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.