詩人と妻 : 中唐士大夫意識の一斷面

Abstract

Love between men and women was one of the ancient themes of the classics of Chinese literature. Most of them, however, deal with love of women for men; the number of the works whose theme is love of men for women is surprisingly small. Especially few are works in which men confess their feelings towards their wives, though the genre itself has existed from very early times, as is evidenced by Zeng-fu shih 贈婦詩 by Chin Jia 秦嘉 of the Hou Han 後漢 dynasty and Dao-wang shi 悼亡詩 by Pan Yue 潘岳 of the Jin 晉 dynasty. The most important reason for this seems to lie in the way of thinking of scholar-officials in olden times. The scholar-officials, who held the leading positions in the state and the society, regarded it as inappropriate to profess in public the feelings related with private, personal matters within their homes. Probably it never occurred to them that they might express their feelings towards their wives. In their Mid-Tang, however, the situation noticeably changed. We know that Yuan Zhen 元稹, one of the most famous poets of this period, wrote many Dao-wang shih, and that Bai Ju-i 白居易 often dedicated his poems to his wife, but they were by no means unusual. Many other leading poets and prose writers of the Mid-Tang, such as Du-gu Ji 獨孤及, Wei Ying-wu 韋應物, Liu Yu-xi 劉禹錫, and Liu Zong-yuan 柳宗元, also wrote similar works. Moreover, the terms and expressions used in these works are far more concrete and specific than those used in works of Pan Yueh, since they derive from personal, individual relationships of the poets with their wives. This indicates that the scholar-officials of the Mid-Tang seemed to be undergoing a concurrent change of mentality. Unlike their counterparts in the past, they came to recongnize the worth of expressing private feelings in their personal lives as well. Such a way of thinking, it is argued, is what is shared by the scholar-officials of the Song 宋 dynasty.