II
Many foreigners, unable to catch the meaning of what is to them a rather tedious dumb-show, pay short and perfunctory visits to the theatre. But this is not wise, for, even should the play lie outside their comprehension, the native playgoers are both affable to accost and interesting to study. They are seated in lidless boxes lined with matting, in parties of four and five, on the ground, on slightly elevated seats at the side, or in a long gallery surrounding the house. A box in the first position will cost about eight shillings, in the second about nine, in the last eleven. The higher you climb the more you pay, except in the Oikomi (“driven-in-place”), where the “gods” are crowded together in a grated pen, from which little can be seen or heard; but then the price is no more than sixpence, or a penny an act if they cannot afford to witness the whole performance. This will consist of two long plays lasting about four hours each, with an intermediary tableau, which is generally the most beautifully mounted of all. During the day every one eats and drinks and smokes. The women take tea, the men saké, while the babies loudly and numerously imbibe milk. Between the acts, when the handsome curtains (often gifts from admiring associations to a popular artist) descend, the audience strolls about the undoba, a large enclosure surrounding the theatre, in which the stall-keepers sell refreshments, photographs, toys, and all kinds of ornamental knick-knacks. You escape the headache engendered by the gas and close atmosphere of a Western play-house, for the sliding shutters that form the outer walls of the upper storey can be opened at will to admit currents of cool air. The best day to go is Monday, for that is the pay-day of the geisha, whom you will see in almost as many costumes as the actor, since she loves to return to an adjacent tea-house at frequent intervals for the purpose of renewing her charms of apparel and complexion.
Tea-houses surround a theatre as jackals a lion; their co-operation is indispensable to the success of an indoor picnic. Besides, it is not considered genteel to apply for seats at the door. Your only chance of a good place is to secure the kind offices of a tea-house proprietor, who will provide attendance and refreshments, besides taking charge of your watch, purse, and any other article of value. The Tōkyō pickpocket is very adroit, and a constant patron of dramatic art. Formerly the entertainment began at dawn, but the Government, which exercises paternal supervision over popular amusements, has now limited its length to eight or nine hours, so that, if you arrive at half-past ten, you may be sure of seeing the programme played out until seven or eight in the evening. Having left your shoes at the tea-house in exchange for a wooden check and sandals, you will be conducted to a box and presented by a polite attendant with cushion, programme, tobacco-box, tea, and sweet cakes, with luncheon to follow. Now, at last, you are at liberty to observe the antics of the actors.
As you cannot understand what they say, you notice more particularly how they say it. At first their elocution will seem both painful and artificial: the tones are too shrill or too gruff, equally removed from the diapason of natural speech. But that is because the traditional samisen, a three-stringed guitar, follows the performer like a curse from start to finish. Unless he pitched his voice above or below its notes, he could not be heard. Even so, the author complains that his words receive inadequate attention from either player or playgoer, for the former relies chiefly on pose and facial expression to score his points, while the latter obediently admires the methods of acting to which he has always been accustomed. It cannot be denied that these methods are effective. I have seen the feminine part of the audience infected with such violent emotion by the agonised play of mobile features as to rush for relief to the “Tear-Room,” where they can cry to heart’s content without inconveniencing more stoical neighbours.
Though the actor’s tone is disagreeably unnatural, his articulation is both clean-cut and sonorous. The syllables crack on the ear like pistol-shots, sharply distinct. I imagine that he is seldom inaudible. It is a great pity that convention, if not law, still forbids the appearance of men and women on the same stage, since the mimicry of one sex by the other, triumphantly deceptive in other particulars, breaks down at the point of vocal imitation. The eye is tricked, but not the ear. Yet peculiar attention is given to the training and discipline of onnagata, or impersonators of female parts. Formerly they were not only given the outward semblance of women by every contrivance which the costumier and coiffeur could supply, but were required to spend their lives from childhood in feminine costume and society, that their masculine proclivities might be as far as possible obliterated. Even now their names stand first on the programme, their dressing-rooms are locked on the inside, their influence is paramount in the Actors’ Guild. The supremacy of Mr. Danjuro is due in no small degree to his ability to play both male and female characters with equal éclat. Notwithstanding every precaution and privilege, the actor cannot acquire the intonation of an actress. His reedy falsetto is a poor parody of the musical tones in which Japanese women converse, and the loss to a public which has never been caressed by Sara Bernhardt’s golden voice or thrilled by Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s may be sympathetically imagined. But, though Tōkyō has no actresses, the Women’s Theatre in Kyōto, in which are no actors, might seem a partial set-off to this deficiency. In fact, however, though the women are extremely clever in simulating the gait and gestures of men—if I had not been taken behind the scenes, I should have believed myself in the wrong theatre—they are hopelessly handicapped by physical weakness. The stage is so enormous, and the performance so long, that an artist may reckon on walking ten miles in the course of the day, while the voice is severely taxed by the prolonged stridency of declamation.
