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The Victorian Translation of China
James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage
By Norman J. Girardot University of California
Copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of California
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-520-21552-4
Introduction
The Strange Saga of Missionary Tradition, Sinological Orientalism, and the Comparative Science of Religions in the Nineteenth Century Biography, as Heinrich Simon ... said, is the best kind of history, and the life of one man, if laid open before us with all he thought and all he did, gives us a better insight into the history of his time than any general account of it can possibly do. Now it is quite true that the life of a quiet scholar has little to do with history, except it may be the history of his own branch of study, which some people consider quite unimportant, while to others it seems all-important. This is as it ought to be, till the universal historian finds the right perspective, and assigns to each branch of study and activity its proper place in the panorama of the progress of mankind towards its ideals. Even a quiet scholar, if he keeps his eyes open, may now and then see something that is of importance to the historian. F. Max Müller, My Autobiography, 1901
THE BEST KIND OF HISTORY
Friedrich Max Müller, the most famous comparative philologist and Orientalist of the nineteenth century, once self-servingly quoted a historian's observation that, in many ways, "biography ... is the best kind of history." The life of a single person, "if laid open before us with all he thought and all he did, gives us a better insight into the history of his time than any general account of it can possibly do." One problem with this methodological principle seems, however, to be the case of the "quiet scholar" who apparently has "little to do with history," except for "the history of his own branch of study, which some people consider quite unimportant, while to others it seems all-important." This judgment is, as Müller says, "as it ought to be" until "the universal historian" finds the right comparative perspective, "and assigns to each branch of study and activity its proper place in the panorama of the progress of mankind towards its ideals." The point is that the life and discipline of "even a quiet scholar"-and Müller was quite typically thinking of himself-may have some general cultural and historical significance, especially if that scholar had the good sense to respond to the changing times and to "keep his eyes open."
But Müller, a prolific academic entrepreneur and a well-connected counselor to the British nobility, was hardly a "quiet scholar." A much better test of the principle concerns his more unassuming Oxonian colleague, the ex-missionary and professor of Chinese, James Legge. I cannot pretend to be Müller's "universal historian," but I do believe that a fully contextualized life of a seemingly quiet missionary and humble scholar such as Legge gives us a revealing perspective on the larger panorama of Victorian cultural history, if not the nineteenth-century "progress of mankind towards its ideals." In the course of his long life as a transcultural pilgrim in Britain and Asia, Legge was someone who kept his eyes open, his religious outlook broad, his translator's pen active, and his moral sensibilities acute.
The trick of this kind of biographical procedure is always to "lay open"-like a comparative anatomist spilling out the internal organs with a scalpel-all a person "thought and all he did" in relation to the larger cultural carcass of the period. Important social developments, intellectual transformations, institutional changes, and religious upheavals are all part of the panorama associated with Legge's long life. So also do we discover that the various realms of activity and study closely identified with Legge-the Protestant missionary enterprise, the emergence of sinological Orientalism, and the creation of the comparative science of religions-are not so completely trivial in relation to the larger pageant of Victorian history. It is not that these pursuits can be seen as "all-important," but rather that they become interesting precisely because of their relative obscurity and strangeness amidst the other emergent human sciences in the nineteenth century. Meaning and importance both depend, as Müller and Michel Foucault would say on quite different methodological grounds, in "finding the right perspective."
REMOTE AND STRANGE
The Western study of Chinese culture and its institutions, that hermetically specialized field within the larger domain of Orientalism known as "sinology," has always been a peculiar discipline. From its beginnings with the Jesuits and French Enlightenment philosophes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, down through its crystallization as a professional academic discipline in the nineteenth century, sinology has reflected and refracted the changing attitudes of the Western encounter with the otherness of Chinese tradition. The checkered history of this intercourse has often been a one-sided intellectual and cultural exchange that, until roughly the end of the nineteenth century, when secularized academic institutions prevailed, was primarily a record of the changing fortunes of the Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary enterprises. But, unlike some other Oriental traditions and, by definition, the illiterate or "savage" cultures, the native Chinese literati class and traditional commentaries were present to guide and adjust Western views on the meaning of the ancient textual tradition, particularly when those views were rooted in the somewhat common classical and commentarial prejudices of European and Chinese scholar-ministers.
In the nineteenth century, when the common philological and racial "brotherhood" of the Indo-European traditions became an article of intellectual and imperial faith, China's remarkable linguistic and cultural isolation, its "formidable solitude," as Raymond Schwab rightly put it, became even more of a factor in the retarded development of sinological Orientalism as an academic discipline, even more of a unrecognized instance of an imperial Western science unwittingly in collusion with traditional Ruist or Confucian forms of Chinese cultural mythology. The discovery of the Aryan equation of Europe and India at the end of the eighteenth century, and its scholarly efflorescence in the field of comparative philology in the next century, meant that the professionalized study of Chinese language and literature in the nineteenth century was not as advanced, or as academically and institutionally privileged, as were either Indological or Semitic Orientalism. In an address to the Royal Asiatic Society in the late nineteenth century, Max Müller, the great Indologist and tireless promoter of Victorian Orientalism, said that the problem was that there were "no intellectual bonds"-no linguistic, spiritual, or social kinship-that united Europe and China. Sinology was therefore in the nineteenth century destined to remain a marginal discipline, a "quite unimportant" branch of study "confined to a very small number of scholars." Professional sinology, or sinological Orientalism, was in this way a largely peripheral discourse within the newly emerging academic salons of international Orientalism in the nineteenth century, disciplinary organizations best exemplified by the tradition of regular scholarly congresses that, beginning in Paris in 1873, met in the great imperial capitals of the Western world.
