Popular novels have become classics: the literati's revision has made four wonderful books, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, The Journey to the West and Jin Ping Mei, which are now recognized classics in the history of China literature. Why can China's ancient popular novels be called classics? Tan Fan, a professor at East China Normal University, pointed out in his speech: the revision and revision of the text of the "Four Wonder Books" by scholars and scholars since the middle of Ming Dynasty is an important factor for the "Four Wonder Books" to become a novel classic. Taken together, this is mainly reflected in three aspects: First, the performance content of the novel has been revised with strong literati characteristics. This is reflected in Jin Shengtan's revision of Water Margin and Shi Mao's comments on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Jin Shengtan's correction of Water Margin embodies three emotional connotations: one is the realistic complex of worrying about the chaos of the world and uncovering the wood one after another; The second is to analyze and identify the loyalty and treachery of the characters in the works politically; The third is the moral judgment to distinguish the true and false temperament of the characters. As a result, he beheaded the Water Margin and fabricated Lu Junyi's "Scared Nightmare" section to show his anxiety about reality; Highlight the chaos from the top, accusing the treacherous court official of taking bribes and bending the law, bringing disaster to the country and the people; He also "hated Song Jiang alone", highlighting his hypocrisy, and regarded Li Kui jy and others as "Heaven and Man". These three obviously constitute the main features of the collation of the Water Margin of Jin, and they are unique among many versions of the Water Margin, showing their unique ideological and artistic personality. The most obvious feature of The Romance of The Three Kingdoms revised by Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang is to further strengthen the orthodox concept of "supporting Liu against Cao". Based on this idea, Shi Mao made more additions and deletions to The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, including plot setting, historical data utilization, characterization and even individual words (for example, most of the original works called Cao Cao "Cao Gong"), and Shi Mao also followed this idea and spirit to transform it. As a result, Mao Ben's Romance of the Three Kingdoms became the most orthodox and literary version. Secondly, the revision of the form of works can be regarded as the perfection and fixation of the form system of popular novels to some extent, which has played an exemplary role in later novel creation. For example, during the Chongzhen period, Jin Ping Mei deleted a lot of lyrics and songs from Hua Ci Ben, which changed Jin Ping Mei with obvious "talking" nature from "rap book" to "storytelling book". Another example is The Journey to the West, in which a large number of poems of "self-report" of characters in The Journey to the West Baihui Edition were also deleted, which gradually changed the works from the form of script to the pattern of readers. The revision of the purpose of regression is also an important aspect of novel criticism in this period. For example, Shi Mao's criticism of The Romance of The Three Kingdoms is connected with the author's intention, and every time he takes dual language as the topic, he strives for accuracy. "Looking back at sentences, refined language and rich literary talent have become a major feature of the novel, and A Dream of Red Mansions has reached its peak.