literature so extensive as the Chinese could not but fall into many devious tracks. It is only by degrees that Sinologues are attaining to the proper accuracy in their representations of the subjects which they take in hand. On two or three points I subjoin some additional observ ations. The low status i. That filial piety or duty is the first of all virtues is a well-known principle of Chinese moralists; and at the foundation of a well-ordered social State they place the right regulation of the relation between husband and wife. Pages might be filled with admirable sentiments from them on this subject; but nowhere does a fundamental vice of the family and social constitution of the nation appear more strikingly than in the She. In the earliest pieces of it, as well as in the latest, we have abundant evidence of the low status of woman, and polygamy. which was theoretically accorded to woman, and of the practice of polygamy. Biot has referred to the evidence furnished by the last two stanzas of II. iv. VI. of the different way in which the birth of sons and that of daughters was received in a family. The family there, indeed, is the royal family, but the king to whom the ode is believed to refer was one of excellent character; and the theory of China is that the lower classes are always conformed to the example of those above them. The sentiments expressed in that ode are those of every class of the Chinese, ancient and modern. While the young princes would be splendidly dressed and put to sleep on couches, the ground to sleep on and coarse wrappers suffice for the princesses. The former would have sceptres to play with; the latter only tiles. The former would be--one of them the future king, the others the princes of the land; the latter would go beyond their province if they did wrong or if they did right, all their work being confined to the kitchen and the temple, and to causing no sorrow to their parents. The line which says that it was for daughters neither to do wrong nor to do good was translated by Dr Morrison as if it said that " woman was incapable of good or evil;" but he subjoins from a commentary the correct meaning, that "a slavish submission is woman's duty and her highest praise." She ought not to originate anything, but to be satisfied with doing in all loyal subjection what is prescribed to her to do. In I. i. I a bride is compared to a dove, but the point of comparison lies in the stupidity of the bird, whose nest consists of a few sticks brought inartistically together. It is no undesirable thing for a wife to be stupid, whereas a wise. woman is more likely to be a curse in a family than a blessing. As it is expressed in III. iii. X. 3, "A wise man builds up the wall [of a city], But a wise woman overthrows it. But she is no better than an owl. A woman with a long tongue Is [like] a stepping-stone to disorder. Disorder does not come down from heaven ;— It is produced by the woman. Those from whom come no lessons, no instruction, The marquis D' Hervey Saint-Denys, in the introduction to his Poetry of the Tang dynasty, p. 19, gives a different account of the status of the woman anciently in China. He says:: "The wife of the ancient poems is the companion of a spouse who takes her counsels, and never speaks to her as a master. She chooses freely the man with whose life she will associate her own. Nothing shows us as yet polygamy in the Songs of the Kwoh Fung, composed between the 12th and the 8th century before our era.' If tradition will have it that Yaou gave his two daughters to Shun in choosing him to succeed to the throne; if the Chow Le mentions a grand number of imperial concubines independently of the empress proper ;—we may believe that these were only royal exceptions, not in accordance with the popular manners." That there was often a true affection between husband and wife in China, in the times of the She-king, as there is at the present day, is a fact to be acknowledged and rejoiced in. Notwithstanding the low estimation in which woman's intellect and character were held, the mind of the wife often was and is stronger than her husband's, and her virtue greater. Many wives in Chinese history have entered into the ambition of their husbands, and spurred them on in the path of noble enterprise; many Between the 12th century and the 6th. more have sympathized with them in their trials and poverty, and helped them to keep their little means together and to make them more. I. ii. III.; v. VIII.; vi. II., III., and V.; vii. VIII. and XVI.; viii. I.; x. V. and XI., are among the odes of the She which give pleasant pictures of wifely affection and permanent attachment. I believe also that in those early days there was more freedom of movement allowed to young women than there is now, as there was more possibility of their availing themselves of it so many centuries before the practice of cramping their feet and crippling them had been introduced. But on the other hand there are odes where the wife, displaced from her proper place as the mistress of the family, deplores her hard lot. There is no evidence to show that honourable marriages ever took place without the intervention of the go-between, and merely by the preference and choice of the principal parties concerned; and there can be no doubt that polygamy prevailed from the earliest times, just as it prevails now, limited only by the means of the family. So far from there being no intimations of it in the odes of Part I., there are many. In ode IV. of Book i., the other ladies of king Wan's harem sing the praises of T'ae-sze, his queen, the paragon and model to all ages of female excellence, because of her freedom from jealousy. The subject of ode V. is similar. In ode X., Book ii., we see the ladies of some prince's harem repairing to his