more unconscious snobs than in any of the classes distinguished
and damned by Thackeray. This is because extrinsic ornament, the
use of words to dazzle or conceal, like jewels or cosmetics, has
more effect on most readers than intrinsic beauty, be it depth of
feeling or exactitude of thought. Poets are to be excused, and
often applauded, for pandering to our eyes and ears instead of
ministering to our souls. It is better to admire a mean thought
or paltry emotion, draped in exquisite folds of melody and
colour, than to deplore a fine theme, marred by vile and clumsy
treatment, just as a plain woman, dressed to satisfy the most
critical arbiter of elegance, is more pleasing to contemplate than
a bank-holiday belle, however comely, in discordant frock and
feathers. Now, a beautiful woman beautifully robed is as rare as a
poem of which the sense is æsthetically equal to the form; hence,
words being cheaper than ideas and pretty things more plentiful
than pretty features, we delight in second-rate women and in
second-rate poetry, for want of first-rate, until, the taste being
corrupted, we are inclined to endorse Théophile Gautier’s canon,
_La perfection de la forme c’est la vertu_. The farther we follow
this misleading maxim, the farther we leave behind us that most
vital poetry, life itself. Often this fact is not perceived, for
secondary art has generated secondary emotion: we derive pleasure
from allusion rather than illusion, from sleight of wit rather
than strength of spirit. Tennyson tells an Arthurian story, or
wishes to, and his listeners are so charmed by the irrelevant
embroidery of sound and simile that they do not perceive that
what they obediently consider a _naïf_ barbarian, the hero, is
really a Broad Church country-parson in fancy dress. Mr. Swinburne
writes an Athenian play, or intends to, and his readers are so
ravished by the splendour of intrusive rhetoric that they are in no
mood to distinguish between archaic piety and nineteenth-century
free-thought. Thus the modern crowns his Muse with paper roses,
cleverly manufactured, while the true flower blushes undisturbed or
fades in humbler keeping.
Fortunately it happens from time to time that the caprice of
fashion lights upon a real rose, which is at once admired not only
by the connoisseurs, but by the uncultivated crowd, which has never
been taught to appreciate paper roses. Only it is to be observed
that the former class retain their reputation by denying the name
of rose to the new flower: it is a cowslip, a daisy--nothing
more. Having ceased to be meretricious, the kind of verse I mean
has ceased to be poetry, in the opinion of these judges; on the
contrary, they insist that, in their eyes, by discarding the
frippery of language, which they rate so highly, the author of it
is no poet, but a vulgar writer. And so, in the highest sense of
the word, he is. He has touched the heart of the vulgar; he has
found a common factor, which will “go” successfully “into” any
assemblage of figures. Take, for instance, three capital instances
of vulgar songs, which, as it seems to me, comply with the
conditions demanded of poetry, that it shall communicate at once
a vivid picture and a direct emotion. When Mr. Albert Chevalier
sings--
“We’ve been together naow for forty year,
And it don’t seem a dy too much;
There ain’t a lydy livin’ in the land
As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch,”
the pathos of life-long love is conveyed quite as poignantly, if
not so verbosely, as by Goethe in “Hermann and Dorothea.” It is not
literature, but it is poetry. When Mlle. Yvette Guilbert sings--
“J’ termine ma lettre en t’embrassant,
Adieu, mon homme,
Quoique tu ne soy pas caressant
J’ t’adore comme
J’adorais l’ Bon Dieu comm’ Papa,
Quand j’étais p’tite,
Et que j’allais communier à
Ste. Marguerite,”
the pathos of recollected innocence in a prostitute of Montmartre
is more intense, because less diffusely obtained, than by Victor
Hugo in the case of Fantine. The chanson of Aristide Bruant
is not literature, but it is poetry. The highest instance of
non-literary poetry is afforded by “The Barrack-room Ballads.” It
is impossible to deny that the best of them are as vivid and as
poignant as any poems ever written. Yet they deliberately distress
conventional ears by their substitution of power for beauty as
governing principle. But even they retain too much literary skill
to illustrate my theory. How surprised were many Londoners when
Alphonse Daudet was touched by the rollicking doggerel of “Her
golden hair was hanging down her back!” To them there was nothing
pathetic in the refrain--
“Oh, Flo! What a change, you know!
When she left the village she was shy;
But alas! and alack! She’s come back
With a naughty little twinkle in her eye.”
