[vi.] Where one or more lines at the commencement of the different stanzas of a piece, or their concluding lines, rhyme with one another. In all the instances adduced to illustrate this case, however, we have not merely a concord of the rhymes, but the repetition of the whole lines.

[vii.] What we call medial rhymes occur occasionally; and in a few instances the members of different lines rhyme in this way at the cæsural pause.

Without specifying other characteristics, I may say that there are throughout the pieces multitudes of lines, sometimes one, and sometimes more, which do not rhyme with any others in the same stanza. The pieces of Part IV. have several peculiarities. Many of them do not admit of a stanzaic arrangement; and there are at least eight in which there is no attempt at rhyme. We may consider such disregard of rhyme as an approach to the structure of blank verse; but while every other irregularity in the ancient odes has found imitators, I am not aware that this has received any favour. So far from the Chinese having any contempt for rhyming, such as Milton expressed when he called it "a jingling sound of like endings," "a troublesome bondage," they consider it essential to poetry.

In the present version, as in the prose one of my larger work, I have made no attempt to adhere to the length of the original lines, or to adopt their rhymes. The dif ferent attributes of the Chinese and English languages. made it impossible to do so. In passing from this subject, I will venture to say that the nature of Chinese is at the best but ill adapted for the purpose of agreeable rhyme. It does not admit the variety that is found in an alphabetical language, and which is to us one of the charms of poetical composition. The single rhyming endings in English are about 360; and if we add to them the double and triple rhymes, where the accent falls on the penultimate syllables, they cannot come short of 400. In Chinese, on the other hand, the rhyming endings are very few. Those of the Book of Poetry are under twenty. There is, indeed, in Chinese a greater number of words or characters to any one ending than in other languages, and scholars have produced compositions in which the

same ending occurs a hundred times and more. Multitudes of the rhymes, however, are to a foreign ear merely assonances, and the effect is that of a prolonged monotony.

The

poetical

4. In the Treatise on the antiquity of the Chinese, with which the "Memoires concernant les Chinois" commence, it is said, "The poetry of the She King is so beautiful and harmonious, the lovely and sublime tone value of the of antiquity rules in it so continually, its picBook of Poetry. tures of manners are so naïve and minute, that all these characteristics give sufficient attestation of its authenticity. The less can this be held in doubt that in the following ages we find nothing, I will not say equal to these ancient odes, but nothing worthy to be compared with them. We are not sufficient connoisseurs to pronounce between the She King on the one side and Pindar and Homer on the other; but we are not afraid to say that it yields only to the Psalms of David in speaking of the Divinity, of Providence, of virtue, &c., with a magnificence of expressions and an elevation of ideas which make the passions cold with terror, ravish the spirit, and draw the soul from the sphere of the senses.'

Such language is extravagant, and the comparison of the compositions in the "Book of Poetry " to the Psalms of David is peculiarly unfortunate. They are not religious poems. The "Praise Songs," which constitute a small part of them, and may be described as "religious," have for their principal themes the heroic founders of the House of Chow and the worship which was paid to them. In these, and in many of the other pieces, God often appears as the righteous and sovereign Lord of Providence; but the writers never make Him their theme for what He is in Himself, and do not rise to the conception of Him as over all," China and other nations, "blessed for ever."

But it would be wrong to deny to the Chinese odes a very considerable amount of poetical merit. It is true that many of them, as Sir John Davis has said in his "Treatise on the Poetry of the Chinese,"1 do not rise above

The Poetry of the Chinese, p. 35 (London, 1870). This interesting Treatise was first published nearly fifty years ago. It had the merit of introducing the subject of Chinese poetry to the English public; and may

the most primitive simplicity, and that the principal interest which the collection possesses arises from its pictures of manners; but there are not a few pieces which may be read with pleasure from the pathos of their descriptions, their expressions of natural feeling, and the boldness and frequency of their figures.

I expressed myself to the above effect in writing about the poetical value of the She in 1871, and I have now to re-affirm the judgment with a greater emphasis, and a wider application to the pieces. The critical labour necessary to secure accuracy of translation in my larger work kept me from being sufficiently alive to their beauty. The renewed study which every poem has received, and the endeavour to give an adequate rendering of it in English verse, have resulted in the perception of many beauties which I did not previously appreciate. I shall be disappointed if my readers do not agree with me in thinking that in China's ancient Odes, Ballads, Songs, and Bardic Effusions there is much poetry of a high order.

