# The Sayings of Confucius; a New Translation of the Greater Part of the Confucian Analects/Introduction

CONFUCIUS is one of the few supremely great figures in the world's history. A man's greatness must always be measured, in the first place, by the consensus of opinion in his own country; the judgment of foreigners can only be allowed to have a secondary value. Especially is this true when the critics are not only foreigners, but belong to a totally different order of civilisation from the men whose greatness they would appraise. For even if they can keep their minds free from purely national bias of the unreasoning sort, they will naturally look for such attributes as are highly prized among themselves, and feel disappointed if these are not much in evidence. They will be apt to see certain defects too plainly, whereas they may easily overlook or fail to appreciate to the full those very qualities on which the title to greatness is mainly based. These errors and prejudices will, doubtless, tend to disappear as more intimate knowledge is gained and the essential unity of human nature shows ​itself beneath the accidents of custom and environment. But the process will always be slow. The name of Confucius may be deemed sufficiently familiar in the West to render unnecessary any revision of the popular verdict which has already been passed on him. But are his judges equally familiar with the teaching which his name represents? The name of Shakespeare was well enough known to Frenchmen in the time of Voltaire. Yet how many generations had to pass ere they began to recognise his true greatness? The parallel between dramatist and social reformer may seem strained, but it is not drawn at random. In both cases, wide differences of language and the inadequacy of translations to bridge the gap, lie at the root of the trouble.
No great man has suffered more than Confucius from the stupidity, the misstatements and the misrepresentations, from the lack of sympathy and generosity, and, in some points, from the pure ignorance of his critics. Early travellers arriving from the West, amongst a people utterly alien to themselves in almost every detail—language, dress, habits, modes of thought, ethical ideals and general view of life—would have done well to walk very warily and, in the Confucian phrase, "to reserve their judgment" on what they saw and heard around them. But patience and discrimination were the very last virtues which these inquisitive newcomers had a mind ​to practise; and, unluckily, the extraordinary fame of the national sage marked him out as one of the earliest victims to their thirst for the marvellous. On the strength of Chinese evidence, readily forthcoming and eagerly swallowed, the most exaggerated accounts of this new luminary were poured into the ears of Europe, and it may well be imagined that these enthusiastic reports suffered no diminution in the telling. Confucius was the prince of philosophers, the wisest and most consummate of sages, the loftiest moralist, the most subtle and penetrating intellect that the world had ever seen. He was a statesman, a bard, an historian and an antiquary rolled into one. His sagacity put the most illustrious of ancient and modern philosophers to shame. He was the greatest and noblest representative of the greatest, happiest, and most highly civilised people on the face of the earth. Such extravagant eulogy could only pave the way for disillusionment. When, after the lapse of a hundred years or so, foreigners had painfully acquired sufficient knowledge of the language to enable them to begin translating, after a fashion, parts of the Classics said to have been composed by this glorious sage, or at least containing the choicest pearls of his wisdom still extant, it is not altogether surprising that the results did not come up to the general expectation. Reaction set in, and it soon became the fashion to ​decry the once much-lauded philosopher. His sayings, which had been extolled as the very epitome of wisdom, were now voted jejune and commonplace. His teaching was found to be shallow, disjointed, unsatisfying. He was blamed for his materialistic bias, for his rigid formalism, for his poverty of ideas, for his lack of spiritual elevation. Comparisons, much in his disfavour, were drawn between him and the founders of other world-systems of religion and ethics. All this before the circumstances of his career had been studied, before the surface of contemporary Chinese history had been so much as scratched, before the host of native commentators and critics had been consulted, or their existence even become known; above all, before the very book which contained his authentic sayings had been translated with anything approaching to exactness or understanding, or with a faint realisation of its numerous difficulties and pitfalls.
