Part 20

Dukes of England sometimes trace their descent from men who came over with William the Conqueror: a poor eight centuries is a thing to be proud of. There may be older families in France, Italy, and elsewhere. Duke K'ung traces his, through a line of which every scion appears more of less in history, to the son of this K'ung Shuhliang Heih in the sixth century B.C.; who in turn traced his, through a line of which every scion appeared in history, and all, with one possible exception, very honorably, to a member of the Imperial House of Shang who, in 1122 B.C., on the fall of that house, was created Duke of Sung in Honan by the first of the Chows. The House of Shang held the throne for some five centuries, beginning with Tang the Comnpleter in 1766, who traced his descent from the Yellow Emperor in mythological times. Duke K'ung, then, is descended in direct male line from sovereigns who reigned beyond the horizon of history,--at the latest, near the beginning of the third millennium B.C. The family has been distinguished for nearly five thousand years.

The matter is not unimportant; since we are to talk of a member of this family. We shall understand him better for remembering the kind of heredity that lay behind him: some seventy generations of nobility, all historic. Only one royal house in the world now is as old as his was then: that of Japan.

Some generations before, the K'ung family had lost their duchy of Sung and emigrated to Lu; where, in the early part of the sixth century, its head, this Shuhliang Heih, had made a great name for himself as a soldier. He was now a widower, and seventy years old; and saw himself compelled to make a second marriage, or the seventy illustrious generations of his ancestors would be deprived of a posterity to offer them sacrifices. So he approached a gentlman of the Yen family, who had three eligible daughters. To these Yen put the case, leaving to them to decide which should marry K'ung.--"Though old and austere," said he, "he is of the high descent, and you need have no fear of him." Chingtsai, the youngest, answered that it was for their father to choose.--"Then you shall marry him," said Yen. She did; and when her son was to be born, she was warned in a dream to make pilgrimage to a cave on Mount Ne. There the spirits of the mountain attended; there were signs and portents in the heavens at the nativity. The _k'e-lin,_ a beast out of the mythologies, appeared to her; and she tied a white ribbon about its single horn. It is a creature that appears only when things of splendid import are to happen.

Three years after, the father died, leaving his family on the borders of poverty. At six, Ch'iu, the child, a boy of serious earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a toy altar. Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he doted on his mother--who would have deserved it,--we know little of his boyhood. "At fifteen," he tells us himself, "his mind was bent on learning." Nothing in the way of studies, seems to have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he came to know all that was to be known. He loved music, theory and practice; held it to be sacred: "not merely one of the refinements of life, but a part of life itself." It is as well to remember this; and that often, in after life, he turned dangerous situations by breaking into song; and that his lute was his constant companion. He used to say that a proper study of poetry--he was not himself a poet, though he compiled a great anthology of folk-poems later--would leave the mind without a single depraved thought. Once he said to his son: "If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to talk to." "Poetry rouses us," said he, "courtesy upholds us; music is our crown." You are, then, to see in him no puritan abhorring beauty, but a man with artistic perceptions developed. At what you might call the other pole of knowledge, he was held to know more about the science of war than any man living; and I have no doubt he did. If he had consented to use or speak about or let others use that knowledge, he might have been a great man in his day; but he never would.

At nineteen, according to the custom, he married; and soon afterwards accepted minor official appointments: Keeper of the Granaries, then Superintendent of the Public Parks in his native district. He made a name for himself by the scrupulous discharge of his duties, that came even to the ears of the Marquis; who, when his son was born, sent the young father a complimentary present of a carp.--It would have been two or three years before the beginning of the last quarter of the century when he felt the time calling to him, and voices out of the Eternal; and threw up his superintendentship to open a school.

Not an ordinary school by any means. The Pupils were not children, but young men of promise and an inquiring mind; and what he had to teach them was not the ordinary curriculum, but right living, the right ordering of social life, and the right government of states. They were to pay; but to pay according to their means and wishes; and he demanded intelligence from them; --no swelling of the fees would serve instead.--"I do not open the truth," said he, "to one not eager after knowledge; nor do I teach those unanxious to explain themselves. When I have presented one corner of a subject, and the student cannot learn from it the other three for himself, I do not repeat the lesson." He lectured to them, we read, mainly on history and poetry, deducing his lessons in life from these.

His school was a great success. In five years he had acquired some two thousand pupils: seventy or eighty of them, as he said, "men of extraordinary ability." It was that the Doors of the Lodge had opened, and its force was flowing through him in Lu, as it was through the Old Philosopher in Honanfu.--By this time he had added archery to his own studies, and (like William Q. Judge) become proficient. Also he had taken a special course in music theory under a very famous teacher. "At thirty he stood firm."

