P‘U SUNG-LING.
17th century a.d.
[After taking his first or bachelor’s degree before he was twenty, this now famous writer, popularly known as “Last of the Immortals,” failed to secure the second and more important degree which would have brought him into official life; the reason being that he neglected the beaten track of academic study and allowed himself to follow his own fancy. His literary output consists of a large collection of weird fantastic tales, which might well have disappeared but for the extraordinarily beautiful style in which they are written, a style which has been the envy and admiration of authors for the past two hundred and forty years. They have been translated into English by the present writer under the title of “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.” All that we really know about him is given in the document translated below.]
AUTHOR’S OWN RECORD.
“CLAD in wistaria, girdled with ivy:” thus sang Ch‘ü P‘ing[1] in his Falling into Trouble. Of ox-headed devils and serpent Gods, he of the long nails[2] never wearied to tell. Each interprets in his own way the music of heaven; and whether it be discord or not, depends upon antecedent causes. As for me, I cannot, with my poor autumn fire-fly’s light, match myself against the hobgoblins of the age. I am but the dust in the sunbeam, a fit laughing-stock for devils. For my talents are not those of Kan Pao,[3] elegant explorer of the records of the Gods; I am rather animated by the spirit of Su Tung-P‘o,[4] who loved to hear men speak of the supernatural. I get people to commit what they tell me to writing, and subsequently I dress it up in the form of a story; thus in the lapse of time my friends from all quarters have supplied me with quantities of material, which, from my habit of collecting, has grown into a vast pile.[5]
Human beings, I would point out, are not beyond the pale of fixed laws, and yet there are more remarkable phenomena in their midst than in the country of those who crop their hair;[6] antiquity is unrolled before us, and many tales are to be found
