act, yet in typical Chinese fashion he has a ready but translucent excuse to offer; however, when he is threatened with torture he is willing to confess that he is a robber. This wicked official is then made to sign a written confession of his guilt and is led off to jail. His kind appears in hundreds of plays; in fact, he is probably the very favorite type on the Chinese stage. The mandarin asks Wu-niang why she had come to the court herself instead of sending a male member of the family; a woman, he says, should not leave the inner apartments of the house. It is interesting to note that a Chinese commentator considers this an erroneous interpretation of the passage in the “Book of Rites”; it is only the young girl who is not to leave the inner apartments; once a woman is married she may do so. When the mandarin learns of Wu-niang’s sad situation, he commands an attendant to give her three portions of the rice embezzled by the official. Another official, who seems to be hand in glove with the embezzler, follows Wu-niang and in a lonely place on the road demands that she return the rice, lest he kill her on the spot. Wu-niang offers him her clothes; if he will only not demand the food that is to save the lives of the old people. The black-hearted villain says that he wants the rice and does not care to expose her limbs to the fury of the elements. Then comes the young woman’s touching answer, which reaches perhaps the highest level of a daughter’s devotion: “What matters it if my body be exposed to the fury of the elements, so long as I can save the lives of my father-in-law and my mother-in-law!” The cowardly wretch pretends to be touched and bids her go her way in peace, but as soon as she is off her guard he snatches from the defenseless woman her bag of rice. Fearing the reproaches of her parents-in-law Wu-niang plans suicide, but the memory of her husband’s admonition that she watch over his parents decides her to continue in the thankless task.

The next scenes show just how ungrateful her parents-in-law are for her unlimited devotion. Wu-niang herself is eating roots, buds, the bark of trees, and other things classified as material containing some slight food values in so-called “famine food books”—a type of literature enjoying a wide circulation in China. But her suspicious mother-in-law fears that the young woman is eating better food than she is serving to her, because Wu-niang eats her miserable stew in private. At one of her meals the author, by a strange realism, has her say, “When I have eaten this mess my hunger ceases, but then there begin pains in the intestines much more violent than the hunger had been.” When the mother-in-law surprises her she finds that Wu-niang had been extremely self-sacrificing instead of selfish as she had supposed, and the shock is too much for her weakened body; she dies.

The husband too is very much enfeebled, and when the friend of the family, Chang, comes to call, he is mortified that he cannot rise to meet his guest. Throughout the play there is in the speeches of practically all the characters an urbanity and a politeness which show how deeply the lessons of Confucius to do or say always the fitting thing have gone over into the flesh and blood of his nationals. Wu-niang tells Chang of their greatest cause for anguish—they have not the means to give the deceased a proper burial. Chang then shows himself an ideal friend from the Chinese point of view by saying, “I shall order a servant to prepare a wooden coffin in which we shall place the body of your wife. I myself shall then select a lucky day for the funeral, and after having had a grave dug on the hill in the south, I shall accompany the procession.”

The scene that gives the title to the play is one in which Tsai-yung gives expression to his tenderest emotion by playing on the lute. This instrument is regarded by the Chinese as the noblest and æsthetically the highest musical instrument in existence. A Chinese lover of music cannot find words to express the delight the lute can provide.[14] As a general thing the Chinese are ashamed to display emotion, and the Westerner is often shocked by apparent callousness, as for example when a person who has just lost a dear relative gives vent to a nervous laugh instead of yielding to tears when the subject is alluded to. Therefore it is by means of the lute that Tsai-yung gives expression to his repressed feelings. He does this with the delicate touch employed by Chinese painters in their impressionistic pictures and by the poets in their suggestive verses in which, as some one has said, the i’s are never dotted, but a definite mood is nevertheless conveyed all the more forcefully.[15] While Tsai-yung touches the strings of his instrument one servant fans him with an ivory fan, and a second burns incense, and a third places his books before him. Under such ideal conditions the Chinese scholar is quietly singing to his lute.

At this point his newly wedded wife, Niu-hsi, enters. Evidently the relation between the two is still an extremely distant one, for his wife, in asking Tsai-yung to sing a ballad for her, remarks that every time she comes to listen to his music, he stops. She too has her grief which she would like to have dispelled by sweet music. Tsai-yung begins to play, “The pheasant in the morning begins his long flight”, and “The wild duck separated from the companion he loves.” But these songs do not suit Niu-hsi’s mood. She wants not a song of a disappointed lover, but one to fit the present situation where husband and wife are together.

“My lord, in the calm of this lovely evening, in full view of this ravishingly beautiful scenery, sing me the ballad, ‘When the storm wind moves the pine trees.’” Tsai-yung starts to play it, but alas! as Niu-hsi discovers, he gradually slips into the air, “When I think of returning to my native land.”