But the distinguished novelist, with his fine sense of the
thinly-veiled tragedies of life, was touched. The young gentleman
from college, the labourer’s daughter; the visit to London,
the descent of the girl from stupid simplicity to knowing
naughtiness--the whole sordid, pitiable tale lay for him in a
badly-written ditty, cynically set to a dancing tune. It takes a
foreigner, whose ears have been sealed by fate to the siren-voices
of an alien literature, to make such discoveries as this, to
discern poetry where literature is woefully wanting. Therefore I am
not in the least disconcerted to learn that the Japanese “common
people have songs of their own ... despised by all well-bred
persons,” but which illustrate for me this familiar phenomenon
of non-literary poetry. As a foreigner, I am better fitted to
appreciate them. When O Wakachio San sings--
“Andon kakitate
Negao mozoki
Yoso no onna no
Horeru-hazu,”
it may be that she tortures a refined ear by “colloquialisms,”
but to me her words disclose this graphic thumb-nail sketch of
a jealous wife, leaping in one miserable moment from surmise to
certainty:
I, with trimmed lantern,
Scan thy face, sleeping:
By a strange woman
Thou art beloved.
If the singing-girl’s vulgar song can stir at times as keen a throb
of sympathy as the ditties which celebrate a “coster’s courtship”
or a gigolette’s captivity, yet this effect and colloquial phrasing
are the only points of resemblance. The points of difference are
so numerous that, before quoting other specimens from a geisha’s
_répertoire_, something should be said of the characteristics
peculiar to this and all Japanese verse.
The most obvious trait of recognised and unrecognised poems is
their brevity. The great majority of them consist of three, four,
or five lines, in which the number of syllables is either five or
seven. Even the so-called Naga-uta (long songs), which enjoyed a
short period of popular favour, seldom ran to more than a few dozen
lines. Oldest and most classical of metres is the Tanka, a stanza
of thirty-one syllables, and a Tanka competition is held every
New Year, for which a theme is chosen by the Emperor. In January
1896 thousands of amateur poets composed “Congratulations Compared
to a Mountain”; in the following year they sang of “Pine-trees
Reflected in Water.” The Royal Family itself takes part, and the
whole nation thus inaugurates the year with libations of lyrical
enthusiasm. Motoöri’s famous comparison of Japanese patriotism to
cherry-blossom radiant on the hills at sunrise is a good example of
the Tanka:
“Shikishima no
Yamato-gokoro wo
Hito towaba,
Asahi ni niou
Yama zakura bana.”
This may be rendered--
Heart of our Island,
Heart of Yamato,
If one should ask you
What it may be;
Fragrance is wafted
Through morning sunlight
Over the mountain,
Cherry-trees bloom.
But the Hokku or Haikai, which dates from the fifteenth century,
imprisons the soul of wit in a cell of even briefer dimensions. It
gives the Tanka fourteen syllables start, and covers the course in
three strides of five, seven, and five. The pace is so swift that
it almost always requires an exegetic field-glass (a microscope and
a race of animalcula were perhaps a fitter comparison) to estimate
the astonishing triumphs of this wee Pegasus. One of the winners
established this remarkable record:
“Asagao ni
Tsurube torarete,
Morai mizu.”
The naked eye perceives in this, indistinctly--
By convolvulus
Well bucket taken:
Gift-water.
Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s powerful glasses reveal the merit and the
secret of this achievement so clearly that I borrow them for the
readers use. “The poetess Chiyo,” it appears, “having gone to
her well one morning to draw water, found that some tendrils of
convolvulus had twined themselves round the rope. As a poetess
and a woman of taste, she could not bring herself to disturb the
dainty blossoms. So, leaving her own well to the convolvuli, she
went out and begged water of a neighbour.” Both Tanka and Haikai
may enter for the prizes of polite literature, but the Dodoitsu,
being reserved for vulgar songs, is “despised by all well-bred
persons.” As reasonably might the plebeian “moke” of ’Enery ’Awkins
aspire to run at Ascot or Goodwood, as the Dodoitsu be classed
with Haikai and Tanka! Culture ignores it; society excludes it
from the list of intellectual amusements. Yet its inferiority is
sometimes more apparent than real. The metre is a happy medium
between the two aristocratic favourites, since it consists of four
lines, containing twenty-six syllables in all; three lines of seven
syllables are clenched by a finale of five. It very often enshrines
a sweet fancy, a delicate image, a chiselled exclamation of grief,
or faith, or roguery. The nearest analogue to all three would be
the epigram, were it not that the Oriental poet frequently aims at
nothing more than a pictorial flash; a landscape seen by lightning,
a life divined by instinct; a momentary miniature, not a condensed
conclusion. I can think of but one English poem which partially
follows the same method, Robert Browning’s “Apparitions”:
“Such a starved bank of moss
Till, that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!