Such was still the deplorable state of things when Legge set to work on his translation of the Confucian Canon, which when completed many years later, with its exhaustive prolegomena, notes and appendices, formed a truly wonderful monument of research and erudition. With its publication, Chinese scholarship was carried at once to a higher plane, and foreign study of Confucian doctrine began in earnest. The heavy ​accumulations of ignorance and error were in large part removed, and the figure of the great Teacher began at last to emerge from the "obliterating sands of time." His sayings were no longer read as interesting but desultory fragments of conversation, but studied in relation to the events of his life. From various Chinese sources, the chief of which were the Analects themselves and Ssǔ-ma Ch'ien's biography, Legge managed to compile a good and coherent account of the sage's life, work and wanderings, which was an enormous advance on anything that had been done before, and is not likely, even in the future, to undergo any considerable addition or amendment. There are many minor points which may be disputed, and many long blanks which may never be filled up, but taken as a whole, the chronology and the leading events of the life of Confucius must now be considered as finally settled.
If Legge is on firm ground where hard facts are concerned, it is far otherwise when he comes to draw inferences from these facts, to sum up the salient principles of Confucian ethics, and to pass judgment on the character of Confucius himself. His pronouncements on these points, too hastily accepted as final, need to be carefully re-examined and, as I shall hope to show, largely modified if not totally reversed. His opinion, of course, was based chiefly on his own inter​pretation of the more important sayings in the Analects, in translating which he had the oral help of native scholars, besides the benefit of voluminous standard commentaries. Thus equipped for his task, it cannot but appear strange that he, admittedly a great sinologue, should have gone so far astray as to miss the very core and essence of the doctrines to the elucidation which he devoted most of his life. The explanation may lie in the fact that he was a Christian missionary in the first place, and only secondly a scientific student; he had come to teach and convert the heathen, not to be taught or converted by them. This preconceived idea acted as a drag on the free use of his understanding, and prevented him from entering whole-heartedly into his subject. We are told that the Master himself had "no foregone conclusions," but Legge's whole attitude to Confucianism bespoke one comprehensive and fatal foregone conclusion—the conviction that it must at every point prove inferior to Christianity. A certain inelasticity of mind showed itself also in the way in which he approached the work of translation. He was too apt to look upon a Chinese word as something rigid and unchanging in its content, which might be uniformly rendered by a single English equivalent. Delicate shades of meaning he too often ruthlessly ignored. Now there is a certain number of Chinese terms which ​mirror Chinese ideas, but have really no absolute equivalent in English at all, and must therefore be translated with the aid of circumlocution, and in such a way as to suit the context and the general spirit of the passage. It is in such terms, unfortunately, that the very essence and inner significance of the Confucian teaching are contained. Obviously, if proper equivalents are not given, the whole sense of the passages in which they occur will be lost or violently distorted. Worse still, the judgments laboriously built up on such rotten foundations will be hopelessly vitiated. Here, indeed, we have an object-lesson of the importance, clearly recognised by Confucius himself, of "defining terms" and making "words harmonise with things." Indispensable as such a process is for any investigation in which language plays a part, it is doubly so when words have to be transplanted, as it were, from their native soil to one differing from it in almost every conceivable quality. Such an operation can only be successful if carried out with the utmost delicacy and care, and no amount of erudition can supply the want of that instinctive feeling for the right word which is the translator's choicest gift. The scope of the present work forbids my entering into details, but some broad examples of failure in this respect will be noted later on.