Niu-hsi is disappointed because she cannot penetrate her husband’s melancholy mood. He explains that he cannot play better because he has his old lute no longer. In answer to his wife’s questions Tsai-yung speaks of his lute with evident symbolism, telling her that he has thrown his old lute aside but that at the bottom of his heart he loves it still. Niu-hsi guesses the cause of her husband’s grief, but she cannot persuade him to confide it to her. The two drink wine together and recite verses, but when the hour becomes late Tsai-yung asks his wife to retire and calls for his servant. Before the latter appears Tsai-yung sings to notes of his lute about a dream in which Wu-niang had appeared to him; but, in the words of Heine, “Es war ein Traum.”

He asks the servant to find him a trustworthy messenger whom he may send to his native village to inquire about his parents. But before this plan is put into operation an impostor appears, bringing an alleged letter from Tsai-yung’s father, according to which all the family are enjoying the very best of health. The letter gives the young scholar great pleasure and earns its bearer a rich reward; Tsai-yung gives the impostor some pearls and some gold for his father in addition to a letter in which he states that he is detained at the capital, but that he hopes to return home soon. Meanwhile, he very humbly begs forgiveness for the long delay. The false messenger is portrayed in a monologue as the most cowardly and the direst of villains. That it is so easy for him to deceive Tsai-yung is not so far-fetched as it may seem to the Westerner, for the employment of professional letter-writers is a very common practice in China where the percentage of illiteracy is high.

Of course, the father never receives his son’s letter; on the contrary, the next scene shows him dying of hunger. His faithful daughter-in-law watches over him to the last. For three years Tsai-yung has been absent without so much as sending a letter; therefore the father asks his daughter-in-law to marry again as soon as he has died. Wu-niang replies with a Chinese proverb, “No one can serve two masters”, and affirms her resolve to remain faithful to her husband. He is so grateful to her that he hopes, according to Buddhist beliefs, to be her daughter-in-law in his next life while she is to be his father-in-law. He curses the day he asked his son to leave home and gives to his friend Chang the injunction: “I leave you my cane. When this ungrateful and disobedient son of mine returns home, beat him for me with my stick and chase him out of the house.” With these fatherly words he breathes his last.

In order to earn the money for her father-in-law’s funeral Wu-niang cuts her hair and tries to sell it in the street. Her bald head gives her the appearance of a nun, although she feels scarcely worthy of becoming one. In the anguish of her poverty she runs through the streets, imploring people not to bargain with a wretched woman in her position, but to help her by buying the very last thing of value she possesses. The faithful Chang meets her in the street, and, on learning her story, promises to send to her house enough money to enable her to bury her father-in-law properly according to the rites. She in return gives him her hair, asking him to sell it. He accepts it, but not in order to sell it; far from that, he is going to keep it until Tsai-yung’s return, in order to prove to him the full extent of Wu-niang’s filial piety. This piety is so great that when Wu-niang goes to the cemetery to erect a monument over the grave of the deceased, a genie, touched by her devotion, comes to her aid by calling the white monkey of the south and the black tiger of the north to help him erect this tomb with the well-known speed and skill that genii possess. He also advises Wu-niang through the medium of a dream to assume the garb of a nun and to search for her husband in the capital. Wu-niang decides to follow this advice. She plans to earn her subsistence by taking with her Tsai-yung’s lute, in order to sing in the villages songs in praise of filial piety. In order to be able to accord the spirits of her parents-in-law their proper worship she paints their portraits and carries them with her. The Octogenarian Chang totters with Wu-niang to the edge of the village and bids her godspeed on her long journey.

Meanwhile Tsai-yung has been acting all this time like a man in a stupor, his wife says. Niu-hsi is pictured as a kindly young woman watching over her husband with loving care. “What ails you?” she asks. “You have the finest delicacies served you. You eat boiled tongues of orang-outang and roasted leopard embryos. You wear robes of violet silk; your belt is a belt of jade. When you go out or when you return your horse crushes under foot all manner of flowers which people spread on your path. Your head is shaded by an umbrella with three layers of silk. Formerly you were only a poor scholar living in a thatched hut; now you fulfill the highest functions in the emperor’s palace. You swim in wealth, but this wealth is not sufficient for you; you do nothing but wrinkle your forehead and heave sighs.”

Niu-hsi asks many more questions, but her husband refuses to reveal the cause of his grief. But when she leaves the room Tsai-yung relieves his feelings in a monologue which she overhears. When he has finished lamenting his separation from his parents and his wife (the latter is always mentioned after father and mother), Niu-hsi comes in to say simply that she will travel with him to his native village, if that is what he is longing for. He retorts, with the timidity found in most scholar-heroes in Chinese plays, that he is afraid to let her father hear of the matter and that he therefore forbids her to mention it. But the otherwise docile and obedient wife simply overrides his wishes and takes the matter to her father. The latter is quite willing to give his permission for the journey; only suggests that it might be better to send a faithful servant to bring Tsai-yung’s parents and wife to the capital. This plan is agreed to by all except the servant who, in a somewhat humorous scene, speaks of the evils that are sure to follow when two wives are living under one roof. But at last he agrees to go, even though he feels his mistress will never thank him for having obeyed on this occasion.

