THE SHE KING; OR, THE BOOK OF ANCIENT POETRY

18 THE SOURCES OF THE ODES AS A COLLECTION. THE AUTHORS OF THE ODES. 19
currence 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,1
and that the odes of those States extend only over a
short period of their history: for these things we can
not 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 com
plete 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.
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 inter
pretation of many of the odes. The remark of Sze-ma
Bearing of the Ts'e'en, that " Confucius selected those
above paia- pieces which would be serviceable for the
graphs on the I: 1 i , ij
interpretation of illustration ot propriety and righteousness,
particularpieces. jg ^ emmeous as the otllerj ^ tte 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
1 I might say not quite a dozen, for Books Hi., iv., and v., all belong to
Wei, and probably also xiii., as well as x., to Tsin.
I
.manners of the people," and so come to a decision re
garding 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 sen
tence, Thought without depravity," 1 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 in
dividuals who possessed the gift, or thought that they pos
sessed the gift, of poetical composition. Who ite writers of
they were we could tell only on the authority the odes-
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
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. 2 We may
assign to him also the 1st and 3rd 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
2nd of Book xv., which lias just been referred to, can be
assigned with certainty. Some of the others, of which
the historical interpretation may be considered as suffi
ciently fixed, as the complaints of Chwang Keang, in Books
iii., iv.j v., are written in the first person; but the author
1 See the Ana. II. ii.
" See the Shoo, V. vi. 15.
2*