The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 24 – Part 7

Author’s note:

A professor of physics has published a book of criticism on Jin Yong’s novels, for which the author is most grateful, and in revising the third edition the author adopted a number of his suggestions. But he held that the deep love of Wanyan Honglie,¹ a prince of the Great Jin, for Bao Xiruo² was out of keeping with the cruel and coarse nature of a nomad aristocrat. Such a view may carry an element of racial prejudice. Barbarous and cruel as the Jurchen were at first, there must surely have been some among them who set great store by love. By the time of the Manchu Qing, the Jurchen had a great lyric poet, Nara Singde,³ whose ci are full of lingering tenderness, and though the man himself may not have felt exactly so, there can be no doubt that he was capable of deep love. The Qing Shunzhi Emperor⁴ is said to have become a monk when his beloved Consort Donggo died. It may be legend, or it may be true, but at the very least people of the time widely believed that a Manchu could love deeply.

In the epics of the ancient Greek poet Homer, there is the deep and faithful love of Hector and his wife in the Iliad, and of Ulysses and his wife in the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks were then not long civilised, and yet husband and wife could love so deeply, which is not in the least surprising. The famous lovers of old English literature, Isolt and Tristan, were ancient Britons. They were buried together after death, and the rose stems planted on their grave twined their tendrils and leaves together so that no human hand could part them. Such fancies or legends of love grown into “intertwined branches” are found in China and abroad alike, and they do not differ with how advanced or backward a culture is. Every uncivilised people is cruel and coarse, and yet every barbarous people has its beautiful, tender love stories. In arguing that Wanyan Honglie’s deep love for Bao Xiruo was impossible, this professor wrote, “Love is a feeling that flows both ways. It cannot flow in one direction only, like a rectifier.” He also felt that Wanyan Honglie’s love for Bao Xiruo was too dangerous, not worth it, with too high a coefficient of danger, so that it could not have happened and was simply a “miracle”, and that he would have done better to love a painting or a statue of a beautiful woman (is this, I wonder, the rational calculation of a natural scientist?).

In physics, in mechanics, action and reaction must be equal, and the energy of the negatively charged electrons in an atom must equal that of the positive charge in the nucleus. But energy can escape and cause an atomic or a nuclear explosion, so that even in physics imbalance happens. In biology, without the miracle of mutation, living things would never evolve.

In ordinary life, according to statistics, the great majority of loves probably do flow both ways, but the normal life arrived at by statistics is not the stuff of literature. The world’s critics agree that the four greatest writers of all time are Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante. And the love these four great writers wrote of is, of all things, a one-way street, not a feeling that flows both ways. In Homer’s epic the Iliad, Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was the wife of Menelaus, king of a small Greek state. Paris, prince of Troy (who abandoned his own wife, Oenone), seduced her and ran away with her. The Greek army attacked Troy, and Paris went out to fight and was killed. Helen then married Paris’s brother Deiphobus, and when Troy fell, she betrayed Deiphobus and went back to Greece with King Menelaus. How heartless this beauty was towards men, one can well imagine. In another version of the Greek myth, after her husband King Menelaus died, she married the great warrior Achilles.

As for Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Othello and Hamlet, love in them is often one-way, and that needs no saying. Recent scholars hold that what best expresses Shakespeare’s true feelings is his sonnets, in which he writes of his utter devotion to a beauty of somewhat dark complexion (the Dark Lady), a love that pierced him to the heart. But the beauty did not love him, and took up with a handsome young man who was his friend, and Shakespeare could only grieve, with nothing to be done.

Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers). Its hero is Goethe himself, and what it tells is true. The woman he loved so deeply was named Charlotte Buff, but she was already engaged to a man named Kestner and paid Goethe little attention. The hero of the book ends by killing himself (Goethe himself, of course, did not).

Dante became engaged at twenty-two and later married. But at the age of nine he had seen another little girl of nine, Beatrice, and fallen deeply in love with her. The two had little to do with each other, and only when they were both eighteen did they come to know each other, and Beatrice showed him no favour. Dante loved her ardently, and she did not respond. It was love entirely unrequited, and later the girl died. In his masterpiece La Vita nuova, Dante wrote in superb verse and prose of his deep, unrequited love for her, right up to her death and his own profound grief. In his still greater later work, La divina commedia, Dante tells how after death he passed from Hell through Purgatory and rose to Paradise, with Beatrice as the angel who guides him. The beauty with which he portrays this girl in mind and spirit is one of the enduring masterpieces of world literature.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the great French novelist Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, the great English novelist Hardy’s The Return of the Native and many more all tell of one-way love.