While the stage-woman, adroitly personated, is often tolerable, the stage-child is an intolerable infliction. Convention has decreed that it shall shriek all its lines on one high monotonous note, and shriek it does. There is no attempt at variety of tone or naturalness of expression. When a steam-launch emits similar sounds, we condone in a machine what we resent in a human being. It is simply an ear-splitting automaton. One turns with relief to watch the children in the audience, who are evidently the spoiled darlings of their relations. But, indeed, the child seems never snubbed or thwarted in Japan. At the termination of every act, while the curtains fall or are drawn together, there is a scurry of tiny feet up and down the parallel hana-michi (the flower-walks which divide the auditorium), and, if some audacious little intruders rush upon the stage itself, they are greeted with indulgent laughter.
Perhaps the chief obstacle to illusion, and the one most easily remedied as regards scenic accessories, is the enormous area of the stage. It is far too large to be enclosed between “wings” and “flies,” while the custom of exit and entry along the flower-walks transgresses our cardinal principle of separating those who act from those who look on. As a rule, the supposed locality of the piece, be it palace or temple or battle-field, is a wood-and-cardboard island in a sea of bare boards, of which the circumference nearly corresponds with that of a revolving section of the stage, twenty or thirty feet in diameter, which turns on lignum-vitæ wheels. While one scene is being enacted, a second is being prepared behind, and at a given signal the eccyclema is whirled round, carrying away one set of actors and bringing on their successors. Do not suppose, however, that realistic effects are outside the range of the Meiji-za or Kabuki-za management. I remember a melodrama, written by a lieutenant in the Japanese navy, in which the hero, though encumbered by a heavy piece of ordnance hoisted on his shoulders, cut down eight assailants in turn in spite of a terrific storm, which drenched the company with real rain and blew down real trees, planted that afternoon!
The actor is a more important personage than the author in most people’s eyes. Until this relation shall be reversed, the Thespian cart is not likely to leave the rut in which it moves. Meanwhile, a glance at their respective positions may fitly conclude this essay. Before Meiji, the present era of enlightenment, the mummer was treated as a rogue and vagabond. He was regarded with contempt as a koyamono, or “occupant of a hut,” and placed on a par with mendicants. In public places he was obliged to wear a mebakari-zukin or hood, which covered head and face all but the eyes, and was only allowed to frequent particular restaurants. Unless he belonged to one of the half-dozen theatrical families who ruled the stage with oligarchic exclusiveness, monopolising the secrets of the profession, the power to admit novices, and the right to play particular parts, his progress was slow. Beginning with the horse’s leg (uma no ashi), a limb of the pantomimic charger, which was indispensable to historic drama, he was obliged to buy or insinuate his way by adoption to more important parts before he could earn either fame or fortune. Nowadays all that is changed. Free competition rules. The public is his only patron. Without training or payment of fees to the Ichikawa, the Onoye, or the Nakamura, a successful débutant can march by his own merits into wealth and popularity. As he treads the flower-walks, fans, purses, embroidered pouches will be showered at his feet; to his dressing-room will come love-letters innumerable, for the Japanese “matinée girl” is very susceptible; in public he will be pointed out, the idol of the masses; his crest will be on the tortoise-shell or ivory pin, which adorns the high coiffure of the stage-struck musumé; finally, should he ever reach the head of his profession, he may hope to make as much as £5000 in four weeks, far surpassing the modest income of a prime minister or an archbishop.
The Heroine of a Problem-play.
