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only five pieces, of all of which Choo considers the date to be uncertain; of that of the second, as has been observed above, we have no memorials at all; of that of the third we have only one piece, which Choo, for apparently good reasons, would assign to a considerably later date. Then follow four pieces, the date of which is quite uncertain, and eleven, assigned to the reign of Le,-some of them with evident error. To Le's succeeded the long and vigorous reign of Seuen (B.C. 828-781) when we may suppose that the ancient custom of collecting the poems was revived. Subsequently to him, all was in the main decadence and disorder. It was probably in the latter part of his reign that Ch'ing-k'aou-foo, an ancestor of Confucius, obtained from the Grand music master of the court of Chow twelve of the sacrificial odes of the previous dynasty, with which he returned to Sung which was held by representatives of the House of Shang. They were used there in sacrificing to the old kings of Shang, and were probably taken with them to Loo when the K'ung family subsequently sought refuge in that State. Yet of the twelve odes seven were lost by the time of Confucius.

The general conclusion to which we come is, that the existing Book of Poetry is the fragment of various collections made during the early reigns of the kings of Chow, and added to at intervals, especially on the occurrence of a prosperous rule, in accordance with the regulation which has been preserved in the Le Ke. How it is that we have in Part I. odes of not more than a dozen 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 and the results of disorder. We can only accept the collection as it is, and be thankful for it. It was well that Confucius was a native of Loo, for such was the position of that State among the others, and so close its relations with the royal court, that the odes preserved in it were probably more numerous and complete than anywhere else. Yet we cannot accept the statement of the editor of the Suy catalogue adduced on page 2, that the existing pieces had been copied out and arranged by Che, the music-master of Loo, unless, indeed, Che had been in office during the boyhood of Confucius, when, as we have seen, the collection was to be found there, substantially the same as it is now.

9. I say not quite a dozen, for Books III., IV., and V., all belong to Wei, and Books X. and probably also XIII., to Tsin.

of particular pieces.

7. The conclusions which I have sought to establish in the above paragraphs, concerning the sources of the She as a collection, have an important bearing on the interpretation of many of the odes. The Bearing of the above para-) remark of Sze-ma Ts'ëen, that 'Confucius graphs on the interpretation selected those pieces which would be serviceable for the illustration of propriety and righteousness,' is as erroneous as the other, that the sage selected 305 pieces out of 3000. Confucius merely studied and taught the pieces which he found existing, and the collection necessarily contained odes illustrative 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 Choo He's interpretation of the pieces as the readiness with which he attributes a licentious meaning to those of Book VII., Part I. But the reason why the kings in their progresses 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 at the language of vice in some of them than at the language of virtue in many others. The enigmatic saying of Confucius himself, that the whole of 'the three hundred odes may be summed up in one sentence,―Thought without depravity,'10 must be understood in the meaning which I have given to it in the translation of the Analects. It may very well be said, in harmony with all that I have here advanced, that the odes 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 habits of the people.

8. The pieces in the collection were of course made by individuals who possessed the gift, or thought that they possessed the gift, of poetical composition. Who they were we

The writers of the odes. could tell only on the authority of the odes themselves, or of credible historical accounts, contemporaneous with them or nearly so. They would in general be individuals of some literary culture, for the arts of reading and writing even could not be widely diffused during the Chow dynasty. It is not worth our

10. See the Ana. II. ii.

while to question the opinion of the Chinese critics, who attribute many pieces to the duke of Chow, though we have independent testimony only to his composition of a single ode,-the second of Book XV., Part. I. We may assign to him also the 1st and 3d odes of the same Book; the first 22 of Part II.; the first 18 of Part III.; and with two doubtful exceptions, all the sacrificial Songs of Chow.

Of the 160 pieces in Pt. I. only the authorship of the 2d of Bk. XV., which has just been referred to, can be assigned with certainty. Some of the others, of which the historical interpretation may be considered as sufficiently fixed, as the complaints of Chwang Keang, in Bkk. III., IV., V., are written in the first person; but the author may be personating his subject. In Pt. II., the 7th ode of Bk. IV. was made by a Këa-foo, a noble of the royal State, but we know nothing more about him; the 6th of Bk. VI., by a eunuch styled Măng-tsze; and the 6th of Bk. VII., from a concurrence of external testimonies, may be ascribed to duke Woo of Wei.

In Pt. III., Bk. III., the 2d piece was composed by the same duke Woo; the 3d by an earl of Juy in the royal domain; the 4th must have been made by one of Seuen's ministers, to express the king's feelings under the drought which was exhausting the kingdom; and the 5th and 6th claim to be the work of Yin Keih-foo, one of Seuen's principal officers.

9. In the preface which appeared along with Maou's text of the She, the occasion and authorship of many more of the odes are given; but I am not inclined to allow much weight to its The Preface. testimony. It will be found in the first appendix to this chapter, as it is published in every native edition of the Book of Poetry of any pretensions, and is held by a great proportion of the scholars as an authoritative document. In the body of this volume I have shown in a multitude of cases the unsatisfactoriness of the view which it would oblige us to take of particular odes. There are few western Sinologues, I apprehend, who will not cordially concur with me in the principle of Choo He, that we must find the meaning of the odes in the odes themselves, instead of accepting the interpretation of them given by we know not whom, and to follow which would reduce many of them to absurd enigmas.

