so revolutionary in many ways, is nevertheless easily recognizable as the descendant of these [, , and ] three great popular romances. It has their inordinate length (it is certain that , as planned by Tsao, ran to at least a hundred chapters), their lack of faith in the interestingness of the everyday world, leading to the conviction that a realistic story must necessarily be set in a supernatural framework. It has the story-teller's tendency to put far more art into the technique of the individual séance or chapter, than into the construction of the work as a whole. It has the same moralizing tendency; for, as I have said, Chinese fiction is always on the defensive—is always, with an eye on official Puritanism, trying to prove that, like serious and approved literature, it has a "message." In indeed this message is reserved for the later chapters, which Tsao did not live to complete. But we know that the edifying final episodes (for example, Pao-Yu's entry into the Buddhist Church) were part of the author's original plan. But the is unlike all previous Chinese novels in that Tsao, instead of embroidering upon existing legends or histories, describes a group of people wholly unknown to the reader; and stranger innovation still, these people (as Dr. Hu Shih has proved) are the author and his family. All realistic novels are, of course, autobiographical, the writer's knowledge of realities being drawn chiefly from his own experience. But is autobiographical in a more complete sense. Indeed, one even feels that, were it not for the rigid framework imposed by tradition, Tsao might easily have fallen into the error of transcribing with too careful a fidelity the monotonies of actual life. [...] It is in his accounts of dreams that as an imaginative writer Tsao Hsueh-Chin rises to his greatest heights; and it is in these passages that we feel most clearly the symbolic or universal value of his characters—Pao-Yu, the hero, standing for Imagination and Poetry; his father, for all those sordid powers of pedantry and restriction that hamper the artist in his passage through life.
Cao Xueqin
