Foreign Literature Elements Of Qian Gurong’s Literature Criticism

Qian Gurong has his own opinion about western literature. In his essay On "Literature Is the Study of Man", he made a brilliant exposition about the law of development of world literature history, which is based on humanism. From his statements, we can reorganize his evaluation about the view of western culture in every period.Beginning with Gorky’s quotation "The great litterateur must be the great humanist, and it will be proved by the history of world literature", Qian regards the humanism as the principal line throughout the world literature, and extensively discusses the humanistic spirit in masterpieces of western literature. Qian thinks that realism and romanticism, the two basic approaches of literature creation, are essentially identical in humanism, which means "They are both based on sympathy and love for people; they try to improve people’s life; and they help people fight for spiritual liberation." From the Renaissance Era, western literature goes into the evolution stage of thoughts and parties. Many literary thoughts, including humanism, classicism, enlightenment, romanticism, realism, modernism, and etc., alternate successively. In the 1950s, Chinese academia regards the realistic literature in 19th century as the peak of literature history. Although, Qian doesn’t have obvious opinion about that, he mentions a lot about Balzac, Tolstoy and other realistic writers, which indicates his agreement on the dominant thought in 1950s. However, there is something different. Qian’s agreement was based on humanism instead of the theory of class rising in that period. In his view, the much more profound humanism thoughts attribute to the greatness of western realistic writers. Qian emphasize more on the combined function of humanism rather than the differences between thoughts and parties. He believes that, the excellent literary works may different in people’s nature, in national character, in creation approach, or in thoughts and parties, but the humanistic spirit is common and necessary. People like Byron and Hugo not because they are romanticists; people respect Balzac and Dickens not because they are realists. Instead, the humanistic spirit about respecting people and loving people in their famous works earn the praises for these great writers.