Among our own country’s classics, the ancient poem Huashan Ji, “Meng zhi chi chi” in the Classic of Poetry, Cao Zhi’s “Rhapsody on Lady Zhen”, Du Fu’s “Beautiful Woman”, Li Shangyin’s “The Ornate Zither”, and the Romance of the Western Chamber and the Tale of the Pipa, timeless masterpieces all, which of them does not tell of one-way love?

In literature, love does not seem to reckon whether it is worth it or how high the coefficient of danger may be. So it is with great literature, and so it is too with “low literature”, or “not literature at all”, such as The Legend of the Condor Heroes.

This critic also held that “the rulers of nomadic peoples who came to power over the Central Plains were often boundless in their lust”, because on the one hand they kept their old way of life and their “robust bodies”, and on the other they were free of the constraints of the Central Plains’ rites and culture, and were not afraid to commit “shocking outrages”. He said that Wanyan Honglie’s forebear of the Jin, Wanyan Liang,⁵ was the best example, a man of utterly shameless depravity, and that under the influence of such a “sex-crazed” forebear, Wanyan Honglie could never have loved Bao Xiruo so tenderly. It was “truly hard to understand”, and would not do even in a “fairy tale”.

In fact, Wanyan Honglie is an invented character. His father, Zhangzong,⁶ was accomplished in both calligraphy and painting and wrote both shi and ci, and his calligraphy in the Slender Gold style was almost indistinguishable from that of Emperor Huizong of Song.⁷ His mother, Empress Yang,⁸ was a fine painter. Clearly his cultural heritage was no weaker than that of the scholars of the Central Plains. Wanyan Liang’s shameless depravity is not in question, but his poems were also very fine, such as his seven-character regulated verse “Written on Passing Ruyin”:

The gate shut at dusk, the moss stained green. The traces of that visit half lost in dust. The empty courtyard at day’s end. Birds jostle and laugh. The hidden path deep in grass. No one comes. A rockery fathoms high stands at door and window. One pool of spring water winds around the terrace. The thick blooms know nothing of rise and fall. Still they lean on the railing, opening one by one.

Is that not deeply felt, enough to make one linger over it and sigh?

Besides, shameless depravity has little to do with cultivation. Emperor Yang of Sui⁹ was depraved enough, and yet his poems really were superb. Li Houzhu of the Southern Tang¹⁰ and Emperor Xuanzong of Tang¹¹ must be counted men of the highest cultivation, yet their love lives would hardly meet the ideals of a modern scientist.

Footnotes

1. 完颜洪烈 — Wányán Hóngliè. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 包惜弱 — Bāo Xīruò. Her name meaning “cherishing the weak”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 纳兰性德 — Nàlán Xìngdé (1655—1685). A Qing dynasty ci poet of Manchu descent, renowned for the emotional depth of his lyrics. ↩

4. 顺治皇帝 — Shùnzhì Huángdì. The Shunzhi Emperor (1638—1661), third ruler of the Qing, said to have become a monk after the death of Consort Donggo. See Wikipedia. ↩

5. 完颜亮 — Wányán Liàng (1122—1161). The fourth Jin emperor, known as the Prince of Hailing, who was killed by his own officers during his invasion of the Song. ↩

6. 章宗 — Zhāngzōng (1168—1208). Emperor Zhangzong, sixth emperor of the Jin, known for his skill in calligraphy and painting. ↩

7. 宋徽宗 — Sòng Huīzōng. Emperor Huizong of Song (r. 1100—1126), a patron of Daoism and the arts whose reign ended in the Jin conquest of northern China. See Wikipedia. ↩

8. 杨后 — Yáng Hòu. Literally Empress Yang. ↩

9. 隋炀帝 — Suí Yángdì (569—618). The second emperor of the Sui dynasty, known both for his cultural refinement and for his notorious excesses. ↩

10. 李后主 — Lǐ Hòuzhǔ. Literally Li the last ruler. Li Yu (937—978), the last ruler of the Southern Tang, celebrated as a poet of ci lyrics. ↩

11. 唐玄宗 — Táng Xuánzōng. Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (685—762), under whom the dynasty reached its height, remembered for his devotion to Consort Yang Guifei. See Wikipedia. ↩