While travelling about, Confucius repeatedly came across recluses,—a class of men who had retired from the world in disgust. That there was such a class gives us a striking glimpse into the character of the age. Scholarly, and of good principles, they had given up the conflict with the vices and disorder that prevailed. But they did not understand the sage, and felt a contempt for him struggling on against the tide, and always hoping against hope. We get a fine idea of him from his encounters with them. Once he was looking about for a ford, and sent Tze-lu to ask a man who was at work in a neighbouring field where it was. The man was a recluse, and having found that his questioner was a disciple of Confucius, he said to him : “Disorder in a swelling flood spreads over the kingdom, and no one is able to repress it. Than follow a master who withdraws from one ruler and another that will not take his advice, had you not better follow those who withdraw from the world altogether?” With these words he resumed his hoe, and would give no information about the ford. Tze-lu went back, and reported what the man had said to the master, who observed: “It is impossible to withdraw from the world, and associate with birds and beasts that have no affinity with us. With whom should I associate but with suffering men? The disorder that prevails is what requires my efforts. If right principles ruled through the kingdom, there would be no necessity for me to change its state.” We must recognize in those words a brave heart and a noble sympathy. Confucius would not abandon the cause of the people. He would hold on his way to the end. Defeated he might be, but he would be true to his humane and righteous mission.
It was in his sixty-ninth year, 483 B.C., that Confucius returned to Lu. One of his disciples, who had remained in the state, had been successful in the command of a military expedition, and told the prime minister that he had learned his skill in war from the master, urging his recall, and that thereafter mean persons should not be allowed to come between the ruler and him. The state was now in the hands of the son of the marquis whose neglect had driven the sage away; but Confucius would not again take office. Only a few years remained to him, and he devoted them to the completion of his literary tasks, and the delivery of his lessons to his disciples.
The next year was marked by the death of his son, which he bore with equanimity. His wife had died many years before, and it jars upon us to read how he then commanded the young man to hush his lamentations of sorrow. We like him better when he mourned, as has been related, for his own mother. It is not true, however, as has often been said, that he had divorced his wife before her death. The death of his favourite disciple, Yen Hwui, in 481 B.C., was more trying to him. Then he wept and mourned beyond what seemed to his other followers the bounds of propriety, exclaiming that Heaven was destroying him. His own last year, 478 B.C., dawned on him with the tragic end of his next beloved disciple, Tze-lu. Early one morning, we are told, in the fourth month, he got up, and with his hands behind his back, dragging his staff, he moved about his door, crooning over—
| “ | The great mountain must crumble, |
| The strong beam must break, | |
| The wise man must wither away like a plant.“ |
Tze-kung heard the words, and hastened to him. The master told him a dream of the previous night, which, he thought, presaged his death. “No intelligent ruler, he said, arises to take me as his master. My time has come to die.” So it was. He took to his bed, and after seven days expired. Such is the account we have of the last days of the sage of China. His end was not unimpressive, but it was melancholy. Disappointed hopes made his soul bitter. No wife nor child was by to do the offices of affection, nor was the expectation of another life with him, when he passed away from among men. He uttered no prayer, and he betrayed no apprehension. Years before, when he was very ill, and Tze-lu asked leave to pray for him, he expressed a doubt whether such a thing might be done, and added, “I have prayed for a long time.” Deep-treasured now in his heart may have been the thought that he had served his generation by the will of God; but he gave no sign.
When their master thus died, his disciples buried him with great pomp. A multitude of them built huts near his grave, and remained there, mourning as for a father, for nearly three years; and when all the rest were gone, Tze-kung, the last of his favourite three, continued alone by the grave for another period of the same duration. The news of his death went through the states as with an electric thrill. The man who had been neglected when alive seemed to become all at once an object of unbounded admiration. The tide began to flow which has hardly ever ebbed during three-and-twenty centuries.
The grave of Confucius is in a large rectangle separated from the rest of the K‘ung cemetery, outside the city of K‘iuh-fow. A magnificent gate gives admission to a fine avenue, lined with cypress trees and conducting to the tomb, a large and lofty mound, with a marble statue in front, bearing the inscription of the title given to Confucius under the Sung dynasty: “The most sagely ancient Teacher; the all-accomplished, all-informed King.” A little in front of the tomb, on the left and right, are smaller mounds over the graves of his son and grandson, from the latter of whom we have the remarkable treatise called The Doctrine of the Mean. All over the place are imperial tablets of different dynasties, with glowing tributes to the one man whom China delights to honour; and on the right of the grandson's mound is a small house said to mark the place of the hut where Tze-kung passed his nearly five years of loving vigil. On the mound grow cypresses, acacias, what is called “the crystal tree,” said not to be elsewhere found, and the Achillea, the plant whose stalks were employed in ancient times for purposes of divination.
The adjoining city is still the home of the K‘ung family; and there are said to be in it between 40,000 and 50,000 of the descendants of the sage. The present chief of the family is in the line of the 75th generation, and has large estates by imperial gift, with the title of “Duke by imperial appointment and hereditary right, continuator of the sage.” It is thus no empty honour which is still given by the sovereigns of China to Confucius, in the persons of his descendants.
