AR THE CLASSICAL POETRY OF THE JAPANESE. INTRODUCTION. I. THE current impression that the Japanese are a nation of imitators is in the main correct. As they copy us to-day, so did they copy the Chinese and Coreans a millennium and a half ago. Religion, philosophy, laws, administration, written characters, all arts but the very simplest, all science, or at least what then went by that name, everything was imported from the neighbouring continent; so much so, that of all that we are accustomed to term "Old Japan" scarce one trait in a hundred is really and properly Japanese. Not only are their silk and lacquer not theirs by right of invention, nor their painting (albeit so often praised by European critics for its originality), nor their porcelain, nor their music, but even the larger part of their language consists of mispronounced Chinese; and from the Chinese they have drawn new names for already existing places, and new titles for their ancient gods. That their literature should be, for the most part, A fashioned on the Chinese model and express Chinese ideas is, therefore, but what was à priori to be expected. What was not to be looked for, was, that one whole branch of that literature should, weathering the storm that shook its infancy, have preserved down to our own times the unaltered form and the almost unaltered substance of the earliest manifestation of Japanese thought. This one original product of the Japanese mind is the native poetry. So remarkable a fact should, of itself, suffice to gain for the poetry of this people the first place in the attention of those who make Japan and Japanese the special object of their investigations. It should even attract the passing notice of the more general reader, who, in the present day, has to peruse quite a library of books treating of Japan,-and this, altogether apart from any intrinsic merit which that poetry may or may not possess. Hitherto, like the rest of the literature of the far East, it has been more often judged than studied. The following pages are an attempt to make the study more general, by placing it within the reach of those who, while sharing in the interest for Japan now universally felt, are yet not prepared to face the difficulties which must ever continue to hedge in the Oriental originals. In order to appreciate the assertion made as to the peculiar and non-Chinese character of the form of Japanese poetry,-in other words, of its prosody,—it is, of course, necessary to possess some knowledge of the distinguishing features of Chinese versification, a subject which it does not fall within the scope of this work, as a popular one, to treat in any detail. Suffice it to say that, as in French verse, so in Chinese, rhyme is considered essential, but that the syllables of which each line is composed, instead of being, as in French, merely counted, must follow each other according to rule in various tones, just as the cadence of an English verse is determined not merely by the rhyme, and by the enumeration of the syllables composing each line, but also by the relative position of the accented syllables and those on which no stress is laid. The third chief characteristic of Chinese versification is what has been termed "parallelism," that is, the exact correspondence between every word in two successive lines or clauses, noun for noun, verb for verb, particle for particle, thus We-would-keep the-Spring, but-the-Spring We-would-avert the- Wind, but-the-Wind and-the-blossoms are-stricken and-desolated.* Owing to the unrivalled conciseness of the Chinese literary style, all the words bracketed together in the above, form but one character, that is, one syllable, and the correspondence is, therefore, as exact in sound as it is in sense. The structure of a great portion of Hebrew poetry rests on a somewhat looser kind of parallelism. Take, for instance, Psalm cxiv. * Verses by Peh Kü-Yih, a famous poet of the T'ang dynasty, who died A.D. 846. When Israel came out of Egypt: and the house Judah was his sanctuary: and Israel his The sea saw that and fled: Jordan was The mountains skipped like rams: and the &c. &c. Of all such complications Japanese prosody knows nothing. It regards neither rhyme, tone, accent, quantity, nor alliteration, nor does its rather frequent parallelism follow any regular method. Its only essential rule is that every poem must consist of alternate lines of five and seven syllables, with, generally, an extra line of seven syllables to mark the close. It is, indeed, prosody reduced to its simplest expression. Yet so little artifice is needed to raise * * Here is an example. It is the original of the elegy on p. 71, beginning "Alas! poor mortal maid The fondness of the Japanese for brevity has led them to write an immense amount of poetry in a very short stanza of thirty-one syllables, thus Some European writers have falsely supposed that the flights of the Japanese Muse were always bound down within these lilliputian limits. For a translation of the above stanza see p. 129 (No. 38). prose to verse in this most musical of tongues, that such a primitive metre still satisfies the native ear to-day in every street-ballad, as it already did in the seventh century at the Mikado's court; and no serious attempt has ever been made to alter it in the slightest degree, even during the period of the greatest intellectual ascendancy of China. Though not essential, there are, however, some usual additions to the means at the Japanese versifier's command. They are three in number, and altogether original, viz., what are styled "Pillow-words," "Prefaces," and "Pivots." The "Pillow-words" are meaningless expressions which are prefixed to other words merely for the sake of euphony. Almost every word of note has some "Pillow-word" on which it may, so to speak, rest its head; and dictionaries of them are often resorted to by the unready Japanese versifier, just as rhyming dictionaries come to the aid of the poetasters of modern Europe. A "Preface is but a Pillow-word" on a more extensive scale, consisting, as it does, of a whole sentence prefixed to a poem, not on account of any connection with the sense of what follows, but merely as an introduction pleasing to the ear. This ornament is chiefly confined to the very early poetry, whereas the "Pillow-words" have flourished equally in every age. The "Pivot" is a more complicated device, and one which, in any European language, would be not only insupportable, but impossible, resting, as it does, on a most peculiar kind of jeu de mots. A word having |