“World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God’s own smile came out:
That was thy face!”
Yet, bright and clean-cut though it be, this gem is clouded by
metaphors which would puzzle the Japanese intellect. It would
fail to grasp the meaning of “a starved bank”; it would miss the
identity of “God’s smile” with a human face. Personification and
metaphor lie outside its limits: even the simile is rare. In the
forty or fifty Dodoitsu which I have collected and translated no
simile is employed, unless both branches are plainly indicated.
They abound in fancy; they lack imagination. They derive their
very force from this limpet-like allegiance to fact, their
suggestiveness from the assurance that the quick-witted but
unimaginative reader will associate one fact with others of the
same order and not be misled by the vagaries of Western vision. To
the Western mind, on the other hand, this association, wanting in
his experience, will sometimes need explanation; at other times
the meaning is crystal-clear. There are shades of significance,
touches of tenderness, which escape translation because dependent
on grammatical peculiarities which no European tongues possess.
The personal pronoun, generally unexpressed, by its absence
generalises and so humanises the passion of a lover’s cry; a
reticence is gained which accords well with the shrinking delicacy
of a sensitive heart. When expressed, the word for “I” will connote
submission, the word for “thou” lordship or lovership, by a double
sense, impossible to convey. Thus, the very structure of Japanese
verse, even in the case of vulgar songs, forbids that literary
luxuriance which makes modern English poetry “meretricious” because
tricked out with superfluous gewgaws. You cannot daub such a tiny
profile with Tennysonian enamel or Swinburnian rouge. On the other
hand, it were absurd to pretend that the Tanka, much less the
Dodoitsu, is often of superlative value. For one which embeds in
amber a scene or sentiment of exceptional worth, a thousand will
deserve as much immortality as an ingenious riddle or far-fetched
pun. Yet, it being conceded that their literary pretensions amount
to nil, a foreign student will find in the hundreds of Dodoitsu,
published anonymously in paper-covered volumes, which cost about
three farthings, an inexhaustible fund of plebeian sentimentality
and humour.
Apology should perhaps be offered for the very imperfect mould in
which I have attempted to recast the Dodoitsu. If the reader will
repeat to himself, dwelling equally on each syllable, the following
poem, he will remark three things: first, the absence of rhyme;
secondly, the liquid lapse of melodious words; thirdly, the sudden
jerk with which it terminates:
“Nushi to neru toki
Makura ga iranu
Tagaï-chigaï no
O te makura.”
I have adopted a metre which avoids rhyme and ends abruptly, but
runs more swiftly than the original. I have prefixed a title. Thus
the preceding poem becomes--
PILLOW SONG.
Sleeping beside thee,
No need of pillow;
Thine arm and mine arm,
Pillows are they.
This being alternative to the method sometimes adopted of literal
unrhythmical translation, I hope occasional licence will be
condoned. This is what I might have written:
Lord-and-master (or Thee)-with-sleep-when,
Pillow-indeed-no-go-;
Mutual-different-of
Honourable-Arm-Pillow.
To be quite literal is to be crudely unintelligible; the absence
of all gender, number, and person makes certain interpolations
inevitable. At the same time, the translator must take for his
unvarying motto _Sancta simplicitas_.
Love, of course, inspires innumerable quatrains, which fly from
mouth to mouth, from geisha to gejo, like butterflies from one
blossom to another. Sometimes it is the man who speaks, as in the
following:
SNOW SONG.
Careless of snow-drifts,
Nightly I seek thee;
Deeper the love lies,
Heaped in my heart.
More often the woman, who does not allow her sense of humour to be
atrophied by passion. But perhaps the humour is quite unconscious
in this description of
LOVERS MEETING.
So much to talk of!
Yet for joy weeping,
Words, when we meet, fall
Head over heels.
Bodily beauty is, of course, particularly fascinating to a race
which cannot be pronounced less susceptible to its charm than
those European peoples--Greek, Italian, French--whose feeling
for line and colour is reckoned a superiority in them to their
Northern neighbours. Yet the panegyric of his mistress’s hair or
eyes or bosom is entirely banished from even vulgar songs. Innate
refinement rather than cold indifference is probably the cause. The
tree of the spirit is preferred to the fruit and flowerage of the
flesh. Yet one seems to detect a flavour of apology in this:
CONFESSION.
Stylish appearance
Does not bewitch me;
Fruits pass, and flowers:
I love the tree.
