Part 2 (1/2)

Notwithstanding the difficulties that beset this pa.s.sage of the Li Ki, I am not disposed to reject it altogether. It derives a certain amount of confirmation from the pa.s.sage quoted from the Official Book of Kau on p.

278, showing that in the Kau dynasty there was a collection of poems, under the divisions of the Fang, the Ya, and the Sung, which it was the business of the Grand, Music-Master to teach the musicians of the court.

It may be accepted then, that the duke of Kau, in legislating for his dynasty, enacted that the poems produced in the different feudal states should be collected on occasion of the royal progresses, and lodged thereafter among the archives of the bureau of music at the royal court.

The same thing, we may presume a fortiori, would be done, at certain other stated times, with those produced within the royal domain itself.

The music-master of the king would get the odes of each state from its music-master.

But the feudal states were modelled after the pattern of the royal state. They also had their music-masters, their musicians, and their historiographers. The kings in their progresses did not visit each particular state, so that the Grand Music Master could have the opportunity to collect the odes in it for himself. They met, at well-known points, the marquises, earls, barons, &c., of the different quarters of the kingdom; there gave audience to them; adjudicated on their merits, and issued to them their orders. We are obliged to suppose that the princes were attended to the places of rendezvous by their music-masters, carrying with them the poetical compositions gathered in their several regions, to present them to their superior of the royal court. We can understand how, by means of the above arrangement, the poems of the whole kingdom were acc.u.mulated and arranged among the archives of the capital.

How the collected poems were disseminated through the states.

Was there any provision for disseminating thence the poems of one state among all the others? There is sufficient evidence that such dissemination was effected out in some way. Throughout the Narratives of the States, and the details of Zo Khiu-ming on the history of the Spring and Autumn, the officers of the states generally are presented to us as familiar not only with the odes of their particular states, but with those of other states as well. They appear equally well acquainted with all the Parts and Books of our present s.h.i.+h; and we saw how the whole of it was sung over to Ki Ka of Wu, when he visited the court of Lu in the boyhood of Confucius. There was, probably, a regular communication from the royal court to the courts of the various states of the poetical pieces that for one reason or another were thought worthy of preservation. This is nowhere expressly stated, but it may be contended for by a.n.a.logy from the accounts which I have given, in the Introduction to the Shu, pp. 4, 5, of the duties of the royal historiographers or recorders.

How the s.h.i.+h is so small and incomplete.

2. But if the poems produced in the different states were thus collected in the capital, and thence again disseminated throughout the kingdom, we might conclude that the collection would have been far more extensive and complete than we have it now. The smallness of it is to be accounted for by the disorder into which the kingdom fell after the lapse of a few reigns from king Wu. Royal progresses ceased when royal government fell into decay, and then the odes were no more collected[1]. We have no account of any progress of the kings during the Khun Khiu period. But before that period there is a long gap of nearly 150 years between kings Khang and i, covering the reigns of Khang, Kao, Mu, and Kung, if we except two doubtful pieces among the Sacrificial Odes of Kau. The reign of Hsiao, who succeeded to i, is similarly uncommemorated; and the latest odes are of the time of Ting, when 100 years of the Khun Khiu period had still to run their course. Many odes must have been made and collected during the 140 and more years after king Khang. The probability is that they perished during the feeble reigns of i and the three monarchs who followed him. Then came the long and vigorous reign of Hsuan (B.C. 827 to 782), when we may suppose that the ancient custom of collecting the poems was revived. After him all was in the main decadence and confusion. It was probably in the latter part of his reign that King-khao, an ancestor of Confucius, obtained from the Grand Music-Master at the court of Kau twelve of the sacrificial odes of the previous dynasty, as will be related under the Sacrificial Odes of Shang, with which he returned to Sung,

[1. See Mencius, IV, ii, ch. 21.]

which was held by representatives of the line of Shang. They were used there in sacrificing to the old Shang kings; yet seven of the twelve were lost before the time of the sage.