Two of his disciples were members of the royal family; and Marquis Chao regarded him with favor, as the foremost educationist in the state. He had an ambition to visit the capital (of China); where, as no where else, ritual might be studied; where, too, was Laotse, with whom he longed to confer. Marquis Chao, hearing of this, provided him with the means; and he went up with a band of his pupils. There at Loyang, which is Honanfu, we see him wandering rapt through palaces and temples, examining the sacrificial vessels, marveling at the ancient art of Shang and Chow. But for a few vases, it is all lost.

He did interview Laotse; we cannot say whether only once or more often. Nor, I think, do we know what passed; the accounts we get are from the pen of honest _Ben Trovato; Vero,_ the modest, had but little hand in them. We shall come to them later.

And now that he stands before the world a Teacher, we may drop his personal name, K'ung Ch'iu, and call him by the title to which paeans of praise have been swelling through all the ages since: K'ung Futse, K'ung the Master; latinized, Confucius. It is a name that conveys to you, perhaps, some associations of priggishness and pedantry: almost whereever you see him written of you find suggestions of the sort. Forgo them at once: they are false utterly. Missionaries have interpreted him to the West; who have worked hard to show him something less than the Nazarene. They have set him in a peculiar light; and others have followed them. Perhaps no writer except and until Dr. Lionel Giles (whose interpretation, both of the man and his doctrine, I shall try to give you), has shown him to us as he was, so that we can understand why he has stood the Naional Hero, the Savior and Ideal Man of all those millions through all these centuries.

We have been told again and again that his teaching was wholly unspiritual; that he knew nothing of the inner worlds; never mentions the Soul, or 'God'; says no word to lighten for you the "dusk within the Holy of holies." He was all for outwardness, they say: a thorough externalist; a ritualist cold and unmagnetic.--It is much what his enemies said in his own day; who, and not himself, provide the false-interpreters with their weapons. But think of the times, and you may understand. How would the missionaries feel, were Jesus translated to the Chinese as a fine man in some respects--considering--but, unfortunately! too fond of the pleasures of the table; "a gluttonous man and a winebibber "?

They were stirring times, indeed; when all boundaries were in flux, and you needed a new atlas three times a year. Robbers would carve themselves new principalities overnight; kingdoms would arise, and vanish with the waning of a moon. What would this, or any other country, become, were law, order, the police and every restraining influence made absolutely inefficient? Were California one state today; a dozen next week; in July six or seven, and next December but a purlieu to Arizona?--Things, heaven knows, are bad enough as they are; there is no dearth of crime and cheatery. Still, the police and the legal system do stand between us and red riot and ruin. In China they did not; the restraints had been crumbling for two or three centuries. Human nature, broadly speaking, is much of a muchness in all lands and ages: I warrant if you took the center of this world's respectability, which I should on the whole put in some suburb of London;--I warrant that if you relieved Clapham,--whose crimes, says Kipling very wisely, are 'chaste in Martaban,'--of police and the Pax Britannica for a hundred years or so, lurid Martaban would have little pre-eminence left to brag about. The class that now goes up primly and plugly to business in the City day by day would be cutting throats a little; they would be making life quite interesting. Their descendants, I mean. It would take time; Mother Grundy would not be disthroned in a day. But it would come; because men follow the times, and not the Soul; and are good as sheep are, but not as heroes. So in Chow China.

But the young Confucius knew his history. He looked back from that confusion to a wise Wu Wang and Duke of Chow; to a Tang the Completer, whose morning bath-tub was inscribed with this motto from _The New Way:_ "If at any time in his life a man can make a new man of himself, why not every morning?" Most of all he looked back to the golden and sinless age of Yao and Shun and Yu, as far removed from him, nearly, as pre-Roman Britain is from us: he saw them ruling their kingdom as a strong benevolent father rules his house. In those days men had behaved themselves: natural virtue had expressed itself in the natural way. In good manners; in observation of the proprieties, for example.--In that wild Martaban of Chow China, would not a great gentleman of the old school (who happened also to be a Great Teacher) have seen a virtue in even quiet Claphamism, that we cannot? It was not the time for Such a One to slight the proprieties and 'reasonable conventions of life.' The truth is, the devotion of his disciples has left us minute pictures of the man, so that we see him ... particular as to the clothes he wore; and from this too the West gathers material for its charge of externalism. Well; and if he accepted the glossy top-hats and black Prince Albert coats;--only with him they were caps and robes of azure, carnation, yellow, black, or white; this new fashion of wearing red he would have none of:--I can see nothing in it but this: the Great Soul had chosen the personality it should incarnate in, with an eye to the completeness of the work it should do; and seventy generations of noble ancestry would protest, even in the matter of clothing, against red riot and ruin and Martaban.