The Japanese word _ki_ signifies both “tree” and “spirit.” Quite
commonplace, I own, is the consolation afforded by some lines
engraven on a toothpick, but how many almond-eyed maidens visiting
the tea-house which thus combined mental with carnal refreshment
have tittered to read them!
CONSOLATION.
In mine ears linger
Words said at parting;
Sleeping alone, I
Hope for a dream.
Rather quaint is the following lament over conjugal
incompatibility. But the wife knows that she must submit, on
pain of divorce; and the word _kigane_, which I have rendered
“trouble,” is used of little inevitable domestic worries. The terms
“fire-nature” and “water-nature” are taken from Chinese philosophy.
INCOMPATIBILITY.
Thou, cold as water,
I, hot as fire;
Till we to earth turn,
Trouble is mine.
Mathematicians who revel in romance of the fourth dimension will
note with pleasure this little sum in amorous arithmetic:
ADDITION.
Longing to meet thee,
Longing to see thee,
Six and four inches,
Passion’s a-foot!
The exact translation being--
Longing to meet, six inches,
Longing to see, four inches,
These, indeed, being added together,
Make a _shaku_.
The word _shaku_ has two meanings: (1) a linear foot; (2) a woman’s
hysterical desire. Ten inches go to a Japanese foot.
The separation of lovers is a fruitful topic. I select three poems
which treat of it in divergent but equally piquant manners. The
first might be called--
AMANTIUM IRÆ.
Would that my heart were
Cut out and shown thee!
Quarrelling leaves me
Deeper in love.
The second contains a hint of that fondness for trees and flowers
which permeates all classes:
AMONG THE PINES.
If, from thee sundered,
I roam the pine-wood,
Can it be dew falls?
Can it be tears?
The third frames a pretty fancy:
REFLECTION.
Far from each other,
Yearning for union;
Good, were our faces
Glassed in the moon!
Then it should be remarked that the wife figures as frequently as
the sweetheart in this lyrical woodland, vocal with twittering
sentiment. The European has been so long accustomed to regard
romance as the province of young men and maidens, led through three
volumes or five acts to the altar, that married life is either
prosaic or only to be made interesting by a breach of the Seventh
Commandment. More than ever does he presume that this convention
must apply to domestic life in the East, for he has always been
informed that there a girl must stifle the instincts of her heart
and pass submissively from her father’s to her mother-in-law’s
yoke. As the French saw puts it, _Fille on nous supprime, femme on
nous opprime_. But this reasoning fails to take into account two
modifying considerations. Custom is so tempered by practice that
an affectionate parent (his name is legion) would not risk his
daughter’s happiness by marrying her to an odious or notoriously
evil person. Japanolaters will assert that no Japanese person
can be odious unless corrupted by Western influence. But this is
nonsense. What most makes for happy marriages is the strong sense
of duty and the loving disposition of a Japanese girl. Neither
husband nor wife regards the sexual instinct, however veiled, as
the corner-stone of partnership for life. Obedience to parental
wisdom is the first stage, mutual politeness the second, devotion
to children, begotten or adopted, the third. From these unselfish
elements a high average of felicity is attained, possibly even
higher than elsewhere. However that may be, the wife’s fidelity,
jealousy, affection recur as motives of popular poesy. That
essentially feminine quality which every bachelor has observed in
some otherwise perfect wife “wedded to a churl,” and of which I can
find no better definition than the following verse affords, would
seem common to both hemispheres:
RAISON DE FEMME.
Dearer than kindness
Of those I love not
Is thine unkindness,
Loved one, to me.
This degrading and doglike devotion explains the joy in service
which robs it of all sting. Take this revolting picture, which I
christen
CONTENTED.
Gladly on love’s road
Pulling the rickshaw,
Undrawn, I draw it
On to the end.
The husband (selfish brute!) is of course seated in the rickshaw,
and it is worth notice that “love’s road” is the first metaphor we
have encountered. Against the jealous wife, bending, lantern in
hand, over her faithless lord, may be set this quiet tribute of
grateful security:
MY HUSBAND.
Thou art as yonder
Delicate hill-pine,
Through years a thousand
Ever the same.
It would not occur to a Tōkyō editor to invite his readers in
the silly season to answer the question, “Have women a sense of
humour?” But, if it did, such quatrains as follow might convince
him that they have:
WARNING.
I am my master’s
Single-flowered cherry;
Folk seeking blossom
Bend no boughs here.
WAITING.
All night I waited,
Yet my lord came not;
None but the moon came
Under my net.
The _kaya_ (mosquito-net) is not a mere curtain, but a green gauze
room within a room, suspended from the corners of the ceiling.