But the author, instead of ruling the kingdom which he creates, is in most cases no more than a theatrical employé. In fact, the term “create” can only be used with much qualification, for the genesis of a play is curiously and multifariously planned. First, the manager sends for the author, and indicates the subject and period which he desires to form the bases of a drama; the author prepares and submits two or three drafts, from which the best is selected; then the cast is appointed, and the chief actors are consulted about their parts, which of course are modified to suit their suggestions; then the composer is called in, and, if the musical setting should lead to new alterations in the libretto, the author has no choice but to submit. When plays have to be constructed in this way, you cannot expect them to have any more artistic value than a London pantomime or “musical comedy.” Nor has the author the satisfaction of salving the wounds to “artistic conscience” with consolatory gold. On the first run of a piece (the season is never longer than four or five weeks at a time) he may receive £20; a revival may bring him in £10 more, a provincial tour yet another £10. On the whole, he will be lucky to make £50, while the leading actor makes £5000. But then the audiences do not pay their money for the opportunity of solving historical problems or appreciating intellectual artistry: their object is simply to feast eyes and ears on a sensational pageant, in which to them the actor is king. They do not bestow a thought on the power behind the throne, chained there by ignorance and convention. Plays are sometimes published, but their sale is insignificant. The aristocracy, both of birth and intellect, hold too much aloof from a plebeian amusement, which under higher conditions might become a fruitful and immortal art. When I think of Mr. Fukuchi, fettered by public taste, that stupidest of Jupiters, to the Caucasus of picturesque melodrama, while vulturine actors peck at his brains, I wish that a chorus of Oceanides, winged ideas and ideals from Paris, from London, and Christiania—could cross the seas to Tōkyō and liberate Prometheus.
GEISHA AND CHERRY-BLOSSOM
[GEISHA AND CHERRY-BLOSSOM]
Nothing is more difficult to eradicate than a British misconception of foreign defects. French lubricity, German clumsiness, Russian cruelty, are quite as much articles of faith on this side of the Channel as Albion’s perfidy on the other. Similarly, it is useless to controvert the popular opinion that the geisha is generally pretty and always improper. Her detractors have seen an English opera bearing her name and traducing her character: it is enough; they know. Nevertheless, this opinion is founded on imperfect knowledge, and requires much modification before it can be received as even partially true. Etymologically, a gei-sha is an accomplished person; socially, she is an entertainer, who has been trained from the age of seven or eight to dance or sing for the amusement of guests at a dinner-party. Probably her parents have leased her for a certain number of years to a teacher, who undertakes to board and train her, to procure engagements and to chaperon her, to pay a fixed sum to her family as well as a tax to the Government, in return for all of which a sufficient recompense is assured by the fees which a talented artist is able to earn. Less frequently she lives at home and obtains engagements through an agent, who receives only a percentage of her gains. The training is continuous and severe. To a foreigner the dancing will appear graceful but monotonous; it has none of the free, vigorous motion which we associate with the term: on the other hand, for the connoisseur each gesture is significant, each pose symbolic. To appreciate many of the “dances,” requiring hours of patient rehearsal, it would be necessary to catch continual allusion to poems, legends, and flowers, with which the treasure-house of Japanese memory is stored. Those who would deny the applicability of the term “music” to “the strummings and squealings of Orientals,” would yet admit that both the koto and samisen (the stringed instruments most in vogue) are not to be mastered without constant practice, and the irregular rhythm of the songs, with their abrupt intervals and capricious repetitions, cannot be easy to render until the voice has attained extreme flexibility. On the mysteries of Japanese music, however, seeing that the best authorities are at variance, only an expert dare pronounce judgment. To return to the question of the social status of the geisha, I should say that it corresponds more exactly with that of a Parisian actress than of an Athenian hetaira. Convention having banished the actress from the Japanese stage, the geisha takes her place as the natural recipient of masculine homage. She is much courted, and sometimes makes a brilliant match. There are a large number who make the profession an excuse for attracting rich admirers, just as the name of “actress” in more Puritan climes will cover a multitude of sins. But a professional courtesan she is not: her favours are not always for sale to the highest bidder. When her short reign is over at the age of twenty-five, she generally imparts to a younger generation the secrets of professional success. Among these the art of conversation is not the least important. To parry indiscreet advances and to bandy compliments enter as much into her rôle as the playing of “Kitsune ken” or “fox-forfeit,” in which no little agility is needed to represent at the right moment the fox, the man, and the gun on facile fingers. Childish of course the geisha is, like most of her younger countrywomen; sometimes dangerous and fickle, as her popular nickname of “Nekko,” the cat, testifies; but virtuous as well, in many cases, where she has enough independence and strength of character to resist the flattering importunity of fame’s innumerable suitors.