apartment, happy in their lot, and acquiescing in the difference between it and that of their mistress. Every feudal prince received his bride and eight other ladies at once, a younger sister of the bride and a cousin, and three ladies from each of two great Houses of the same surname. The thing is seen in detail in the narratives of the Tso-chuen. Nothing could show more the degrading influence of polygamy than the vaunted freedom from jealousy on the part of the proper wife, and subordinately in her inferiors. The consequences of this social State were such as might be expected. Many of the odes have reference to the deeds of atrocious licentiousness and horrible bloodshed to which it gave rise. We wonder that, with such an element of depravation and disorder working among the people, the moral condition of the country, bad as it was, was not worse. That China now, with this thing in it, can be heartily received into the comity of western nations is a vain imagination. ii. The preserving salt of the kingdom was, I believe, the filial piety, with the strong family affections of the Chinese race, and their respect for the aged ;-virtues certainly of eminent worth. All these are illustrated in The filial piety many odes of the She; and yet there is a and other vir danger of misjudging from them the actual nese, not conduc- condition of the country. In this point the ing to the peace marquis D' Hervey Saint-Denys has again so much as we fallen into error. Starting from the 4th ode of Book ix., Part I., he institutes an eloquent contrast between ancient Greece and ancient China (Introduction, p. 15): tues of the Chi of the country might expect. "The Iliad," says he, " is the most ancient poem of the west, the only one which can be of use to us by way of comparison in judging of the two civilizations which developed parallelly under conditions so different at the two extremities of the inhabited earth. On one side are a warlike life; sieges without end; combatants who challenge one another; the sentiment of military glory which animates in the same degree the poet and his heroes :-we feel ourselves in the midst of a camp. On the other side are regrets for the domestic hearth; the home-sickness of a young soldier who ascends a mountain to try and discern at a distance the house of his father; a mother whom Sparta would have rejected from her walls; a brother who counsels the absent one not to make his race illustrious, but above all things to return home :-we feel ourselves in another world, in I know not what atmosphere of quietude and of country life. The reason is simple. Three or four times conquered by the time of Homer, Greece became warlike as her invaders. Uncontested mistress of the most magnificent valleys of the globe, China behoved to remain pacific as her first colonists had been." But there are not a few odes which breathe a warlike spirit of great ardour, such as II. iii. III. and IV.: III. i. VII.; iii. VIII. and IX.: IV. ii. III.; iii. IV. and V. There is certainly in others an expression of dissatisfaction. with the toils and dangers of war,-complaints especially of the separation entailed by it on the soldiers from their families. What the speakers in II. iv. I. deplore most of all is that their mothers were left alone at home to do all the cooking for themselves. It may be allowed that the natural tendency of the She as a whole is not to excite a military spirit, but to dispose to habits of peace; yet as a matter of fact there has not been less of war in China than in other lands. During the greater part of the Chow dynasty a condition of intestine strife among the feudal States was chronic. The State of Ts'in fought its way to empire through seas of blood. Probably there is no country in the world which has drunk in so much blood from its battles, sieges, and massacres as this. men at the ing them alive iii. The 6th ode of Book xi., Part I., relates to a deplorable event, the burying of three men, brothers, esteemed throughout the State of Ts'in for their admirable character, in the grave of duke Muh, and along with his coffin. Altogether, according to the Tso-chuen, 177 individuals were immolated on that occasion. Immolating Following the authority of Sze-ma Ts'een, tombs of the who says that the cruel practice began with princes, or buryduke Ch'ing, Muh's elder brother and prede- in them. cessor, at whose death 66 persons were buried alive, M. Biot observes that this bloody sacrifice had been recently taken from the Tartars. Yen Ts'an, of the Sung dynasty, of whose commentary on the She I have made much use, says that the State of Ts'in, though at that time in possession of the old territory of the House of Chow, had brought with it the manners of the barbarous tribes among whom its people had long dwelt. But in my mind. there is no doubt that the people of Ts'in was made up mainly of those barbarous tribes. This will appear plainly when the Ch'un Ts'ew and Tso-chuen give occasion for us to review the rise and progress of the three great States of Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'oo. The practice was probably of old existence among the Chinese tribe as well as other neighbouring tribes. A story of Tsze-k'in, one of Confucius' disciples, mentioned in a note on p. 119 of the Analects, would indicate that it had not fallen into entire disuse, even in the time of the sage, in the most polished States of the kingdom. Among the Tartars so called it continues to the present day. Dr Williams states, on the authority of De Guignes, that the emperor Shun-che, the first of the present Manchëw dynasty, ordered thirty persons to be immolated at the funeral of his consort, but K'ang.he, his son, forbade four persons from sacrificing themselves at the death of his.1 The Middle Kingdom, vol. i., p. 267. |