He is made to cite the 'Superior Man' as the model of excellence; and that phrase sounds to us detestably priggish. In the _Harvard Classics_ it is translated (as well as may be) 'true gentleman,' or 'princely man'; in which is no priggish ring at all. Again, he is made to address his disciples as "My Children," at which, too, we naturally squirm a little: what he really called them was 'My boys,' which sounds natural and affectionate enough. Supposing the Gospels were translated into Chinese by someone with the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber bias; --what, I wonder, would he put for _Amen, amen lego humin?_ Not "Verily, verily I say unto you"!

But I must go on with his life.

Things had gone ill in in Lu during his absence: threee great clan chieftains had stopped fighting among themselves to fight instead against their feudal superior, and Marquis Chao had been exiled to Ts'i. It touched Confucius directly; his teaching on such matters had been peremptory: he would 'rectify names': have the prince prince, and the people his subjects:--he would have law and order in the state, or the natural harmony of things was broken. As suggested above, he was very much a man of mark in Lu; and a protest from him,--which should be forth-coming-- could hardly go unnoticed. With a band of disciples he followed his marquis into Ts'i: it is in Chihli, north of Lu, and was famous then for its national music. On the journey he heard Ts'i airs sung, and 'hurried forward.' One of the first things he did on arriving at the capital was to attend a concert (or something equivalent); and for three months thereafter, as a sign of thanksgiving, he ate no flesh. "I never dreamed," said he, "that music could be so wonderful."

The fame of his Raja-Yoga School (that was what it was) had gone abroad, and Duke Ching of Ts'i received him well;--offered him a city with its revenues; but the offer was declined. The Duke was impressed; half inclined to turn Confucianist; wished to retain him with a pension, to have him on hand in case of need;-- but withal he was of doubtful hesitating mind about it, and allowed his prime minister to dissuade him. "These scholars," said the latter, "are impractical, and cannot be imitated. They are haughty and self-opinionated, and will never rest content with an inferior position. Confucius has a thousand peculiarities";--this is the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber saying, which the missionary interpreters have been echoing since;--"it would take ages to exhaust all he knows about the ceremonies of going up and down. This is not the time to examine into his rules of propriety; your people would say you were neglecting them."--When next Duke Ching was urged to follow Confucius, he answered: "I am too old to adopt his doctrines." The Master returned to Lu; lectured to his pupils, compiled the Books of Odes and of History; and waited for the disorders to pass.

Which in time they did, more or less. Marquis Ting came to the throne, and made him chief magistrate of the town of Chungtu.

Now was the time to prove his theories, and show whether he was the Man to the core, that he had been so assiduously showing himself, you may say, on the rind. Ah ha! now surely, with hard work before him, this scholar, theorist, conventional formalist, ritualist, and what else you may like to call him, will be put to shame,--shown up empty and foolish before the hard-headed men of action of his age. Who, indeed,--the hard-headed men of action-- have succeeded in doing precisely nothing but to make confusion worse confounded; how much less, then, will this Impractical One do! Let us watch him, and have our laugh...--On the wrong side of your faces then; for lo now, miracles are happening! He takes control; and here at last is one city in great Chu Hia where crime has ceased to be. How does he manage it? The miracle looks but the more miraculous as you watch. He frames rules for everything; insists on the proprieties; morning, noon, and night holds up an example, and, says he, relies on the power of that.--Example? Tush, he must be beheading right and left!--Nothing of the sort; he is all against capital punishment, and will have none of it. But there is the fact: you can leave your full purse in the streets of Chung-tu, and pick it up unrifled when you pass next; you can pay your just price, and get your just measure for it, fearing no cheateries; High Cost of Living is gone; corners in this and that are no more; graft is a thing you must go elsewhere to look for;--there is none of it in Chung-tu. And graft, let me say, was a thing as proper to the towns of China then, as to the graftiest modern city you might mention. The thing is inexplicable--but perfectly attested. Not quite inexplicable, either: he came from the Gods, and had the Gloves of Gwron on his hands: he had the wisdom you cannot fathom, which meets all events and problems as they come, and finds their solution in its superhuman self, where the human brain-mind finds only dense impenetrability.--Marquis Ting saw and wondered.--"Could you do this for the whole state?" he asked.--"Surely; and for the whole empire," said Confucius. The Marquis made him, first Assistant-Superintendent of Works, then Minister of Crime.