Of the life of Confucius only the barest sketch ​can be given here, but stress may be laid on one or two points which it is important to bear in mind. Confucius was born at a time when the feudal system, established several centuries earlier by the founder of the Chou dynasty, was showing unmistakable signs of disruption and decay. It is almost certain that China had been feudally governed from the very earliest times, but Wu Wang placed the whole system on a seemingly firmer basis than ever. He divided his realm into a large number of vassal states, which he bestowed upon his own kith and kin who had helped him to the throne. Thus the Empire really came to resemble the huge united family which Chinese political theorists declare it to be, and for a short time all seems to have worked smoothly. But as the bonds of kinship grew looser, the central government gradually lost all effective control over its unruly children, and the various states were soon embroiled in perpetual feuds and struggles among themselves, besides being usually at loggerheads with the parent dynasty. The state of things that ensued may be likened (though on a far larger scale) to several Wars of the Roses going on at the same time, or better still, to the turbulence of the later days of the Holy Roman Empire, when the fealty of its members had become merely nominal. Matters were further complicated in many of the states by the upgrowth of large and powerful families which ​often attempted either by insidious methods or by open violence to wrest the supreme authority into their own hands. Thus in Lu, the comparatively small state to which Confucius belonged, there were three such families, the Chi, the Mêng, and the Shu; the heads of these clans, of whom we hear a good deal in the Analects, had already, by the time of Confucius, reduced their lawful prince (or duke, as he is generally called) to a condition of virtual dependency. On the other hand, they themselves were sometimes threatened by the lawless behaviour of their own officers, such as the ambitious chariot-driver, Yang Huo, who thought nothing of seizing towns or even the person of his own chief, in order to hold him to ransom. Thus, though the period of the "Warring States" is not usually reckoned as beginning until after the death of Confucius, the date is a purely arbitrary one, inasmuch as his whole life long disturbances were rife and military operations well-nigh incessant throughout the length and breadth of China. In the midst of the prevailing disorder, Confucius comported himself with an admirable mixture of dignity, tact and outspoken courage. Wisely opposing the dangerous tendency to decentralisation, and upholding the supreme authority of the Emperor as against his too powerful vassals, he heartily disapproved of the illegal usurpations ​of the dukes, the great families and the soldiers of fortune that preyed one upon the other, and did not shrink on occasion from expressing his disgust in unequivocal terms. But knowing the futility of protests unbacked by force, he kept himself aloof for the most part, and devoted himself to a long course of study and teaching, gathering, it is said, as many as three thousand disciples around him. This is a palpable exaggeration, but there can be no doubt that he had become a marked man and gained great fame as a moralist and teacher many years before he actually took office. In 501 B.C., at the age of fifty, he at last made his entry on the political stage by accepting the governorship of a small town in Lu. Here he is said to have been eminently successful in the work of reform, and he rapidly rose to be the most trusted adviser of Duke Ting, who on one occasion at least owed his life to the courage and address of his minister. But it was not long ere the weak and fickle character of the ruler, carefully manipulated by rivals to Confucius, brought about a catastrophe. The neighbouring state of Ch'i, jealous of the new prosperity of Lu under the régime of the sage, cunningly sent as a gift to the prince a band of beautiful women, trained in song and dance, and a number of magnificent horses, in order to distract his mind from the serious cares of state. The plotters had evidently taken ​measure of their victim, for the artifice succeeded, and Confucius felt compelled to resign. Then began the weary years of wandering from state to state, in which we cannot follow him here, except to note a sagacious prophecy uttered by a friendly official on the frontier of Wei. Coming out from an interview with Confucius, he comforted the woebegone disciples by telling them that their Master's divine mission was now only just beginning. It may, indeed, be that the ensuing period of homeless exile, hardships and danger, did more to spread the fame of the great reformer than either the few brilliant years of office or those spent as a teacher in the comparative seclusion of Lu. For one thing, it could not but inspire and fortify his followers to observe that the lofty principles which a sudden accession to power had failed to corrupt, were equally capable of standing the test of adversity. His serene and courageous bearing in many a strange and perilous situation proved that the conception of a "higher type of man" was for him no empty ideal, but the worthy object of practical endeavour. It is sad, however, to reflect that the best years of his life had passed before the call came which resulted in his return. Had it not been so long delayed, he would doubtless have thrown himself once more into the arena of public affairs, and begun rebuilding the fabric ​of good government which had been so rudely shattered thirteen years before. His patience would have been equal to the task; but he was now an old man, worn out by years of travel, privation and anxiety, at a time of life when the physical frame begins to demand a certain measure of quiet and repose. Hence, though he may be said to have returned to his native state with flying colours, he took no further active part in its administration, but devoted the rest of his life to literary labours which have added materially to his fame. Such were the collecting and editing of certain old national ballads known to us as the Odes, and the penning of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu, which may be regarded as the first real record of authentic facts, as opposed to the mere string of speeches and eulogies which we find in the miscalled Book of History.
