English
Few of them aré nearly so long as “Locksley Hall,” and the majority are effusions of a few dozen lines only. A feature which strikingly distinguishes the Japanese poetic muse from that of Western nations is a certain lack of imaginative power. The Japanese are slow to endow inanimate objects with life. Shelley’s “Cloud,” for example, contains enough matter of this kind for many volumes of Japanese verse. Such lines as “ From my wings are shaken The dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest On thetr mother’s breast As she dances about the sun, would appear to them ridiculously overcharged with metaphor, if not absolutely unintelligible. Still more foreign to their genius is the personification of abstract qualities. Abstract words are comparatively few, and it does not occur to the Japanese poet (or painter) to represent Truth, Justice, and Faith as comely damsels in flowing robes, or to make Love a chubby naked boy with wings and a bow and arrows. Muses, Graces, Virtues, Furies—in short, the host of personifications aptcica i cioshy 7s colin ee Nace POETRY 31 \ without which Western poetry would be only a shadow of itself—have little counterpart in Japanese literature. This impersonal habit of the Japanese mind is shared by them with other races of the Far East, notably China. It is not confined to poetry, or even to literature, but is profoundly characteristic of their whole mental attitude, showing itself in their grammar, which is most sparing of personal pronouns; in their art, which has no school of portrait-painting or monumental sculpture worth men- tioning ; in the late and imperfect development of the drama; and in their religious temper, with its strong bent towards rationalism, and its hazy recognition of a ruling personal power in the universe. To their minds things happen, rather than are done; the tides of fate are far more real to them than the strong will and the endeavour which wrestles with them. The significance of this fact in regard to the moral and psychological development of these races may be left to others to determine. It is sufficient here to note its influence on the literature, and especially on the poetry. Some rhetorical devices which are peculiar to Japanese poetry require a brief notice. One of these is the Makura- Kxotoba, or “pillow-word” as it is called, because it usually stands at the beginning of the verse, serving, as it were, as a pillow upon which it rests. The Makura- Kotoba is a stock conventional epithet prefixed to certain words something after the fashion of Homer’s “swift- footed” Achilles or “many-fountained” Ida. These words are survivals from a very archaic stage of the language, and the meaning of some of them is now extremely doubtful, a circumstance which forms no obstacle whatever to their continued use. Others are still intelligible and appropriate enough, such as the 32 JAPANESE LITERATURE “house-bird” cock, the “rain-enshrouded” Mount Mi- kasa, the “ever-firm” heaven, “ morning-mist” thought- wandering. But even although a Makura-Kotoba may be sufficiently apt if it is rightly applied, some Japanese poets take a perverse pleasure in wresting it from its proper sense in a way which to us is nothing short of ludicrous. ‘ Whale-catching,” for example, may pass as an epithet of the sea. But what shall we say of the poet who uses it as a prefix to the inland sea of Omi, now called Lake Biwa, where, needless to observe, whales are an unknown phenomenon? “Creeper-clad” is well enough as an epithet of a rock, but it tries one’s patience a little to find it applied to the province of Iwami, simply because /wa means rock. From the versifier’s point of view the Makura-Kotoba is a very useful institution. It consists almost invariably of five syllables, and therefore supplies him without any trouble with a first line ready made, no unimportant con- sideration when the entire poem consists of only thirty- one syllables. These epithets are several hundreds in number, and are collected into dictionaries which serve the purpose of a Gradus ad Parnassum. They are most useful in a country where the composition of Tanka has been for centuries little more than a mere mechanic art. Another trick of the Japanese poet is what Mr. Cham- berlain! has aptly termed “ pivot-words.” In these a word or part of a word is used in two senses, one with what precedes, the other with what follows. Thackeray has something of the kind in The Newcomes, where he speaks of the tea-pot presented to Mr. Honeyman by the devotees attending his chapel as the “ devotea-pot.” Here the syllable “tea” is contrived a double debt to 1 In his Classical Poetry of the Japanese. ene ee Te Oe POETRY 33 pay. It represents at the same time the final syllable of “devotee” and the first syllable of “tea-pot.” Perhapsa better example is the following from Butler's Hudzbras :-— “ That old Pyg—what d’ye call him—malion, Who cut his mistress out of stone, ad not so hard a hearted one.” “What is this but a kind of pun ?” the reader will not unnaturally say. Yet it would be hardly fair to stigma- tise these yeux de mots as puns. They are meant not to provoke laughter, but as ornament, and the effect is sometimes not unpleasing. At its best, however, the “pivot” word is an ornament of doubtful taste, and poets of the classical period indulge in this figure of speech but sparingly. More remains to be said of it when we come to the dramatists of a later age, who have used it in an extravagant, and, at least to us Europeans, exasperating manner. Parallelism, or the correspondence between each word of two successive lines or clauses, noun for noun and verb for verb, is an occasional ornament of Japanese, as it is of Chinese poetry. It is familiar to us in the Psalms of David, and is a favourite with Longfellow, whose Hiawatha contains numerous such pairs of parallel lines, as— “ Filled the marshes full of wild-fowl, Filled the river full of fishes.” Some Japanese examples of this figure will be found in the poems quoted on page 37. NARA POETRY While the eighth century has left us little or no prose literature of importance, it was emphatically the golden \ age of poetry. Japan had now outgrown the artless ° 34 JAPANESE LITERATURE, effusions described in a preceding chapter, and during this period produced a body of verse of an excellence which has never since been surpassed. The reader who expects to find this poetry of a nation just emerging from the barbaric stage of culture characterised by rude, un- tutored vigour, will be surprised to learn that, on the contrary, it is distinguished by polish rather than power. It is delicate in sentiment and refined in language, and displays exquisite skill of phrase with a careful adherence to certain canons of composition of its own. The poetry of this and the following period was written by and for a very small section of the Japanese nation. The authors, many of them women, were either mem- bers of the Mikado’s court, or officials temporarily stationed in the provinces, but looking to the capi- tal as their home. We hear nothing of any popular poetry. On the other hand, the faculty of writing verse was universal among the higher classes. Nearly every educated man and woman could indite a Tanka upon occasion. There were no voluminous writers. It was not the custom to publish the poems of individual authors separately. Had it been so, very thin volumes indeed would have been the result. Collections were made at intervals by Imperial authority, in which the choice poems of the preceding period were brought to- gether, and if twenty or thirty Tanka of one poet found a place there, it was sufficient to give him or her a dis- tinguished position among the multitude of contributors, The poetry of the Nara period has been preserved to us in one of these anthologies, known as the Manyoshiu, or “Collection of One Thousand Leaves.” According to the usual account, it was completed early in the ninth century. The poems contained in it belong chiefly to t MANYOSHIU 38 the latter half of the seventh and the first half of the eighth century of the Christian era, and cover a period of about 130 years. They are classified as follows: poems of the four seasons; poems of the affections; elegiac, allegorical, and miscellaneous poems. They nuinber in all more than 4000 pieces, of which the great majority are Tanka, or short poems of thirty-one syllables. The remainder are for the most part Naga-uta or so- called “(long poems.” As for the authors, their name is legion. Among them, however, two poets stand out with some degree of eminence—viz., Hitomaro and Akahito. The former flourished at the end of the seventh century, the latter in the reign of Shomu (724-756). Little is known of either, further than that they were officials of the Mikado’s court, and attended him on some of his progresses through the provinces. The Riakuge edition of the J/anyoshiu in_ thirty volumes, which was formerly the best, has now been totally eclipsed and superseded by the magnificent J/an- yoshiu Kogi, recently published under official auspices. It extends to 122 volumes, and contains everything (and more) in the way of commentary and indexes that the most ardent student can desire. The print is admirable, and the text a great improvement on that of the Riakuge edition. The following translations, inadequate as they are, may help to give some idea of the character of the Manyoshiu poetry. The first specimen is by Hitomaro. It is an elegy on Prince Hinami, son of the Mikado Temmu, who died A.D. 687, before succeeding to the throne.