Wu-niang has meanwhile reached the capital. She enters a Buddhist temple where she is asked to sing by two clowns who pretend to be mandarins. The long series of misfortunes that has followed her consistently does not forsake her at this point—the two clowns simply make sport of her and pay her nothing. After her disappointment she unrolls the pictures of her parents-in-law to render homage before them and to pray to Heaven that she may find her husband. At this very moment Tsai-yung enters to pray for a safe journey for his parents. The bonze asks Wu-niang to leave and to make room for the great man. She forgets the pictures in her haste, and Tsai-yung carries off the scroll without having looked at it closely. But Wu-niang recognizes him and makes inquiries in regard to his residence. In this whole scene there is, as in many Chinese plays, a great deal of satire on Buddhist priests. One priest while saying a prayer is corrected by the abbot for mispronouncing one of the Sanskrit names for Buddha, Po-lo-t’ang instead of Po-lo-mi. The ignorant priest retorts, “Well, ‘t’ang’ is sugar and ‘mi’ is honey; both are sweet, so what difference does it make?” An Occidental parallel for this scene would be the medieval priest who baptized, “In nomine patriae, filiae, et spiritus sanctae.”

Wu-niang goes to her husband’s house as a mendicant nun and meets Niu-hsi. In a scene which the Chinese commentators consider the best in the play she gradually tells her story and reveals her identity to her husband’s second wife. Niu-hsi is touched by the filial piety of Wu-niang, calls her sister, and asks her to live with them. First she advises her how to reveal herself to her husband, namely by writing him a letter and placing it on his table in the library where he will be sure to find it. When Tsai-yung comes home he reads in the “Book of Annals”, a collection of historical illustrations selected by Confucius to give point to his moral teachings. In every passage he finds a rebuke for his lack of filial piety, and when he finds Wu-niang’s letter with the picture of his parents in their famished condition this means to him a greater reproof still. He begins to suspect that the messenger with the letter from his father had been an impostor. His wife’s letter contains nothing but hidden allusions to his actions. Among ancient examples quoted there is mention of one man to whom an emperor had offered his daughter but who had refused to degrade his wife to the rank of a concubine, and of another who had under similar circumstances repudiated his wife. Niu-hsi asks him whose conduct he approves of and he says the former’s, of course. Then she asks whether, if his first wife were to step before him now clad in rags, he would not blush with shame and repudiate her? He answers that he would not, that he considers his marriage indissoluble. When Wu-niang appears and tells him her story he feels deep shame because an ironic fate had led him to serve his emperor but to neglect his parents. Since his parents have died Chinese etiquette demands that he give up his office for a number of years and mourn for the death of his father and mother. Tsai-yung with his two wives sets out to make a pilgrimage to the ancestral tomb to offer proper worship to the deceased. The emperor is going to give posthumous honors to his parents because of Wu-niang’s faithfulness, and the historians will keep ever fresh the memory of the daughter-in-law’s filial piety.

Even after the death of his parents the son must put their interests (or supposed interests) above his own by a three-year period of mourning, a space of time which is simply lost out of his life. In his “Chinese Characteristics”, Doctor Arthur H. Smith points out the one-sidedness of the matter of filial piety—the Chinese ethical code mentions no duties of the parents toward their children. His summary of the subject, given in the chapter on Filial Piety, seems most apropos of the action of this play:

“Every son has performed his filial duties to his father, and demands the same from his own son. That is what children are for. Upon this point the popular mind is explicit. ‘Trees are raised for shade, children are reared for old age.’ Neither parents nor children are under any illusions upon this subject. ‘If you have no children to foul the bed, you will have no one to burn paper at the grave.’ Each generation pays the debt which is exacted of it by the generation which preceded it, and in turn requires from the generation which comes after full payment to the uttermost farthing. Thus is filial piety perpetuated from generation to generation, and from age to age.”

Of course, this is as the matter appears to the Occidental from the outside. But for the Chinese, who has grown up in a deep veneration of Confucius, filial piety is the most laudable institution in existence. Confucius laid it down as a principle that in the relations of ruler and subject, husband and wife, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, there must be rule on one side and submission on the other. Moreover, the “Book of Filial Piety” condemns sharply “selfish attachment to wife and children”; in other words, if the claims of father and wife clash, the son must neglect his wife to serve his father. These things are among the bases of Chinese society on which it has outlived the Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman and other civilizations; it is small wonder therefore that they seem good to the Chinese. The other extreme perhaps is found in Anglo-Saxon countries where a son, on becoming of age, goes where he likes and does what he likes without feeling any responsibility toward his parents. To quote Doctor Smith once more, “To the Chinese such customs must appear like the behaviour of a well-grown calf or colt to the cow and the mare, suitable enough for animals, but by no means conformable to li (ethical standards) as applied to human beings. An attentive consideration of the matter from a Chinese standpoint will show that there is abundant room in our own social practice for improvement, and that most of us really live in glass houses, and would do well not to throw stones recklessly.” To both the Westerner and the Chinese the practice of the other seems inferior, and neither can express an impartial opinion as to which is the better system. But the Westerner who wishes to understand the Chinese point of view can gain an insight into many things from reading “The Story of a Lute.”