Canon McClatchie

Canon McClatchie was a nineteenth-century translator whose 1876 version of the I Ching became a sustained point of comparison in James Legge’s account of the classic. Legge acknowledges the scope of McClatchie’s undertaking, but repeatedly challenges its handling of textual layers, divinatory language, and symbolic interpretation; his criticism makes the translation a practical test case for the difference between rendering a difficult text and imposing a theory upon it.

Identity and Translation

In 1876, Canon McClatchie, identified as a Master of Arts and based in Shanghai, published A Translation of the Confucian Yi King, or the “Classic of Changes,” with Notes and Appendix. The work included both the Text and the Appendixes. Its arrangement placed the first, second, and fourth Appendixes among the Text, following the layout of common school editions. Legge notes that this presentation joined materials he considered distinct in date and authorship.

Legge understood McClatchie to treat the first and second Appendixes as though they belonged to the original authorship of King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, or, in McClatchie’s presumed attribution, Confucius. Legge instead regarded these explanations of the hexagrams and their lines as the work of a later writer. The disagreement was not simply about who composed a set of commentaries: it shaped whether readers approached the classic as a single unified work or as an older Text accompanied by later interpretive layers.

Method and Disputed Interpretations

McClatchie’s stated project was to unlock the I Ching through comparative mythology. Legge rejected this as an unnecessary key, arguing that its use led McClatchie to interpretations that Chinese scholars had not conceived. He says he followed the translation paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence but found nothing he could use to advantage in his own version. The breadth of that comparison makes McClatchie more than a passing reference: Legge treats the translation as a sustained alternative reading, then tests its conclusions against the text and its commentarial tradition.

The contrast also reflects different ideas about what translation should do. Legge describes his own earlier attempt at strict concision as producing English phrases with little syntactical connection and says that a literal version cannot adequately convey the thought represented by Chinese symbolic characters. His preferred task is to express the meaning as exactly and concisely as possible, adding occasional words to clarify what he understands the original thought to supply. Against that approach, he presents McClatchie’s mythological framework as a source of additions and conjectures not warranted by the written text.

Several notes make the disagreement concrete. In discussing the trigrams, Legge objects to McClatchie’s rendering of a passage about Heaven, Earth, and the family relations represented by the figures. Elsewhere he questions the elaborate mythological explanation attached to a phrase translated as “Imperial Mother,” asking why such additions should be read into the written words. In another case, he says McClatchie’s translation of an Appendix loses the significance of its mythological paragraph. These examples show Legge’s recurring concern: an interpretation can turn symbolic or compressed material into a more elaborate story than its wording supports.

Commentary and Divination

McClatchie’s translation also appears in Legge’s discussion of divination and claims about the book’s power to disclose the future. Legge quotes McClatchie’s description of the I Ching as a storehouse of knowledge that, if fully fathomed, could enable its possessor to foretell all future events, and calls this a misstatement. He distinguishes the use of the book to seek guidance from a claim to comprehensive prediction. For Legge, a cursory reading of the Appendixes might suggest that divination gives knowledge of what is to come, but a careful reading shows a more limited point; he cites a passage in which stillness is auspicious when both the tortoise-shell and the stalks oppose human judgment, while active measures are unlucky.

That criticism belongs to Legge’s wider argument about how the I Ching should be read. Its figures and oracles have a divinatory history, but that function does not license a translator to claim that the book contains a complete forecast of every possible event. McClatchie’s formulation therefore serves as an example of how a broad claim about the classic’s reach can exceed what Legge believes its language warrants.

Reception and Legacy in Legge’s Account

Legge’s references to McClatchie are sharp, but they form part of a larger defense of careful textual criticism. Legge disputes the suggestion that Chinese scholars have merely piled commentaries onto an unknowable work, and argues that their interpretations often clarify the Text substantially. He also resists the claim that European scholarship had produced a host of confusing translations: in his count, the European versions then available amounted to two. He considers the earlier Latin translation by Philippe Grégoire Regis and his collaborators open to improvement, yet valuable for its information and notes; McClatchie’s version, by contrast, supplied no material Legge could employ in his own translation.

Legge’s objections do not erase the importance of McClatchie’s publication as a work that attempted to translate the whole classic, Text and Appendixes together, nor its place in the nineteenth-century reception of the I Ching. Rather, McClatchie’s version helps expose the stakes of that reception: whether textual layers should be kept distinct, whether an interpretive system clarifies or overrules the wording, and how far divination can be said to reveal the future. In Legge’s account, these disputes make McClatchie a conspicuous counterexample to his own effort to render the classic intelligibly without allowing an explanatory theory to become part of the text.