FOREWORD TO TSANG-LANG DISCOURSE
ON POETRY
SO far as I know, this Discourse on Poetry, which Mr Peng Chun Chang has translated at my urgent request, is the first example of Chinese literary criticism to appear in English. But whether or not it is the first—for in this field I cannot speak with authority—it is a delightful thing, well worthy of an even larger audience than that which has treasured it for centuries. Everyone to whom such things make any appeal whatever will recognize its naïve and exotic charm. But beyond this, it has a special interest as anticipating by eight centuries some of the most modern conceptions of art of the Western World.
The arts, including the art of poetry, are as old as life itself, but it is only recently that their real place and function in the life of man have been clearly understood. For centuries they were assumed to be one with philosophy, or science, or religion, or morals, or sensual enjoyment, and their purpose was thought to teach, or to improve morals, or to give pleasure. It is only during the last century or two that we have gradually begun to understand that "beauty is its own excuse for being," and that art is an inevitable expression of a side of man's nature that can find no other realization except in it. This side of our nature Croce calls "intuition." But whether we call it intuition, or imagination, or fantasy, or whatever else may best suit our whim or our thought, it remains an integral part of the life of the spirit, without which men can no more live than they can without acting or thinking; and art needs no further justification than that it is the flowering of this side of human nature. The true critic distinguishes clearly between art, religion, morals, and philosophy, not for the purpose of denying, but of establishing their essential unity in the life of the spirit.
But though this conception of art has come to us only recently, a few earlier anticipations of it have of course been discovered. An Italian scholar, Rostagni, has found them in a Greek treatise On Poetry of the first century, fragments of which have been salvaged