5. Sir John Davis contends, in the Treatise referred to above, that "verse must be the shape into which Chinese, as well as other poetry, must be converted, in order to do it mere justice," adding that he himself, while giving now a prose translation, now a faithful metrical version, and now an avowed paraphrase, has deferred more than his judgment and inclinations approved to the prejudices of those who are partial to the literal side of the question. When I had resolved to publish the present volume, I had no hesitation in deciding that Principle on the rendering of every piece should be a sent version has faithful metrical version of the original. I been made. thought at first of re-publishing, side by side with each piece, the prose translation in my larger work; but this plan was abandoned, as it would have made the book larger than was desirable, and would only have distracted the attention of the majority of the readers for whom it was intended. They may rest assured, however, that they have here no paraphrase, but the poems of the

66

which the pre

well stand side by side with the author's two volumes on The Chinese," published in the "Library of Entertaining Knowledge" in 1836. Fuller descriptions of China and the Chinese have since appeared, but none with the same literary finish which we find in these volumes.

36

PRINCIPLE ON WHICH PRESENT VERSION IS MADE.

Chinese writers presented to them faithfully, with as little introduction of ideas of my own or of my helpers as it was possible to attain to. Rhyme is often a hard master, and as it was our endeavour to give the pieces in as good English verse as the nature of the case would permit, it was necessary to employ occasionally epithets which are not found in the Chinese text, but this has been done sparingly. While much amplification would have been a misrepresentation of the original, a bad translation would often have been mere doggerel. And not only so; it would also have been unfaithful. There is more in the words of the text than meets the ear; it might be more correct to say, from the peculiar nature of the Chinese characters, than meets the eye. Apart even from the satirical pieces, and the allusive pieces on which I shall presently touch, in translating Chinese poetry one has constantly to regard what was in the mind of the writer. It was my object to bring this out in the notes in my larger work; and what was brought out there had to be transferred to the stanzas of the present version. But this also has been done only so far as seemed indispensable.

I had some difficulty in getting my nephews, of whose valuable assistance I have spoken in the Preface, to enter fully into my views of what their versions should be; and occasionally I had to re-cast their versions, the result being pieces inferior in poetical merit to what they had produced, but which I thought better represented the original Chinese. A correspondent in HongKong, having himself no little of the poetical faculty, and condemning the adherence to the letter of the text even to the extent for which I contend, referred to the words of Horace in his De Arte Poetica,

Et qua

Desperat tractata nitescere posse, relinquit.

Horace, however, is giving his view of the course which an original poet should pursue, and I agree in the counsel which he suggests. But I was intending to come before the public not as an original poet, but as a translator in English verse of what Chinese poets wrote between two and three thousand years ago. If they

dealt with themes which they could not make to shine, it was still my duty to show how they had treated them. Nor did it appear to me that there was anything in the She, which might make me take warning from that other advice of Horace, touching me more nearly,

Nec desilies imitator in arctum,

Unde pedem proferre pudor vetet, aut operis lex.

There are, indeed, pieces in it which no treatment could make to "shine," and others which might be described as narrow and cramping, entrance into which is difficult and graceful exit from them all but impossible. My friend and others, seeing this, advised that I should publish a selection of the pieces, and not the whole of them. But this was forbidden by "the law of the work," as a reproduction in English verse of the translation of the Book of Poetry. And as I pursued my task, even the poorer odes became clothed with an attractiveness which I did not previously perceive. I would not now say, as I did in 1871, that "the collection as a whole is not worth the trouble of versifying." The versification, no doubt, might have been executed better than I and my coadjutors have succeeded in doing; but our labours, such as they are, will, I hope, satisfy my readers, that these ancient Chinese poems have, as a whole, not a little poetical merit. At any rate they have those poems, and not others made by paraphrase from them. If the dress be English, the voice is always Chinese; while much may be learned from them of the mind and manners of feudal China.

6. Nothing could be more simple than the structure of the bulk of the odes in the first Part of the She. The different stanzas of a piece often convey substantially the same idea, which is repeated again and again Peculiarities with little change in the language. The in the structure writer wishes to prolong his ditty, and he of the pieces. effects his purpose by the substitution of a fresh rhyme, the preceding stanza re-appearing with no other alteration but what is rendered necessary by the new term. There is an amusing instance in the third ode of Book xiv., where the poet is compelled by the necessities of his rhyme to say that the young of the turtle-dove are