The impoverished situation of sinological Orientalism was unlikely to change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because the West, as Müller in a flight of quasi-racist rhetoric once declared, "received nothing from the Chinese." "There is," he emphasized, "no electric contact between the white and the yellow race." Despite the monumental productions of James Legge's Chinese Classics and Sacred Books of China (for Müller's own Sacred Books of the East series), the fact was that, according to Müller's authoritative estimate in the 1890s, China had "not been brought near to our hearts." The ever-present and essential difference was that, to use Müller's words again, "China is simply old, very old-that is, remote and strange." Unlike the philological principles linking India and Europe, there was no real linguistic or intellectual premise for a sympathetic understanding of China, no real basis for any kind of convincing comparative similitude. As Zhang Longxi has said, China in the nineteenth century became for the West the "image of the ultimate other."
QUITE UNIMPORTANT BRANCHES OF STUDY
Along with the obdurate strangeness of the Chinese language, the special cultural singularity of China was shown by the seemingly unreligious and nonmythological nature of its authoritative texts. The ancient Chinese documents appeared very much unlike the richly imaginative, and epically dynamic, religious literature of Hinduism and Hellenic tradition-or, for that matter, the theistic and prophetic drama of the Semitic biblical traditions. This contrast was particularly striking when the lushly mythological Vedic hymns of ancient Aryan India or the dramatic tales of Greek mythology were compared with the "prosy and dosy" literature of the great or high tradition of Chinese Confucianism attributed to the ancient moral philosopher and sagely educator known to the West as Confucius. In the nineteenth century, when the comparative sciences of philology and history became the foundations for the imperious intellectual mission of the human sciences, the unclassifiable Chinese language and the seemingly religionless, mythless, and agnostic Chinese civilization were the primary factors contributing to the special isolation, distortion, and handicapped nature of sinology as one of the newer disciplines of the universal science of Orientalism. During this same period in the mid- and late nineteenth century, the old certitude in the static exclusivity and superiority of the Christian tradition-as well as the general study of religion and religions-were undergoing dramatic changes that would lead both to the emergence of a new science of comparative religions and, after the turn of the century and the First World War, to this fledgling discipline's mostly marginalized and contested status within the more fully secularized academy.
Sinology and comparative religions may well be the two most peculiar, and orphaned, offspring of the human sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is for this reason that these two academic disciplines share a certain kind of disciplinary alienation and have often been found, even within institutions of higher learning, to be "quite unimportant branches of study." The very set-apart strangeness of the two disciplines-in relation to their separate histories in the nineteenth century, their mutual involvement in the transformations of the Protestant missionary movement, their controversial appropriation of the comparative method, and in terms of their brief convergence in the so-called sacred books produced by Max Müller and James Legge-makes them ideal vehicles for getting at some important issues of Victorian cultural history. Moreover, the tense relationship of missionary tradition with Orientalistic disciplines such as sinology and the rise of sympathetic, impartial, or comparative approaches to the study of non-Christian religion and civilization is a sorely neglected aspect of this history. An analysis of the interrelated traditions of the Protestant missionary movement, sinological Orientalism, and the comparative science of religions-as mirrored in the life and work of James Legge-is consequently an excellent way to study larger cultural changes at the end of the nineteenth century. These are changes that directly anticipate the emergence of the modern world of the twentieth century and, in diverse and devious ways, continue to distort Western and Chinese perceptions of each other.
COMPARING RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
A fuller awareness of the history of sinological strangeness is made all the more interesting and relevant by the simple fact that the specialized study of Chinese cultural institutions, especially traditions that can be loosely identified as philosophical and religious, has undergone a quiet revolution in recent decades, especially since the 1960s and 1970s. There are many examples of these often revisionary, and frequently interdisciplinary, developments, but let me only mention the explosion of archaeological information; the application of new interdisciplinary methodologies and the dramatic reevaluation of earlier interpretations of the ancient tradition; the growing realization of the importance of religion throughout Chinese history and for all aspects and levels of Chinese society; the fuller incorporation of Chinese literature into the comparative study of world literature; the advances in the study of the Daoist tradition and in the nature and significance of a sinified Buddhism; the heightened appreciation of popular traditions; sweeping reconsiderations of Confucius, Confucianism, and Neo-Confucianism; reexaminations of the whole meaning of modernization and westernization in relation to Chinese tradition; and so on. As a result of these developments, the very definition, classification, and understanding of Chinese religion, philosophy, and, for that matter, Chinese culture and civilization-as well as the ambiguous meaning of artificial categories such as "Confucianism" and "Daoism"-have been radically transformed by sinological specialists and comparative scholars.
Prevailing scholarly assumptions about Chinese tradition, ancient and modern, are being questioned and often overturned, even to the extent that hoary methodological debates dating back to the nineteenth century are being resurrected and fought once again-often with little awareness of their historical precedents. One instance of these revisionary turns that directly harks back to positions staked out during the last part of the nineteenth century concerns the reassertion of comparativistic and diffusionist theories arguing for multicultural, especially Western Asiatic and perhaps even Indo-European, sources for the Chinese language and civilization. China's wholly unique linguistic and cultural tradition was a basic article of polygenetic faith for both secularized Western and chauvinistic native Chinese scholars ever since the old comparativistic approach was definitively quashed after the turn of the century. Now, however, it is becoming increasing probable that traditional Chinese civilization, which was never purely monolithic in its origins or cultural development, will only be fully and fairly known comparatively in relation to its complex interaction with other ancient traditions.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Victorian Translation of China by Norman J. Girardot Copyright © 2002 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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