To this closing period, too, are to be referred most of the sayings given in the present volume. These, together with the invaluable biography by Ssǔ-ma Ch'ien, which is largely built upon them, form the only really reliable source of information about Confucius and his doctrines. The Chinese title Lun Yü may be rendered "Conversations" or "Discussions," but neither is a very apt description of the work, which contains very little discussion in the ordinary sense. It consists in fact almost wholly of ​detached obiter dicta, or replies to questions put by various disciples on subjects chiefly moral or personal. These sayings were once supposed to have been collected and committed to writing by the immediate disciples of Confucius, but Legge has shown sufficient reason to believe that they were transmitted orally at first, and did not take the form in which we have them until at least two generations after the Master's death. Nor must it be imagined that they represent the ipsissima verba of Confucius. No man could have made offhand remarks in such a crisp, concise and epigrammatic style. A translation, in which brevity has again and again to be sacrificed to smoothness and lucidity, hardly allows the European reader to form any idea of the glittering compactness of these sayings in the original. So far from having been uttered impromptu, they appear to have been repeatedly ground and polished, and shorn of every redundancy, until they shone like diamonds fresh from the hands of the cutter. At the same time, as expressing the essence of what the Master thought and the substance of what he said, it is with good reason that they are to be found inscribed on hundreds of thousands of scrolls and tablets in every corner of the Empire. These gems, however, are unsorted. As in most Chinese philosophical works, there is very little attempt at orderly arrangement; even such a rough classi​fication as will be found in this volume is absent. This is not necessarily to be regarded as a defect: jewels jumbled in a heap often have a charm which they lack when strung symmetrically into a necklace. The only danger is that unwary readers, looking in vain for a beginning, a middle and an end, may jump to the conclusion that Confucius himself was merely a master of casual apophthegms; they may very easily miss the connecting principles which serve to bind the Confucian teachings into one rounded system. Even the disciples seem to have been in danger of overlooking the whole in their admiration of the parts. It needed the penetration of Tsêng Tzǔ to tell them that the Master's Way was, after all, simple in its diversity, and might be summed up in two words: duty to oneself and charity to one's neighbour. Unhappily, owing to the misinterpretation of these important words, the beautiful simplicity of the Confucian doctrine has long passed unrecognised.
For what has been, and is perhaps even now, the prevailing conception of Confucius in the West? Does not the name conjure up in most minds the figure of a highly starched philosopher, dry, formal, pedantic, almost inhuman in the unimpeachable correctness of his personal conduct, rigid and precise in his notions of ceremonial, admirable no doubt in his sentiments, but always more a man of words than of deeds? He has ​been constantly accused of laying undue weight on things external, of undervaluing natural impulses of the heart. "Propriety," says Legge, "was a great stumbling-block in the way of Confucius. His morality was the result of the balancings of his intellect, fettered by the decisions of men of old, and not the gushings of a loving heart, responsive to the promptings of Heaven, and in sympathy with erring and feeble humanity." It is high time that an effective protest was made against such an amazing piece of misrepresentation. With bitter truth we may retort that "propriety"—that is, the Chinese word li which has been cruelly saddled with this absurd rendering—has indeed been a stumbling-block, but a stumbling-block not so much to Confucius as to Dr. Legge himself. The whole tenor of the Master's teaching cries aloud against such wilful and outrageous distortion. Any one who reads the sayings carefully will soon discover that this accusation is not only libellous but grotesque in its remoteness from the truth. If there is one thing more than another which distinguishes Confucius from the men of his day, it is the supreme importance which he attached to jên, the feeling in the heart, as the source of all right conduct, the stress which he laid on the internal as opposed to the external, and even on motives rather than outward acts, except in so far as these might be taken as an index to character. ​Over and over again he gave proof of the highest and noblest moral courage in ignoring the narrow rules of conventional morality and etiquette when these conflicted with good feeling and common sense, and setting up in their stead the grand rule of conscience which, by asserting the right of each individual to judge such matters for himself, pushed liberty to a point which was quite beyond the comprehension of his age. So far from being "fettered by the decisions of men of old," it was his hand that valiantly essayed to strike the fetters of bigotry and prejudice from the necks of his countrymen. But whilst declining to be bound by the ideas and the standards of others, he was not blind to the danger of liberty degenerating into license. The new fetters, therefore, that he forged for mankind were those of an iron self-discipline and self-control, unaccompanied, however, by anything in the shape of bodily mortification, a practice which he knew to be at once more showy and less troublesome than the discipline of the mind.
