Poetry is the most meretricious of arts. Among its adherents are 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—

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—

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—

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—

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:

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:

This may be rendered—

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:

The naked eye perceives in this, indistinctly—

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”:

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mathematicians who revel in romance of the fourth dimension will note with pleasure this little sum in amorous arithmetic:

Addition.

The exact translation being—

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.

The second contains a hint of that fondness for trees and flowers which permeates all classes:

Among the Pines.

The third frames a pretty fancy:

Reflection.

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.

This degrading and doglike devotion explains the joy in service which robs it of all sting. Take this revolting picture, which I christen

Contented.

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.

It would not occur to a Tokyo 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.

Waiting.

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.

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:

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.

Sometimes the cut blossom is commiserated, as in

Adrift.

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.

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”—

He knows that the Great Mother has other cares more absorbing than the love-sick suspense of a whining suitor, that the myriad marriages of bird and beast and blossom are perhaps as much or as little to her as the predilections of Maud. He would enjoy Professor Huxley’s rap at the singers who “mistake their sensual caterwauling for the music of the spheres,” and his pedestrian fancy would shudder at the unchartered imagination of Tennyson.

Buddhist doctrines have so profoundly influenced thought and feeling, that thousands of little songs rise daily like prayers of intercession or gratitude to the Lord Buddha. But these would demand a volume of explanation, which I am not competent to write. I select one playful and one serious poem, having reference to religious ideas. The first might be called

Extravagance.

This may be expanded into: “We drove about in a rickshaw, enjoying ourselves; we spent all our money; we are punished by Heaven, for we suffer remorse, like the sinners, who are pulled in fiery rickshaws by avenging devils in hell.” Such engaging pictures of a future state are often exhibited at temple fÊtes, and serve to stimulate liberality on the part of worshippers. Quite philosophic is the pessimism of

Occasion.

I translate ukiyo by “this world”: the more scrupulous dictionary renders it by “this fleeting or miserable world, so full of vicissitudes and unsettled.” For the “vale of tears” is not a Christian concept only: Mrs. Gummidge was also a Buddhist without knowing it. It is curious that this theological term, with its disparaging connotation, was affixed to the modern popular school of painters, among whom Hokusai is the best known, because they descended from lofty, conventional subjects to the life of workaday folk. The central thought of the poem, however, narrowed to a romantic application, recalls a line by Browning:

Writers of Dodoitsu have this advantage over versifiers who employ more classical metres, that they are not forced by convention to repeat stereotyped fancies, but are at liberty to invent new ones. The balloon, the camera, the locomotive, may take the place of dragon, stork, and phoenix. This pouring of foreign wine into native bottles produces a quaint blend. A girl thus reproaches her lover with

Inconstancy.

Here the similes are plain and forcible. The next poem is less lucid:

Despair.

Literally: “Riding in no vehicle (which is used for a short journey), the train whithersoever going (for an indefinite distance), by doing what shall this body of mine, Terminus?” That is: My love is not a short-lived fancy, but a lifelong passion, until I reach the terminus of death. Graceful, indeed, but scarcely gracious is a lady’s reply to an admirer who had sent her his photograph:

The Higher Photography.

The double meaning of a “faithful” likeness and a “faithful” lover can, for once, be preserved in English. A pun on the word tokeru, which means “to melt” and “to be undone,” is allied with a dainty antithesis in

Dissolution.

The shimada is perhaps the most elaborate, and certainly the most elegant, way of dressing the hair. It is generally adopted by geisha and young married women, dividing favour with the chocho or butterfly coiffure. Respect for age is counselled in a rather pathetic protest by an old woman, who recalls her faded beauty in a conventional image. Nightingales and plum-trees are always associated in Japanese minds.

Once.

The umeboshi, a plum pickled in salt and shiso and afterwards dried, is as happily descriptive of the wizened monkey face of a Japanese crone as the peach of an Anglo-Saxon lassie’s complexion. It will be seen that serio-comic touches of self-depreciation, like the old lady’s frank comparison of faded bloom to dried fruit, do not jar on the Japanese. Sincerity—genuine feeling and just appreciation—is at the root of their poetic impulse. Why should a disappointed girl shrink from whispering her secret to the reeds of anonymous minstrelsy?

Rejection.

From the foregoing thirty Dodoitsu the reader can form a not inadequate opinion of “ditties sung by singing-girls to the twanging of the guitar.” That accidental glamour, which constitutes style and makes of one word a queen, of another a beggar-maid, through vicissitudes of usage, does not emanate from one of them. They are marred for a native ear by domestic and colloquial idiom, “soiled by all ignoble use”; they treat too often of sexual sentiment, which our literary verse parades to satiety, and which theirs rather shrouds in dignified silence. No doubt you will find among Tanka and Haikai more ingenuity of thought, more dexterity of pen. But, putting that aside, the Dodoitsu has more interest for a humanist, since its range of feeling is wider. Just as the street-scenes of Hokusai and the love-scenes of Utamaro afford more humane pleasure than the purely artistic studies of their academic precursors, so we are less allured by “A Fan in my Lady’s Chamber,” by “A Distant View of a Fishing Boat,” by “Hoar-frost on the Bamboos,” than by the artless outcries of else inarticulate nature. The blue-stocking at court, who finds it so easy to turn a polished compliment, is more remote from our hearts than her humble sister, doing rough work in the rice-field. The sorrows of wife and maid, the joy of flowers and laughter—these inspire in us deeper sympathy than the experimental literature of dilettante dames. There is often a crude spontaneity in the non-literary poem which is more pleasing than a recondite conceit. But, however crude the expression may be, it yet owes something to form. The poet is obliged to satisfy the easy metrical conditions which regulate the structure of a Dodoitsu, thus ensuring a neat circlet for a single gem, whether it be paste or diamond. How clumsy a Japanese song can become, when the Muse has forgotten her corset, may be seen by the following effusion:

This is neither poetry nor literature. It reminds one of the primitive war-song, which Mr. Aston quotes in his “History of Japanese Literature” as being sung by the Imperial Guards:

In conclusion, let me say that an exhaustive study of Dodoitsu would assuredly yield richer results than the writer has been able to obtain by the casual gleaning of such songs as fell in his way from the lips of geisha or student.

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TAKING THE WATERS