"Dilution" Beauty And "Plain" Beauty In Tang And Song Poetics

Dilution and Pedestrian both are important items in Chinese classical esthetics. At thebeginning, the two items were not showed in notes on classical poetics, but books onpersonality-evaluating. Dilution was noted initially in DuYi’s biography of Jin dynasty, andJiaoran who recommended it to his book on classical poetics, SikongTu wrote a book namedTwenty-four Styles on Poetry-commenting, and he rated Dilution as the second important style.Pedestrian was showed in Figures Annals，then ZhongRong was the first theorist that introducedthis item to classical poetics. SikongTu commented on classical poetics with Dilution,in hiscommentaries, he spoke favorably of style which expressed by WangWei andWeiYingwu,whom lived in Mid-Tang dynasty. About Pedestrian, most of scholars defined it asthe main feature of poetry in Song dynasty, and MeiShengyu、Sushi、HuangTingjian could be thethree representative poets. Dilution and Pedestrian are very similar on style, so the two always bemixed by someone that thought the two should be replaced by each other. Surely, they share sometraits. Firstly, they belong to the beauty of light, on sense of esthetics. Secondly, they thrived upby the influence of Zhuang and Zen. Thirdly, the two viewed TaoYuanming’s composition as themodel. But they are different definitely. Firstly, the meanings on esthetics are inconsistent. If wecan compare between the two, and the conclusion is obvious. We could view them on estheticstraits, Dilution showed nimbleness、light and softness. But Pedestrian flat、emaciation、toughnessand robustness. On personality of each other. The former cherished a kind of aloof emotion, poetsdetached from this mortal life, the latter introversion and stableness. On the altitude they reached,the former offered lots of imagination for us, but the latter not. Secondly, the social preference onesthetics affected the group of poets. Thirdly, the methods of composition were not alike. Theformer produced by extemporaneousness and undercoating, the latter opposite. In a word, the twoshared traits, but different.