Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 17

The problem is that if we discuss ancient articles, we don't know whether to use the yardstick of literature or the yardstick of rhetoric. For example, Han Yu, whom we are going to talk about today, is a great rhetorician, but he wears the hat of a writer. If I take off this hat, many people will be unhappy. If I talk about things under the hat, it will be disrespectful to Han Yu. What should I do?

Han Yu's poems were not all considered good by his predecessors. For example, Wang Fuzhi said that his poems "are full of tricky rhymes, strange sentences, ancient sentences, and dialects, and are very clever, but they have nothing to do with people's moods and interests, and are only suitable for drinking." However, few people say that Han Yu's prose is not good.

It is a noble thing for later scholars to read and write ancient prose. The so-called ancient prose is not the classics, nor is it the history of the Han Dynasty. Its roots, especially the mindset, can be found in Han Yu and Ouyang Xiu. If we look at the book Guwen Guanzhi, there are more than 20 articles by Han Yu. If we look at the idioms that people use today, there are more than 100 from Han Yu, more than from the Book of Songs, and we can see how great his influence is.

When Han Yu advocated classical prose, his opponents were the flamboyant style of writing at that time, and the writing of the Six Dynasties. Han Yu disliked not only the parallel style of the Six Dynasties, but also the people of the Six Dynasties. In his opinion, their words were not about the great principles, and they were chaotic and chaotic. In today's words, their thoughts were too inconsistent. Han Yu wrote a lot of articles to correct people's hearts, but he was not good at thinking deeply and exploring the truth. In the orthodoxy, he was just a thug, far inferior to Mencius, and he was short of ideas when it came to reasoning. But on the other hand, he actually rectified the style of writing, and was on the right path, which was as good as the Qin Emperor and Han Wudi.

Is the writing of the Six Dynasties really that bad? Far from it. In the "Selected Works of Literature", there are at least dozens of very interesting articles. So, how many interesting articles are there in the "ancient prose" written by Han Yu and later? In my opinion, there is not even one.