How to distinguish between 'elegance' and 'vulgarity' in literary works

Chinese literature has always been defined as "elegant" and "popular". However, there is no clear definition of why they are called "elegant literature" and "popular literature". Here, the so-called "elegant" means formal, standard, normative, from which can also be derived from the noble, not vulgar meaning; the so-called "common", refers to the public, the common practice, can be derived from the meaning of commonplace, commonplace. If you know the definitions of "elegant" and "popular", you can roughly understand the meaning of "elegant literature" and "popular literature". Zheng Zhenduo, in his History of Chinese Popular Literature, defines "popular literature" as popular literature, folk literature, and literature for the masses. He thinks that "popular literature" is something that does not belong to the hall of justice, is not valued by scholars and scholars, but is popular among the people, and has become the hobby and joy of the public.

Looking at the history of Chinese literature, almost every style of literature belonged to "popular literature" when it first appeared. People are accustomed to calling such literary styles as Tang poetry, Song lyrics, Yuan operas, and Ming and Qing novels, which of them were not "popular literature" at the beginning?

There are two criteria for the division of popular and popular literature, one is the style of literature. In the pre-Qin era, the folk songs in the Classic of Poetry belonged to popular literature, while in the Han dynasty, they already belonged to popular literature in terms of form. From some of Cao Cao's four-character poems, we can see the aesthetic taste of the literati at that time. The plain language works that appeared in the Tang and Song dynasties were undoubtedly popular literature, and the novels they later spawned were discriminated against at the time. The so-called classical "Four Great Masterpieces" also appeared as popular literature at that time, but when we read these works today, we should say that they are quite "elegant" literary works. Many styles of literature were popular when they first appeared, but became elegant in later generations. Another criterion for classifying elegant and popular literature is the form of language. In the whole feudal society of China, all the official literature, which was regarded as elegant literature at that time, was written in the classical literary language of the pre-Qin and Han dynasties, while some works regarded as popular literature were written in the ancient vernacular language at that time, which is why it is possible to find materials in the Tang poems, the Song lyrics, the Yuan operas, and the ancient novels in the vernacular language in the study of the history of the Chinese language.

In a sense, it does not make much sense in contemporary literature to differentiate, define, and set up standards of elegance and vulgarity in literature. Who can say that writing novels is popular literature, and writing plays is popular literature, while writing poems is elegant literature? As far as the language itself is concerned, modern and contemporary literature uses modern Chinese, and there are subtle differences in the language differences between different works in Putonghua and dialects, which are quite small and often negligible. The deep-seated reason for people to judge the "elegance" and "vulgarity" of literature in modern and contemporary literature stems from the hermeneutical tradition of ancient China. In ancient China, the hermeneutics of canonical books can be roughly divided into the hermeneutics of scripture, the hermeneutics of history, and the hermeneutics of literature. In the history of traditional Chinese scholarship, the hermeneutic of scripture is the most powerful, and it is the hermeneutic method with a strong ideological nature. The greatest characteristic of this hermeneutic is to moralize, sanctify and ethicalize all ancient texts. Historical hermeneutics mainly focuses on "writing straight" and "not concealing good and evil", and to the extreme, it is the spirit of objectivism that "does not hide anything from the honored one". Literary hermeneutics, on the other hand, was against the common literature of "writing to explain the way of the world" and advocated the "chanting of sexual feelings", i.e., the aesthetic theories expressed in poems, lyrics, operas and novels. The hermeneutic of the Confucianism occupies a rather dominant position, while the hermeneutic of history and literature can only exist as an alien force to the Confucianism, only as a supplement, a tributary. The Book of Poetry belongs to literature, the Book of Shang belongs to historiography, the Rites of the Zhou belongs to political science, the I Ching belongs to philosophy, and the Spring and Autumn Annals belongs to historiography. In this way, it seems that the Scriptures are all-embracing. The scholars' interpretation of the Book of Songs has been a moral and ethical one, and many of the very simple love songs of the time have been regarded as sermons extolling the virtues of the queen consort, and the Spring and Autumn Annals have been shrouded with an aura of sanctity as they have been used by future generations of scholars to search for the slightest hint of the truth in accordance with the interpretation of the scriptures. Therefore, from the point of view of traditional Chinese reading and interpretation of texts, scriptural interpretation is almost all-encompassing, so much so that today when we evaluate literary works, we often take the difference between elegant and popular literature as a criterion for judging the merits of a work, and people subconsciously think that all "elegant literature" is good, and all "popular literature" is good. People subconsciously think that all "elegant literature" is good, and all "vulgar literature" is harmless and trivial, which is the standard of traditional Chinese hermeneutics to distinguish elegant and vulgar literature from the perspective of content. This idea hinders our yardstick for evaluating literary works.

The ancient Chinese hermeneutic system of scripture was mainly a "good", ethical, moralized sermon, in which all explanations of astronomy, physics, history, literature, and documents were aimed at upholding feudal ethics and morality. This method of interpretation also applies to literary works. In fact, when we evaluate literary works today, we consciously or unconsciously follow this method of interpretation of the scriptures.

The division and differentiation of elegant and popular literature is historical, while the interpretation of literature by the scriptural system is moral and ethical. If we still use this standard of literary evaluation today, it will prevent us from reading and interpreting contemporary literary works at multiple levels. Therefore, we should face up to this kind of categorization in evaluating literary works, and should not take it as a criterion for evaluating the merits and demerits of literary works. Any literary work has its own unique textual value, so the evaluation of the high and low standard of literary works, should not be only "elegant" and "vulgar" to determine.