LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 59

by rescuing it from the hands of the palace eunuchs.1 Thereafter, when
the incurable corruption and incompetence of an effete indigenous
dynasty brought extinction upon them and subjugation upon their sub-
jects at the hands of Manchu barbarians, the Confucian litterati once
again played an honourable part in the political arena—first by taking
their share in an eventually unsuccessful Zealot resistance movement in
the South, and then by engaging in an eventually successful manoeuvre
to captivate a resuscitated Sinic universal state's Manchu barbarian
conquerors by making their own administrative services indispensable
to the Empire's new masters.2 In this 'cold war' between litterati and
barbarians the intellectual attractiveness of the Confucian literary culture
was as potent a weapon in the hands of the mandarins as the political
utility of the Confucian administrative tradition; and, in this light, the
outburst of critical scholarship in China in the seventeenth century may
be regarded as a by-product, on the intellectual plane, of a movement of
withdrawal-and-return that was to end on the political plane on which
it had begun.3

The critical scholarship of the Manchu Age was not an entirely new
departure, since the Neoconfucian philosophers of the Sung Age4 had
already cast doubt on the authenticity of some of the works that had
come to be included in the canon of the Classics.5 But, if the seventeenth-
century and eighteenth-century Confucian scholars were indebted to the
twelfth-century and thirteenth-century Neoconfucian philosophers for
their critical approach to the Classics, they found their chief stimulus in
exercising these awakened critical faculties at the Neoconfucians' ex-
pense. After having exposed the Buddhist and Taoist provenance of the
Neoconfucians' cosmology, ethics, and psychology, they went on to con-
demn their scholarship itself as being unscientifically subjective;6 and
they justified their censoriousness by the exactness and exhaustiveness of
their own work on the Sinic classical literature not only in the fields of
phonetics, semantics, and textual criticism, but in the less pedestrian
enterprise of higher criticism as well.7

The Counterfeiting of a Resuscitated Classical Literature

When we pass from these preliminary and preparatory tasks of
scholarship to the scholar's conceit of producing counterfeits of a classi-
cal literature that he is striving to raise from the dead, we must leave it to
statisticians to determine whether the number of essays in the Sinic
classical style that were produced by candidates for the imperial civil
service examinations in China in the course of the 1,283 years that

1 See Hu Hsih: 'The Chinese Renaissance', in The China Year Book, 1924-5 (Lon-
don N.D., Simpkin Marshall), p. 633.

a See Hu Hsih, ibid. p. 634.

3 On this showing, it would appear that the seventeenth-century Chinese scholars
who performed such prodigies in the exegesis of the Sinic classical literature were
following in the footsteps of Confucius himself and were thereby also taking the same
course as the Pleiad of historians—a Thucydides, Xenophon, Jc-jsephus, Ollivier, Machia-
velli, Polybius. Clarendon, and Ibn Khaldun—whose auspiciously broken careers we
have examined in an earlier context (see III. iii. 248-377).

* See pp. 41-43, above. * See Hu Hsih, ibid., p. 634.

<* See Hu Hsih, ibid., p. 635. ? See Hu Hsih, ibid., pp. 635-6.