Another charge not infrequently heard is one of a certain repellent coldness of temperament and stiffness of demeanour. The warrant for such a statement is not so readily forthcoming, unless indeed it is to be found in the stiff and repellent style which characterises some translations of his sayings. In the Analects we are told the exact opposite of this. The Master, we ​read there, was uniformly cheerful in demeanour, and he evidently unbent to quite an unusual extent with his disciples, considering the respect and deference universally shown to age and learning in China. Is it at all conceivable that a man of cold and unlovable temper should have attracted round him hundreds of disciples, with many of whom he was on terms of most intimate intercourse, meeting them not only in the lecture-room, as modern professors meet their classes, but living with them, eating, drinking, sleeping and conversing with them, until all their idiosyncrasies, good or bad, were better known to him than to their own parents? Is it explicable, except on the ground of deep personal affection, that he should have been followed into exile by a faithful band of disciples, not one of whom is known ever to have deserted or turned against him? Is coldness to be predicated of the man who in his old age, for once losing something of his habitual self-control, wept passionately for the death of his dearly loved disciple Yen Hui, and would not be comforted?
But it has been reserved for the latest English translator of the Analects, the Rev. Mr. Jennings, to level some of the worst charges at his head. To begin with, he approvingly quotes, as Legge's final opinion on Confucius, words occurring in the earliest edition of the Chinese Classics to the effect that he is "unable to regard him as a great ​man," quite heedless of the fact that the following stands in the edition of 1893 (two years before his own translation appeared): "But I must now leave the sage. I hope I have not done him injustice; the more I have studied his character and opinions, the more highly have I come to regard him. He was a very great man, and his influence has been on the whole a great benefit to the Chinese, while his teachings suggest important lessons to ourselves who profess to belong to the school of Christ." This summing-up, though certainly unexpected in view of much that has gone before, does partly atone for the unjust strictures which Dr. Legge felt it necessary to pass on Confucius at an earlier period, though it may require many years entirely to obliterate their effect. What I wish to emphasise at present, however, is the unfairness of quoting an early and presumably crude and ill-considered opinion in preference to the latest and maturest judgment of an authority who at no time can be said to err on the side of over-partiality for his subject.
But this is not all. For after pointing out, truly enough, that Confucius cannot well be blamed for "giving no impulse to religion," inasmuch as he never pretended to make this his aim, Mr. Jennings goes on to pick some holes on his own account, and incontinently falls into exactly the same error that he had previously rebuked in Dr. Legge. "In his reserve about ​great and important matters, while professing to teach men, he is perhaps most to blame, and in his holding back what was best in the religion of the ancients." What these great and important matters were, is not made very clear, but if, as seems probable, the phrase is simply another way of referring to "the religion of the ancients," it can only be repeated that religion was a subject which he disliked to discuss and certainly did not profess to teach, as is plainly indicated in the Analects. And the reason why he refrained from descanting on such matters was that, knowing nothing of them himself, he felt that he would have been guilty of hypocrisy and fraud had he made a show of instructing others therein. Would that a like candour distinguished some of our own professed teachers of religion!
