inculcation of propriety and righteousness' is as erroneous as the
other, that be selected 305 pieces out of more than 3000. The sage
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
Ku Hsi's interpretation of the pieces as the readiness with which he
attributes a licentious meaning to many of those in the seventh Book of
Part I. But the reason why the kings had the odes of the different
states collected and presented to them was, 'that they might judge from
them of the manners of the people,' and so come to a decision regarding
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 by references to vice in some of them than
by the language of virtue in many others. Confucius said, indeed, in his
own enigmatical way, that the single sentence, 'Thought without
depravity,' covered the whole 300 pieces[1]; and it may very well be
allowed that they 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, moral, and religious
habits of the people.

The writers of the odes.

The pieces were of course made by individuals who possessed the gift, or
thought that they possessed the gift, of poetical composition. Who they
were we could tell only on the authority of the pieces themselves, or of
credible historical accounts, contemporaneous with them or nearly so. It
is not worth our while to question the opinion of the Chinese critics