The 'Four Books' are the works of three dis ciples of the Sage and of Mencius, his great ex positor, in the century following his death. The "Analeets" gives some accounts of the habits and records the teachings of the great moralist as nearly as possible in his own words, thus forming an invaluable repository of information about Con fucius and his moral system. In this is formu lated the famous text of altruism, the Golden Bide in its Chinese form, "What you would not others should (I() unto you, do not unto them;" and here are expressed his ideas as to the nature of man, the necessity of education, of etiquette, of self-repression, of filial surrender, and here his agnosticism stands out in bold relief. The "Book of Mfaig tsz'." or :Mencius, supplies at rather greater length the teachings of Confucius's greatest follower, a man who subordinated his whole doctrine to the system of his master, but who in breadth and strength of character seems to have been superior to the Sage himself. Like Socrates, he devoted himself to crushing the sophists of his time, and through his learning and influence in combating heterodox philoso phers he may be said to have established the supremacy of the Confucian system in the mind of China. As third among the 'Four Books' comes the Ta I1.such [or Ilia], the "Great Learn ing." once constituting a chapter of the "Book of Rites." It enlarges upon the regulation of the individual, the family, the State, and the Empire, and has condueed, theoretically at least. to the maintenance during successire ages of China's political solidarity under a system allow ing considerable liberty of home rule. Lastly. the Chung lung, also originally a section of the "Book of Rites." develops the idea of the prince ly man who. basing his actions upon the prin ciple of (thing, or uprightness, and submitting to the all-pervading ho, or harmony of the universe, never departs from the just mean. From this source come in great part the attitude of calm and the assumption of impartiality studiously cultivated by Chinese gentlemen.
In a sense these classical works may be con sidered the sum and substance of Chinese litera ture. for not only have the example and ethical system of Confucius become supreme over the minds of his conntrymen, but forms of thought and style have ever been kept subservient to these early products of the national genius. Con fucius did much for his people. but he has much to answer for in repressing original speculation, freedom of research, and imagination by a color less formalism. Such was the idea of the 'First Emperor' Chin, who two centuries after the death of Confucius consolidated feudal China into a real empire and greatly extended its do main. In order to combat the conservative lit erati who resisted his violent and rapid reforms by preaching the doctrines of the dead past. he decreed in u.c. 213 the destruction of all hooks excepting Ilm,e on science, agriculture, and divi nation (the last saving the I clang alone of the classics). and forbidding their or study. The edict, which was carried out with extraordinary thoroughness. brought death upon -1(10 recalcitrant scholars, and forms an epoch in the history of Chinese letters. The tyrant's dynasty did not endure long, and within a half-century of his death the ancient learning was revived with double zest under the Han Dynasty (u.c.200-,k.n.2no). The new zeal also brought with it a harvest of forgeries of old works alleged to have been discovered in hiding places, but really efforts of clever writers to imitate the resuscitated ancients, whose pres tige in eastern Asia always far exceeds the most brilliant successes of authors among their own contemporaries. Before touching upon this re vival of learning in China, however, it is proper to refer brielly to the non-Confucian liter ature of Taoism and the mystics. The philoso pher Lao-tsz', an earlier contemporary of Confu cius, gave birth to a philosophy of quietism, the esoteric meaning of which is hard to determine. The pursuit of tao, as set forth in the Too-tc chino, a work ascribed (improperly) to the teacher, suggests Ilindn transcendentalism and may he derived from India. In its purity it never took much hold on the practical and world ly-minded Chinese, hut idealists exist even there, and to these such speculations have invariably appealed. In the Fourth Century A.D. there arose an author (Chwang Tsz') who illuminated for his followers the dark places of tao, and by the eharin and erudition of his style elevated his exposition to a high place in the literature of a country where style atones for all heresy. The
history of the sect of too, which passed from pure mysticism to the utmost pretensions of alchemy and divination, does not belong here, nor is there much more than this to be said of the numerous writings of the Buddhists, which begin here in the First Century A .D . , hut which have never greatly affected the literary life of educated China.
Mille elucidations of the Confucian canon con stitute an important part of the literary output of China during its mediaeval period, the chief distinction of the Ilan era COWS' from the devel opment of poetry and of historical writing. To 2)lei Siting (Second Century .k.n.) belongs the honor of first exhibiting the beauties of the live word metre, in which form have been produced the finest specimens of the poetic art in the lan guage. Rhymes are of course easily found in a monosyllabic language of few sounds, but Chinese verse calls for similar tones to perfect the rhyme and demands also the disposal of rising and fall ing tones in the line in accordance with a scheme which recalls the niceties of metrical arrange ment among the Greeks. The identification of the human mood with nature, which was almost unknown in Europe until modern times, appears strong and fresh as a poetic motif in China, as elsewhere in the East, from very early ages. In our comprehension of their art, however, the need of translation is a portentous obstacle: whatever the care of the translator, there must always remain differences in standpoint. in mode of life, and intellectual environment to thwart and prejudice the resulting effect upon readers in an alien land. Where every chance allusion to history and familiar enstom, where nature her self, as exhibited in an exotic clime, require ex planation before the sense is secure, it is hard to keep the flowers of Chinese verse from withering when transferred to another speech. In history the language, of course, fares better. and scholars have reason to look for larger results from trans lations of the standard Chinese historians than from those of any other Asiatic peoples. First of these authors in time and reputation—next to Confucius. who preached hut could not write his tory—is Sz'-ma rh'ien (horn lax. 15), whose `llistorieal Record' relates the history of China from the beginning down to nearly his own period. Its 526,500 words, all originally scratched nn bamboo tablets with a stylus, have been conned and counted with such affectionate care in sub sequent ages as to have become the unvarying type of historical presentation in China ever since. Each dynasty has made it a serious busi ness to compile the nation's annals during the preceding dynasty as well as to collect rec ords for its own reigns, and the twenty-four dynastic histories produced in a uniform set of 210 volumes in I741' are an exhibit of intellec tual activity creditable in the extreme to the Chinese mind, (wen if their pages do not glow with marks of genius or lofty imagination. These official histories are supplemented by pri vate memoirs. local annals, travels, and topog raphies, and at long intervals authors have ap peared to eontinne the work of Confucius and Sz'-ma Ch'ien by revising and condensing the national history into acceptable literary form. Such have been Sz'-ma Kwang, whose history in 36(1 books appeared in the Eleventh Century, and Chu Eu-tsz', who issued an 'abridgment' in 55 hooks in the Twelfth Century. (In the whole, the mass of historical literature of all kinds in China may be called enormous, a mine as yet almost networked by European students. In the rather scant literature of foreign travel should be mentioned the accounts of the journeys of the Buddhist pilgrims Fa IIsien in the Fourth Cen tury and of Ilsiian Tsang in the Seventh Century to India in search of holy books and images. They seem to have inspired in China no lasting interest in foreign lauds or desire to travel abroad. but by the efforts of these and other priests in translating Buddhist hooks much of the literature of that creed which would other wise have perished in its extinction in India has been preserved for the researches of modern scholars.