If one of these aspire to win her affection, or merely to make her acquaintance, he has many advantages over the callow youths who wait, like lackeys, at the stage-door of a Western theatre. He is spared the preliminary purgatory of appealing letters, of supplicatory presents, which may easily fail to secure the desired access. He is not forced to share with a crowd of jealous or indifferent strangers the bitter joy of her nightly apotheosis, when her smiles and wiles must be lavished in promiscuous appeal. He has merely to dine at the tea-house with which she, or her employer, has made a mutually advantageous contract: there, on sufficient notice, she will arrive with her duenna, ready to perform, if need be, for his delight alone, while the semi-privacy of the entertainment affords him every opportunity of pressing his suit. As a rule, however, the geisha performs in parties of two, or three, or more, according to the number of guests. Often the convivial character of the occasion tends to lower the standard of art involved; indeed, such feasts are apt to degenerate into orgies. To realise the æsthetic possibilities of an art which is only at its lowest bacchanalian, we must quit the tea-house, that temple of the senses, and seek the sacred city of Kyōto, where palace and monastery raise, like antique junks, their majestic or quaintly carven heads above white waves of cherry-blossom....
It is April. While English weather is struggling in spasmodic furies of wind and rain to escape the clutch of winter, here the enfranchised spring creeps, fairy-like, from plain to height on rosy sandals. First Tōkyō, whose hundred miles of unpaved thoroughfare fatigue the foot and offend the eye with naked dreariness, is clothed with draperies of fleecy pink. The spacious parks of Ueno and Shiba are thronged with gazing multitudes, who ride or saunter all day long through flower-encumbered avenues. At night the river-reaches of Mukōjima are packed with pleasure-boats, whose lanterns gleam like fire-flies beneath the pale mass of overhanging bloom. Yamaguchi San, who by trade is a rice merchant but by nature a poet, has written in the intervals of business, which is not brisk at this time of year, a little sheaf of poems, each consisting of three lines, which run perpendicularly down strips of iridescent rice-paper. So far as their purport can be construed into grosser forms of verse, I take it to be as follows:
“Put on your brightest kimono,
O Haru San, and let us go!
“Bring ivory chop-sticks, lacquer-cup,
And rice and wine, that we may sup.
“On honourable trees is set
A rosy-petalled coronet.
“The shine of day, the sheen of night,
Are drowned in cherry-blossom-light.
“We have no need of sun or star
To revel at Mukōjima.”
But Mukōjima is no more to be compared with Yoshino than Rosherville with Stonehenge. The trees which line the broad Sumidagawa are beautiful but modern; their festal boughs are familiarised and a little vulgarised by the loud merry-making of cockney crowds; all this shouting and laughing recall a barbarian’s bank-holiday. Far westward, on the ridges of Yoshino, where no modern city disturbs the silence of the imperial tumuli, encircled by a low granite fence and enclosing dusty gold relics of dead kings, grow the Thousand Cherry-Trees of immemorial renown. Motoöri sang of them; Hiroshigi painted them; Jimmu. Tenno, the first of the Mikados, in his mausoleum fifteen miles away, is hardly more venerable than they. Every year pilgrims pass through the bronze gateway of the Zo-o-do Temple and climb the mountain side to rest beneath the canopy of tender, billowy blossom, which broods like an ever-renascent cloud of beauty above the Yamato plain, endeared by thirteen centuries of history and romance. Many pleasure-seekers mix with the white-robed pilgrims, who belong for the most part to distant villages and look on religion as an excellent excuse for change of interest and change of scene. Heedless of theology and harassed by no conviction of original sin, they return, like happy children from a picnic, with eyes brightened by the sea of colour and spirits clarified by pure mountain air. Soon the green hills are carpeted with flakes of soft flowerage; the brief splendour of the Thousand Trees is over; the scattered hamlets and holy mounds resume their ordinary quietude.
At Kyōto the cult of the national flower culminates in an annual celebration, the Miyako-odori, a spectacular ballet with choric interludes. For many years the same poet, an old resident, has been assigned the task of composing appropriate lyrics, in which the glories of some historic or legendary hero blend with the praises of the blushing sakura. Musicians, painters, dancers, are engaged to elaborate with auxiliary sound, design, and movement the series of dream-pictures which his fancy has evoked. But words and notes are really subsidiary to the dancing: the tale of the poet is chiefly told by the winding feet and waving arms, the ever-changing pose and mimicry, of the most highly trained geisha in Japan. These number as many as seventy, of whom eighteen combine the functions of choir and orchestra, now chanting, now accompanying on drum and mandoline the statuesque or processional development of the choregraphic theme. The Hanami-Kōji, specially set apart for such representations, is not easy to find. Though within the precincts of the theatrical quarter, it stands a little apart from the other houses, such as the Gion-za Theatre, and is far less capacious; in fact, it bears about the same proportion to its huge, banner-flaunting brethren as the smaller Queen’s Hall to Drury Lane. The structure, too, is entirely different from theirs. Three sides of the building are reserved for the performers. Instead of the parallel hana-michi, trisecting the audience and sloping from stage to entrance, two dancing platforms skirt the “pit” on left and right and join the extremities of the scene: on them sit the singing-girls, concealed at first by cotton curtains. No room remains for the public but the floor between the platforms and a gallery, which faces the drop-scene of the stage proper. As the performance only lasts an hour, it is repeated four or five times in the afternoon and evening of twenty days, and the price of admission to the best (gallery) seats is fifty sen, about one shilling, for economy and simplicity are conspicuous in this essentially popular entertainment.