The last accusation against Confucius is the most reckless of all. "There is," according to Mr. Jennings, "a certain selfishness in his teaching, which had the effect of making those who came under his influence soon feel themselves great and self-satisfied." As only the feeblest of evidence is produced to support this wild statement, it will not be necessary to consider it at any length, though we may ask in passing whether Yen Hui, the disciple who profited most from his Master's teaching and best exemplified it, is depicted as exhibiting ​this alleged self-satisfaction in a peculiarly noticeable degree. For an answer to this question the reader may be referred to Tsêng Tzǔ's remarks on p. 128.
The truth is, though missionaries and other zealots have long attempted to obscure the fact, that the moral teaching of Confucius is absolutely the purest and least open to the charge of selfishness of any in the world. Its principles are neither utilitarian on the one hand nor religious on the other, that is to say, it is not based on the expectation of profit or happiness to be gained either in this world or in the next (though Confucius doubtless believed that well-being would as a general rule accompany virtuous conduct). "Virtue for virtue's sake" is the maxim which, if not enunciated by him in so many words, was evidently the corner-stone of his ethics and the mainspring of his own career. Not that he would have quite understood the modern formula, or that the idea of virtue being practised for anything but its own sake would ever have occurred to his mind. Virtue resting on anything but its own basis would not have seemed to him virtue in the true sense at all, but simply another name for prudence, foresight, or cunning. Yet material advantage, disguised as much as you will, but still material advantage in one form or another, is what impels most men to espouse any particular form of religion. Hence it is nothing less than ​a standing miracle that Confucianism, which makes no promise of blessings to be enjoyed in this life or the next, should have succeeded without the adjunct of other supernatural elements than that of ancestor-worship. Even this was accepted by Confucius as a harmless prevailing custom rather than enjoined by him as an essential part of his doctrine. Unlike Christianity and Mahometanism, the Way preached by the Chinese sage knows neither the sanction of punishment nor the stimulus of reward in an after-life. Even Buddhism holds out the hope of Nirvana to the pure of heart, and preaches the long torment of successive rebirths to those who fall short of perfect goodness. No great religion is devoid of elevated precepts, or has ever failed to mould numbers of beautiful characters to attest the presence of something good and great within it. But in every case the element of supernaturalism, which is of course inseparable from a religion properly so called, introduces a new motive for men's actions and makes it no longer possible for virtue to be followed purely for its own sake, without thought of a hereafter. Thus, if we assent to Comte's famous law of the Three States, Confucianism really represents a more advanced stage of civilisation than biblical Christianity. Indeed, as Mr. Carey Hall has recently pointed out in an article on the subject, Confucius may be regarded as the true fore​runner of Comte in his positivist mode of thought.
His whole system is based on nothing more nor less than the knowledge of human nature. The instincts of man are social and therefore fundamentally good, while egoism is at bottom an artificial product and evil. Hence the insistence on altruism which we find in the sayings of Confucius, the injunction to "act socially," to live for others in living for oneself.
The most important word in the Confucian vocabulary is jên, which in the following extracts is translated "virtue" only for want of a better term. Our English word "virtue" has so many different shades of meaning and is withal so vague, that in using it, the idea of altruism is often hardly present to our mind. But in jên the implication of "social good" emerges much more distinctly. Its connotation has no doubt extended gradually until it seems often to be rather a compendium of all goodness than any one virtue in particular. But this development only means that the word is following in the track of the thing itself. For let a man be but thoroughly imbued with the altruistic spirit, and he may be termed "good" without qualification, since all other virtues tend to flow from unselfishness.