From the large space which the discussion of the Preface occupies in Chinese critical works, it is necessary that I should attempt a

11. See the Shoo, V. vi. 15.

summary of what is said upon it;—on no subject are the views of native scholars more divided.

According to Ching K'ang-shing, what is now called 'the Great preface' was made by Confucius' disciple Tsze-hëa, and what is called 'the Little preface' was made also by Tsze-hea, but afterwards supplemented by Maou. 12 In Maou, however, there is no distinction made between a Great and a Little preface. As the odes came down to him, the Preface was an additional document by itself, and when he published his commentary, he divided it into portious, prefixing to every ode the portion which gave an account of it.13 In this way, however, the preface to the Kwan ts'eu, or the first ode of the collection, was of a disproportionate length; and very early, this portion was separated from the rest, and called the Great Preface.14 But the division of the original preface thus made was evidently unnatural and inartistic; and Choo He showed his truer critical ability by detaching only certain portions of the preface to the Kwan ts‘eu, and dignifying them with the same name of the Great preface. This gives us some account of the nature and origin of poetry in general, and of the different Parts which compose the She. But Choo should have gone farther. In what is left of the preface to the Kwan ts'eu, we have not only an account of that ode, but also what may be regarded as a second introduction to Part I, and especially to the first and second Books of it. To maintain the symmetry of the prefaces there ought to be corresponding sentences at the commencement of the introductory notices to the first odes of the other Parts. But there is nothing of the sort; and this want of symmetry in the preface as a whole is a sufficient proof to me that it did not all proceed from one hand.

In Section II. of last chapter I have traced the transmission of How it is attempted to trace? Maou's text from its first appearance until it got possession of the literary world of China. Scholars try to trace it up to Tsze-hëa, and consequently through

the Preface to Tsze-hea

12 沈重日,按鄭詩譜大序子夏作小序子夏毛公合

;-See the p. 1. 18 On the preface to the Nan Kae, or II. i. X.,

Ching says, 遭戰國及秦之世而亡南陔之文其義則與衆 篇之義合編故存及至毛公為詁訓傳乃分眾篇 義各置於其篇端云:4李樗日詩皆有序獨關雎 設詳,先儒以謂關睢為大序葛覃以下為小序 the 經義考, as above, p. 7.

;-see

him to Confucius; but the evidence is not of an equally satisfactory character. The first witness is Seu Ching, an officer of the State or Kingdom of Woo in the period of 'the Three Kingdoms (A.D. 229-264),' who says, as reported by Luh Tih-ming:-Tsze-hëa handed down the She, [which he had received from Confucius], to Kaou Hăng-tsze; Hăng-tsze to Seeh Ts'ang-tsze; Ts'ang-tsze to Meen Mëaou-tsze; and Mëaou-tsze to the elder Maou'.15 Luh Tih-ming gives also another account of the connexion between Maou and Tszehëa:-'Tsze-hea handed down the She to Tsăng Shin; Tsăng Shin to Le K'ih; Le K'ih to Măng Chung-tsze; Măng Chung-tsze to Kin Mow-tsze; Kin Mow-tsze to Seun K'ing; and Seun K'ing to the elder Maou.'16 There is no attempt made, so far as I know, on the part of Chinese critics, to reconcile these two genealogies of Maou's She; but there is no doubt that, during the Han dynasties, the school of Maou did trace their master's text up to Tsze-hëa. Yen Sze-koo states it positively in his note appended to Lew Hin's catalogue of the copies of the She;17 and hence, as the text and the preface came to Maou together, there arose the view that the latter was made by that disciple of the sage. It became current, indeed, under his name, and was published separately from the odes, so that, in the catalogue of the T'ang dynasty, we find 'The Preface to the She by Puh Shang, in two Books,' as a distinct Work.18

But there is another account of the origin of the Preface which seems to conflict with this. In par. 4 of the 2d section of last chapDifferent account of the) ter I have made mention of Wei King-chung origin of the Preface. 5 or Wei Hwang, one of the great Han scholars who adopted the text of Maou. He serves as a connecting link between the western and eastern dynasties of Han; and in the account of him in the 'Literary Biographies' we are told that 'Hwang became the pupil of Seay Man-king, who was famous for his knowledge of Maou's She; and he afterwards made the Preface to it, remarkable for 15. 徐整云子夏授高行子高行子授倉子薛倉子 授帛妙子帛妙子授河間人大毛公;毛公為詩話傳 於家以授趙人小毛公. The Kaou Hăng-tsze here is identified by many with

the stupid old Kaou,' whose view of one of the odes is adduced and condemned in Mencius, VI. i. III. This seems to me very doubtful. 16

子夏傳會申 (the son of Tsang Sin, one

of Confucius' principal disciples); 申傳魏人李克克傳孟仲子 (

Ching, a disciple of Tsze-sze);

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卿子(the philosopher Seun);孫卿子傳魯人大毛公又有毛 公之學自謂子夏所傳 18 卜子商詩序二卷

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