The general conclusion to which we come is, that the existing s.h.i.+h is the fragment of various collections made during the early reigns of the kings of Kau, and added to at intervals, especially on the occurrence of a prosperous rule, in accordance with the regulation that has been preserved in the Li Ki. How it is that we have in Part I odes of comparatively few of the states into which the kingdom was divided, and that the odes of those states extend only over a short period of their history:--for these things we cannot account further than by saying that such were the ravages of time arid the results of disorder. We can only accept the collection as it is, and be thankful for it. How long before Confucius the collection was closed we cannot tell.

Bearing of these views on the interpretation of particular pieces.

3. The conclusions which I have thus sought to establish concerning the formation of the s.h.i.+h as a collection have an important bearing on the interpretation of many of the pieces. The remark of Sze-ma Khien that Confucius selected those pieces which would be service able for the inculcation of propriety and righteousness' is as erroneous as the other, that be selected 305 pieces out of more than 3000. The sage merely studied and taught the pieces which he found existing, and the collection necessarily contained odes ill.u.s.trative of bad government as well as of good, of licentiousness as well as of a pure morality.

Nothing has been such a stumbling-block in the way of the reception of Ku Hsi's interpretation of the pieces as the readiness with which he attributes a licentious meaning to many of those in the seventh Book of Part I. But the reason why the kings had the odes of the different states collected and presented to them was, 'that they might judge from them of the manners of the people,' and so come to a decision regarding the government and morals of their rulers. A student and translator of the odes has simply to allow them to speak for themselves, and has no more reason to be surprised by references to vice in some of them than by the language of virtue in many others. Confucius said, indeed, in his own enigmatical way, that the single sentence, 'Thought without depravity,' covered the whole 300 pieces[1]; and it may very well be allowed that they were collected and preserved for the promotion of good government and virtuous manners. The merit attaching to them is that they give us faithful pictures of what was good and what was bad in the political state of the country, and in the social, moral, and religious habits of the people.

The writers of the odes.

The pieces were of course made by individuals who possessed the gift, or thought that they possessed the gift, of poetical composition. Who they were we could tell only on the authority of the pieces themselves, or of credible historical accounts, contemporaneous with them or nearly so. It is not worth our while to question the opinion of the Chinese critics who attribute very many of them to the duke of Kau, to whom we owe so much of the fifth Part of the Shu). There is, however, independent testimony only to his composition of a single ode,--the second of the fifteenth Book in Part I [2]. Some of the other pieces in that Part, of which the historical interpretation may be considered as sufficiently fixed, are written in the first person; but the author may be personating his subject.

In Part II, the seventh ode of decade 2 was made by a, Kia-fu, a n.o.ble of the royal court, but we know nothing more about him; the sixth of decade 6, by a eunuch styled Mang-Dze; and the sixth of decade 7, from a concurrence of external testimonies, should be ascribed to duke Wu of Wei, B.C. 812 to 758.

In the third decade of Part III, the second piece was composed by the same duke Wu; the third by an earl of Zui in the royal domain; the fourth must have been made by one of king, Hsuan's ministers, to express the king's

[1. a.n.a.lects, II, ii.

2. See the Shu, V, vi, par. 3.]

feelings under the drought that was exhausting the kingdom; and the fifth and sixth claim to be the work of Yin Ki-fu, one of Hsuan's princ.i.p.al officers.

4. The ninth ode of the fourth Book, Part II, gives us a note of time that enables us to fix the year of its composition in a manner entirely satisfactory, and proves also the correctness, back to that date, of the ordinary Chinese chronology. The piece is one of a group which their contents lead us to refer to the reign of king Yu, the son of Hsuan, B.C. 781 to 771. When we examine the chronology of his period, it is said that in his sixth year, B.C. 776, there was an eclipse of the sun.

Now the ode commences:--

'At the conjunction (of the sun and moon) in the tenth month, on the first day of the moon, which was Hsin-mao, the sun was eclipsed.'

This eclipse is verified by calculation as having taken place in B.C.