I
Among a people with whom poetry has been for centuries a universal
fashion of emotional utterance, we should naturally suppose the common
ideal of life to be a noble one. However poorly the upper classes of
such a people might compare with those of other nations, we could
scarcely doubt that its lower classes were morally and otherwise in
advance of our own lower classes. And the Japanese actually present us
with such a social phenomenon.
Poetry in Japan is universal as the air. It is felt by everybody. It is
read by everybody. It is composed by almost everybody,—irrespective of
class and condition. Nor is it thus ubiquitous in the mental atmosphere
only: it is everywhere to be heard by the ear, and _seen by the eye!_
As for audible poetry, wherever there is working there is singing. The
toil of the fields and the labor of the streets are performed to the
rhythm of chanted verse; and song would seem to be an expression of the
life of the people in about the same sense that it is an expression of
the life of cicadæ…. As for visible poetry, it appears everywhere,
written or graven,—in Chinese or in Japanese characters,—as a form of
decoration. In thousands and thousands of dwellings, you might observe
that the sliding-screens, separating rooms or closing alcoves, have
Chinese or Japanese decorative texts upon them;—and these texts are
poems. In houses of the better class there are usually a number of
_gaku_, or suspended tablets to be seen,—each bearing, for all design,
a beautifully written verse. But poems can be found upon almost any
kind of domestic utensil,—for example upon braziers, iron kettles,
vases, wooden trays, lacquer ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer
sort,—even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels,
screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains,
kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women’s crêpe-silk underwear. Poems are
stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases,
travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon
bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches. It
were a hopeless effort to enumerate a tithe of the articles decorated
with poetical texts. Probably my readers know of those social
gatherings at which it is the custom to compose verses, and to suspend
the compositions to blossoming trees,—also of the Tanabata festival in
honor of certain astral gods, when poems inscribed on strips of colored
paper, and attached to thin bamboos, are to be seen even by the
roadside,—all fluttering in the wind like so many tiny flags…. Perhaps
you might find your way to some Japanese hamlet in which there are
neither trees nor flowers, but never to any hamlet in which there is no
visible poetry. You might wander,—as I have done,—into a settlement so
poor that you could not obtain there, for love or money, even a cup of
real tea; but I do not believe that you could discover a settlement in
which there is nobody capable of making a poem.