The Confucian theory of man's social obligations rests first and foremost on the fact that he forms part of a great social machine—an aggre​gation of units, each of which is called a family. The family, in Chinese eyes, is a microcosm of the Empire, or rather, since the family is chronologically prior to the State, it is the pattern on which the greater organism has moulded itself. The feudal system under which Confucius lived naturally accentuated the likeness. The Emperor had, in theory at least, paternal authority over his feudal princes, who in turn, standing to one another in the relation of elder and younger brothers, were regarded as the fathers of their respective peoples. Now, the way to ensure that a machine as a whole may run smoothly and well, is to see that each part shall fulfil its own function in proper subordination to the rest. How is this result achieved in the family? Obviously through the controlling will of the father, who has supreme authority over all the other members. But this authority is not by any means the mere brute force of a tyrant. It is based firstly on the natural order of things, whereby the father is clearly intended to be the protector of his children; and secondly, as a consequence of this, on the love and respect which will normally spring up in the minds of the children for their protector. Such is the genesis of filial piety, which plays so large a part in Chinese ethics. It is quite untrue, however, to say with Mr. Jennings, that no corresponding parental duties are recognised by Confucius, as the following ​anecdote may serve to show. During the sage's short period of office as Minister of Crime, a father came to him bringing some serious charge against his son. Confucius kept them both in prison for three months, without making any difference in favour of the father, and then let them go. The Minister Chi Huan remonstrated with him for this, and reminded him of his saying, that filial duty was the first thing to be insisted upon. "What hinders you now from putting this unfilial son to death as an example to all the people?" Confucius' reply was, that the father had never taught his son to be filial, and that therefore the guilt really rested with him.
For the harmonious working of a family, then, we need respect for authority on one side, and self-sacrifice on the other. The father's object must be entirely altruistic—the good of his family. Then only will he be doing his duty as a father, just as a son is not doing his duty unless he shows honour and obedience to his parents. The all-important element which makes possible the working of the family machine, the lubricating oil that eases the bearings, is not merely filial piety without any corresponding feeling on the part of the parent, but rather a certain subtle principle of harmony and self-control permeating every member of the family group, which restrains egoistic propensities and promotes the common good. This is the Chinese ​term li, which in this sense of a quality of the soul is hardly translatable by any single word or combination of words, but is certainly not to be rendered by any such atrocious phrase as "the rules of propriety."
Now Confucius saw that the same general principles which govern the family are applicable also to that greatest of families, the State. Here we have the Emperor, in whose hands the supreme authority must lie, exercising functions exactly analogous to those of the father of a family. But if his is the supreme authority, his must also be the supreme responsibility. Veneration and respect are his due, but only because he identifies himself with the good of the people. In public affairs, just as in the home, there must be that same principle of harmony to regulate the relations of governor and governed, otherwise the machine will not work. There must be li here as well, but as it is not possible for the sovereign to maintain with his subjects the personal intimacy which unites a father and his sons, it is necessary to fall back upon symbols, and to give outward and visible expression to the inward sentiments of loyalty and respect which should animate the breast of each member of the nation. These symbols are the rites and ceremonies of which Confucius was considered such a past-master. He saw indeed their full ​importance as symbols, but he also knew that, divorced from the inward feeling, they were meaningless and without value. In this way it is easy to see how the word li, as a human attribute, acquired its various shades of meaning, from the harmony in the soul which prompts action in accordance with true natural instincts, down to ordinary politeness and good manners—also an indispensable lubricant in the lesser dealings of life between man and man.
It was in the family again that Confucius found a natural force at work which he thought might be utilised as an immense incentive to virtue. This was the universal human proneness to imitation. Knowing that personal example is the most effective way in which a father can teach his sons what is right, he unhesitatingly attributed the same powerful influence to the personal conduct of the sovereign, and went so far as to declare that if the ruler was personally upright, his subjects would do their duty unbidden; if he was not upright, they would not obey, whatever his bidding.
