Study On The Mentality Of The Last Literati In Mo Youzhi’s Poetry

In the late Qing Dynasty,all aspects of traditional Chinese society were being impacted by both internal and external factors.As an important and enormous group that created,preserved and passed on traditional culture,the literati class faced an existential crisis.A large number of the literati who were born and raised in the middle of Qing Dynasty,and active in the late Qing Dynasty,maintaining the established traditions including the values,the academic system,the tendency of literature and art,even the entertainment in the turbulent society,demonstrated a comprehensive identification with the identity of the“literati”.With the passing of this generation,there have been great changes within the literati class.Traditions gradually merged with the forces that impacted it,so that a new cultural atmosphere was formed.From a cultural perspective,this generation of literati was actually the Last Literati(“末代士人”),whose identity had the contradictory characteristics of both inheritance and demise.The sense of identification of the Last Literati also contained a contradiction:Inheritance and persistence of the realistic spirit of“a Gentleman sets his heart on the Way”(“士志于道”),and avoidance and rejection of the actual state of society.As a genre on which the literati relied heavily,poetry fully reflected this complex and delicate mentality.Mo Youzhi(莫友芝),the subject of study selected in this article,whose life spanned four dynasties of Jiaqing(嘉庆),Daoguang(道光),Xianfeng(咸丰)and Tongzhi(同治),was a typical Last Literati.From personal experience and extant poetry,his career as a poet and a literati began and ended almost identically.His poetry is a relatively complete record of his life.Taking Mo Youzhi’s identification with literati identity as a core,combined with his poetry,biographies,and historical background,his mentality can be divided into four periods.The first period was from passing the provincial examination in the eleventh year of the Daoguang Dynasty(1831 AD)to before hearing the news about the First Opium War in the twentieth year of the Daoguang Dynasty(1840 AD).During this period,Mo Youzhi’s life experience was relatively simple.His poetry had not yet developed a distinctly personal poetic style,with a strong imitation of form,and repeatedly expressed a sense of loss caused by having not been an official in content,so that his individual experience dissolved in the collective experience shared by common literati.Constraining by frustration at the failure of the Imperial Examinations reflected that in a static living environment,Mo Youzhi passively inherited the status of literati,unconsciously following and identifying with the traditions of literati class.The second period was from hearing the news about the First Opium War in the twentieth year of the Daoguang Dynasty(1840 AD)to before the interruption of the journey to Beijing for the Imperial Examination in the second year of the Xianfeng Dynasty(1852 AD).With the turmoil of the era and births and deaths in daily life,the focus of Mo Youzhi’s life gradually shifted from the Imperial Examination to academics,which diluted the utilitarianism in his mentality,and deepened his separation from the era.In the poetry of this period,the personal poetic style being good at integrating emotions into scenes gradually took shape.And there were more poems pointing to social reality or writing about individual experiences.Vague anxiety of the era appeared in poetry,and made the image of the poet himself fragmented and blurred in the text.Vague anxiety of the era reflected that Mo Youzhi developed a more conscious sense of identification with his literati status.He consciously assumed the cultural responsibility of the literati class in turbulent situations.Meanwhile,out of the maintenance and selfconfidence of the literati class,he could not achieve deep introspection and sober cognition.The third period was from the interruption of the journey to Beijing for the Imperial Examination in the second year of the Xianfeng Dynasty(1852 AD)to before leaving Guizhou to Beijing in the eighth year of the Xianfeng Dynasty(1858 AD).The tragic and painful experience during the war gave Mo Youzhi a strong sense of crisis about himself and the literati class to which he belonged.In the poetry of this period,finally there were a complete,clear,independent image of “Me”,which meaned the true maturity of his poetic style.Mo Youzhi’s literary thought and academic thought were also maturing in this period,showing a strong identification with the traditional culture of the literati class.Corresponding to this state,there were two contradictions in his mentality: Firstly,the actual existence of his life and the imminent disappearance of the group to which he belonged plunged him into a strong identity crisis,for he could not live without a literati status;secondly,his simultaneous accusations against both local officials and the common people at the bottom made him placed the literati in an innocent position,and exacerbated his identity crisis.The fourth period was from leaving Guizhou to Beijing in the eighth year of the Xianfeng Dynasty(1858 AD)to passing away in Xinghua in the tenth year of the Tongzhi Dynasty(1871 AD).The drifting experience of the later years made Mo Youzhi aware of the great difficulty of returning to his hometown,the inability to restore the traditional order,and the irreversible trend of the times,so that“Sorrow of Shu Li”(“黍离之悲”)became the emotional basis in his poetry of this period.In his writing,Mo Youzhi expressed his sorrow of personal experience and the country in plain language,and his poetic style tended to be cold and desolate,and his image of the poet also achieved the final freeze frame.His poetry of this period reflected two points:Firstly,under the structure of Qing Poetry in which“power always played a greater role than talent”(“卿大夫恒以官位之力胜匹夫”),individual discourse was often suppressed,and under the illusion of resurgence in Tongzhi Dynasty,it was even more difficult for poets to express their grief for the country directly;secondly,combined with his academic achievements in his later years,after being disappointed with the Qing Dynasty,Mo Youzhi was no longer angry about the changes in the world and the end of the literati class,but instead completely transformed his sense of identification with the literati into organizing traditional culture,and in a calm posture,coexisted with the literati class before it disappearing.Throughout the whole life of Mo Youzhi,as the changes and upheavals of the era affected his personal life more deeply,his poetry writing gradually shifted from imitation to writing about individual experiences,and the emotions in his poetry gradually changed from vague to clear and deep,and his sense of identification with literati identity shifted from unconscious to conscious,from passive inheritance to active cherishing and maintenance.As for the attitude toward the traditional culture of the literati class,he also gradually changed from blind obedience to secular norms to diluting utilitarian ideas,to the exploration and sorting out of pure scholarship.The life experience of Mo Youzhi was actually a microcosm of the fate of the Last Literati group.