And now you shall hear Chapter X of the _Analects,_ to show you the outer man. All these details were noted down by the love of his disciples, for whom nothing was too petty to be recorded; and if we cannot read them without smiling, there is this to remember: they have suffered sea-change on their way to us: sea-change and time-change. What you are to see really is: (1) a great Minister of State, utterly bent on reproving and correcting the laxity of his day, performing the ritual duties of his calling--as all other duties--with a high religious sense of their antiquity and dignity; both for their own sake, and to set an example. what would be thought of an English Archbishop of Canterbury who behaved familiarly or jocularly at a Coronation Service?--(2) A gentleman of the old school, who insists on dressing well and quietly, according to his station. That is what he would appear now, in any grade of society, and among men the least capable of recognising his inner greatness: 'race' is written in every feature of his being; set him in any modern court, and with half an eye you would see that his family was a thousand years or so older than that of anyone else present, and had held the throne at various times. Here is a touch of the great gentleman: he would never fish with a net, or shoot at a bird on the bough; it was unsportsmanlike. (3) A very natural jovial man, not above "changing countenance" when fine meats were set on his table:--a thing that directly contradicts the idea of a cold, ever play-acting Confucius. A parvenu must be very careful; but a scion of the House of Shang, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, could unbend and be jolly without loss of dignity;--and, were he a Confucius, would. "A gentleman," said he, "is calm and spacious"; he was himself, according to the _Analects,_ friendly, yet dignified; inspired awe, but not fear; was respectful, but easy. He divided mankind into three classes: Adepts or Sages; true Gentlemen; and the common run. He never claimed to belong to the first, though all China knows well that he did belong to it. He even considered that he fell short of the ideal of the second; but as to that, we need pay no attention to his opinion. Here, then, is Chapter X:

"Amongst his own countryfolk Confucius wore a homely look, like one who has no word to say. In the ancestral temple and at court his speech was full, but cautious. At court he talked frankly to men of low rank, winningly to men of high rank. In the Marquis's presence he looked intent and solemn.

"When the Marquis bade him receive guests, his face seemed to change, his knees to bend. He bowed left and right to those behind him, straightened his robes in front and behind, and sped forward, his elbows spread like wings. When the guest had left, he always reported it, saying: 'The guest has ceased to look back.'

"Entering the palace gate he stooped, as though it were too low for him. He did not stand in the middle of the gate, nor step on the threshold. Passing the throne, his face seemed to change, his knees to bend; and he spoke with bated breath. Mounting the royal dais, he lifted his robes, bowed his back and masked his breathing till it seemed to stop. Coming down, his face relaxed below the first step, and bore a pleased look. From the foot of the steps he sped forward, his elbows spread like wings; and when again in his seat, he looked intent as before. He held his hands not higher than in bowing, nor lower than in giving a present. He wore an awed look and dragged his feet, as though they were fettered."

Which means that he felt the royal office to be sacred, as the seat of authority and government, the symbol and representative of heaven, the fountain of order: in its origin, divine. He treated Marquis Ting as if he had been Yao, Shun, or Yu; or rather, the Marquis's throne and office as if one of these had held them. There is the long history of China to prove he was wise in the example he set.

"When presenting royal gifts his manner was formal; but he was cheerful at the private audience.--This gentleman was never arrayed in maroon or scarlet; even at home he would not wear red or purple. In hot weather he wore unlined linen clothes, but always over other garments. Over lambskin he wore black; over fawn he wore white; over fox-skin he wore yellow. At home he wore a long fur robe with the right sleeve short. He always had his night-gown half as long again as his body. In the house he wore fox- or badger-skin for warmth. When out of mourning there was nothing wanting from his girdle. Except for court-dress, he was sparing of stuff. He did not wear lamb's wool, or a black cap, on a visit of condolence. On the first day of the moon he always went to court in court dress. On fast days he always donned clothes of pale hue, changed his food, and moved from his wonted seat. He did not dislike his rice cleaned with care, nor his hash copped small. He would not eat sour or mouldy rice, putrid fish, or tainted meat. Aught discolored or high, badly cooked, or out of season, he would not eat. He would not eat what was badly cut, or a dish with the wrong sauce. A choice of meats could not tempt him to eat more than he had a relish for. To wine alone he set no limit; but he never drunk more than enough. He did not drink brought wine, or eat ready-dried meat. He did not eat much. Ginger was never missing at his table.

"After sacrifice at the palace he would not keep the meat over-night; at home, not more than three days. If kept longer, it was not eaten. He did not talk at meals, nor in bed. Though there were but coarse rice and vegetables, he made his offering with all reverence. If his mat were not straight, he would not sit down. When drinking with the villagers, when those with slaves left, he left too. At the village exorcisms he donned court dress, and stood on the eastern steps.

"When sending inquiries to another land, he bowed twice and saw his messenger out. On K'ang's making him a present of medicine, he accepted it with a low bow, saying: 'I do not know; I dare not taste it.' His stables having been burnt, the Master, on his return from court, said: 'Is anyone hurt?' He did not ask after the horses."

Set down in perfect good faith to imply that his concern was for the sufferings of others, not for his personal loss: and without perception of the fact that it might imply callousness as to the suffering of the horses. We are to read the recorder's mind, and not the Master's, in that omission.--