"The virtue of the prince," he said, "is like unto wind; that of the people, like unto grass. For it is the nature of grass to bend when the wind blows upon it." It must be admitted that Confucius has in this particular somewhat overshot the mark and formed too sanguine an estimate of the force of example. It would be unfair, however, ​to base our argument on the analogy of modern democratic states, where the controlling power is split up into several branches, and the conspicuousness of the monarch is much diminished. Not that even the constitutional sovereign of to-day may not wield a very decided influence in morals. But this influence was much greater while the king retained full despotic power, and greatest of all in feudal times, when the successive gradations of rank and the nice arrangement of a hierarchy of officials, each accountable to the one above him, were specially designed to convey and filter it among all classes of the community. Had Confucius been able to find a prince who would have acted consistently on Confucian principles, the results might have been almost as grand as he anticipated. The experiment was tried, we must remember, on a small scale, when Confucius himself became governor of a town in the State of Lu. And although one must be chary of accepting all the extravagant tales which gathered round his brief official career, it seems indisputable that this political theory, unlike many others, proved reasonably successful in actual practice.
Of course the weak point is that every king cannot be a Confucius, and unless some practical method can be devised of electing rulers on the ground of merit alone, it is impossible to ensure that their conduct shall serve as a pattern to their ​people. "Rotten wood cannot be carved," the Master himself once remarked, and he found bitter confirmation of his saying in Duke Ting of Lu. Nothing could ever have been made out of such utterly weak and worthless material. And he afterwards spent thirteen years of his life in the fruitless search for a sovereign who would correspond even faintly to his ideal. Such unswerving devotion to the abstract cause of right and justice and good government cannot but puzzle those who have been taught to regard Confucius as the very type and embodiment of materialistic wisdom and practical utilitarianism. But in truth, strange though it may sound, he was a great idealist who gained his hold on his countrymen by virtue rather of his noble imaginings and lofty aspirations than of any immediate results or tangible achievements. By the men of his own day he was more often than not considered a charlatan and an impostor. It is remarkable that even the two Taoist recluses and the eccentric Chieh Yü (p. 122) should have condemned him as a visionary and a "crank." Similar was the impression he made on the gate-keeper who asked a disciple if his Master was the man "who was always trying to do what he knew to be impossible." This playful sarcasm is really the best commentary on his career, and one that pays him unintentionally the greatest honour. Though often disheartened ​by the long and bitter struggle against adverse circumstance and the powers of evil, he never gave over in disgust. Therein lay his greatness. "Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlösen," sing the angels in Faust, and no man ever toiled for the good of his fellow-creatures with greater perseverance or with less apparent prospect of success. In this, the truest sense, he could say that his whole life had been a prayer (p. 87). He succeeded in that he seemed to fail. He never achieved the Utopian object of reforming all mankind by means of a wise and good sovereign. On the contrary, after his death confusion grew worse confounded, and the din of arms rose to a pitch from which it did not subside until after the momentous revolution which swept away the Chou dynasty and established a new order of things in China. In a radically individualistic and liberty-loving country like China, the feudal system was bound sooner or later to perish, even as it perished in a later day among ourselves. But throughout the anarchy of that terrible period, the light kindled by Confucius burned steadily and prepared men's minds for better things. His ideal of government was not forgotten, his sayings were treasured like gold in the minds of the people. Above all, his own example shone like a glorious beacon, darting its rays through the night of misery and oppression and civil strife which in his lifetime ​he had striven so earnestly to remove. And so it came about that his belief in the political value of personal goodness was in some sort justified after all; for the great and inspiriting pattern which he sought in vain among the princes of his time was to be afforded in the end by no other than himself—the "throneless king," who is for ever enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen. It is absurd, then, to speak of his life as a failure. Measured by results—the almost incalculably great and far-reaching consequences which followed tardily but irresistibly after he was gone—his life was one of the most successful ever lived by man. Three others, and only three, are comparable to it in world-wide influence: Gautama's self-sacrificing sojourn among men, the stormy career of the Arab Prophet, and the "sinless years" which found their close on Golgotha.
* ↑ See p. 121.
* ↑ See p. 118.
* ↑ See note on p. 60.