Humour has indeed discharged thousands of these pretty pellets,
which lend themselves admirably to satire, drollery, and play
on words. Yet these are precisely the most difficult to render.
A jest, of which the point depends on punning ambiguity, should
never cross the frontier. When a foreigner has been made to see
the quaint conjunction of incongruous ideas, he will yet miss the
surprise attending identity of sound, which strikes with comic
duplicity a native ear. Moreover, the Japanese looks for verbal
legerdemain in his most serious literature with an appreciation
that seems puerile to us, who relegate puns and riddles to
half-educated minds. There is an equally large field of fun which
can only be indicated, since British prudery plants it round with
fig-trees. The Japanese, like the French, see no harm in tipping
Apollo’s arrows with malicious mirth to assail humanity in the arms
of Venus, where it cuts a vulnerable and often ridiculous figure.
The Anglo-Saxon professes to exclude comedy from the bedroom. He
gains in dignity; he loses in gaiety. If this same comedy, banished
to the smoking-room, descend to too gross levels, he has only to
cross the Channel and will find at the Palais Royal or elsewhere
such traps for laughter as Shakespeare and Aristophanes did not
disdain to set. He supposes that the interests of morality require
many drags on the wheels of humour. He is generally sincere: the
restraint is not imposed by “hypocrisy,” as foreigners believe and
assert. But neither is the opposite assumption justified, that
races which permit themselves more joyous licence are less virtuous
than our own. On the contrary, they find in laughter a safety-valve
sanctioned by custom. And it seems to me that Madame and Okamisan,
who are free to giggle behind their fans at audacious pleasantry,
are placed by destiny in a more fortunate attitude than the British
matron, who is reduced to indignation or discomfort. Critics of
Japanese poems, novels, and plays usually dismiss this element of
mirth with the adjective “pornographic,” but the epithet (if it
presuppose an ignobly prostituted pen) entirely misses the mark.
The passages so labelled do not allure readers with the promise
of forbidden fruit: they merely denote a wider range of innoxious
merriment, indulged in by a nation whose sense of humour is as yet
unfettered by our local and artificial sense of propriety. The
_naïveté_ of such songs is proved by the fact that they hardly ever
sound a cynical note. The tone of the only one which I shall quote
is exceptional:
LOTHARIO.
Steered with deft rudder,
Fooled with soft speeches,
To my verandah
I hale her up.
But this song may have the opposite meaning of a woman alluring a
man with soft speeches. As there are no pronouns and no genders in
the vernacular, the sense is entirely ambiguous, and the Japanese
whom I have consulted do not agree. So I append the original:
“Shita go kaji toru
Ano kuchiguruma
Noshite nikai
Hiki-ageru.”
A fragrant anthology might be compiled of Dodoitsu written in
praise of flowers. There is certainly no other country where
flowers are so universally loved. The humblest cottager will place
in the _tokonoma_ (an alcove with slightly raised daïs) of his
living room an iris, a spray of plum-blossom, or a liliputian
tree. The noble will devote years of patient cultivation to the
production of a chrysanthemum more variegated in colour and shape
than those of his neighbour. Wistaria, lotus, convolvulus, and
azalea vie with the cherry-blossom in attracting sightseers, who
come in crowds to feast their eyes on garden or pond. The arts
of flower-arrangement and landscape-gardening may be looked upon
as branches of science and philosophy; at least, they command
as much veneration. Inevitably, then, is the minstrel’s lyre
enwreathed with innumerable garlands. Yet, possibly because of the
“pathetic fallacy,” which so constantly pervades similar parterres
of English poesy that its absence makes the Japanese flower-plot
seem scentless, the fancies which find expression in this class
of subject appear particularly trivial. Sometimes a personal
preference is stated, as in
WHITE PEONY.
Full of set flowers,
Full is my chamber;
Thou art most stately,
White peony.
Sometimes the cut blossom is commiserated, as in
ADRIFT.
Ah! how my petals
Float in the flower-vase;
Helpless and rootless;
Sad is my lot.
Sometimes the operation of a natural law, to which plants as well
as other forms of life are subject, points a moral:
DEATH, THE LEVELLER.
Peonies, roses,
Faded, are equal;
Only while life blooms
Differ the flowers.
But human egoism, which only sees in nature a background to its
own existence, has not stained with drops of romantic blood these
pale flowerets. No Japanese poet would conceive such a stanza as
that in “Maud”--
“There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
The larkspur listens ‘I hear,’ ‘I hear’;
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’”