Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/96

 himself, however, scarcely anything is known: so little, indeed, as to lead the vanguard of modern sinologists to doubt, and even to deny, that such a person ever existed in the flesh. He is, in fact, now generally regarded as a sort of Isaac Bickerstaffe—the literary creation of a sect or school, and so far holding a certain position in the Valhalla of Chinese letters, but not entitled to the honours due to a great historic character about whose personality there is no question. Such scruples are a marked feature of modern criticism; and not only has a blow been recently struck at the authorship and personality of Lao-tzŭ himself, but the destructive process is sanctioned and encouraged by no less eminent an authority than the Quarterly Review. "A book," says the writer of an article on the 'Sacred Books of the East,' "to a modern mind suggests an author. It was not so then"—in the days of old. "No one of them can be properly said to have had an author. And by this much more is meant than the mere suggestion that the books were at first anonymous, or that the names of their authors have not been handed down to us. In those early times a book was seldom or never composed originally in the shape in which it has come down to us. It was not made: it grew. Sayings, passages, legends, verses, were handed down in a school or were current among a body of disciples. These were gradually, and only gradually, blended together. They were added to; their connection or sequence was altered; they were collected by different hands and at different times into compilations of different tendencies. Finally one or other of these compilations became so much the favourite that—all being handed down by memory alone, liable to 'have their root cut off