The dance is preceded by a ceremonious reception of great interest to the foreign visitor. He is conducted to an ante-room and requested to participate in O Cha-no-yu, an august tea-making. The preparation of this aristocratic refreshment must be conducted in accordance with inviolable rules, invented or rather modified by the great Taikō himself, who, not content with military glory, desired to regulate the boudoir as imperiously as the State, in this resembling Queen Anne, who “would sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea.” The twelve utensils employed must be separately cleansed and waved in air by the demure but smart damsel who presides with becoming dignity and science, every gesture, every operation of her deft hands being prescribed by rigid etiquette. After twenty minutes of silent incantation, as it seems, the dainty sorceress has brewed her potion. Then a careful sub-sorceress, who has attentively waited on the principal witch, prostrates herself at the feet of each of the guests, touches the floor with her forehead, and, as she presents a cup of thick, green bouillon, murmurs, “Oh, gracious stranger, deign to taste this honourable tea!” Long as the tea ceremonies appear to the uninitiated, they are considerably shortened and imperfectly observed by the tea-drinkers, who, it is feared, break a thousand and one rules in uncouth efforts to copy the better educated Japanese.
As seen from the strangers’ gallery (for the majority of humble coolies and small shopkeepers have been waiting in patient line until the august tea has been absorbed by their betters, and now sit, packed in tiny compartments, on the floor of the pit) this liliputian theatre has much in common with the galanty-show which first kindled a passion for the stage in distant childhood. The drop-scenes are scarcely more than nine feet high, and of such thin material that through their pale pattern of willow and pine the shining of candles is discerned. It would not surprise me if they grew gradually whiter and brighter, serving at last as the medium for a droll shadow-pantomime of fantastic silhouettes. But even the children would not have come to see that, since their eyes have often followed at home the ingenious shadow-play of parental hands behind the paper-panelled shōji. Rarer and more exotic must be the show to please this easily amused but quickly sated audience. Suddenly the curtains on either side lift, disclosing to the left nine geisha, holding taiko or tzuzumi, circular drums and drums conical, beaten with batons or smacked with open palm; to the right, nine more, with koto and samisen, plucking the strings with curved finger or ivory plectrum: all are much powdered and painted, but soberly attired in black and gold. The prelude lacks melody, lacks harmony, as we understand them, but the sharp, staccato cries, emphasised by drum-taps, the antiphonal, diminishing shrieks, which seem to punctuate a nasal, wailing recitative, insensibly induce a nervous tension of disquieting suspense. The time is most exact: the drums rattle, the zithers clang, in perfect unison. Then along the narrow platforms in front of the musicians issue simultaneously from beneath the gallery two slender files of geisha, whose pink and blue kimono suggest the hues of cherry-blossom and the else cloudless sky. Like running ribbons, they wind towards the stage, festooning at last into a momentary bow before the famous gate, called O Kuru-ma-yose, of which the curiously carven peonies and phœnixes are admirably reproduced, evoking instant recognition. While the dancers disappear through that pictured portal and the curtain falls on the first figure of the dance, let me briefly indicate the subject and intention of this year’s fantasy.
Its hero is Hideyoshi, often entitled Taikō (the retired regent), next to Iyeyasu perhaps the most notable name in all Japanese history—so proverbially notable that Cromwell and Napoleon are not more vividly impressed on the memory of their countrymen. His dramatic rise from rung to rung of the feudal ladder, from peasant’s hut to a regent’s palace, which none but a noble had occupied before him; the contrast of his mean appearance, which caused him to be dubbed “The Monkey,” with his grandiose achievements, which included the commercial supremacy of Ōsaka and the subjugation of Corea; his dreams of world-empire; the patronage of art, which led him to summon a congress of tea-drinkers and to take an active part in the presentation of Nō plays; the adroit concentration of power in his own person, despite the jealousy of patricians and the victories of contemporary generals; these and many other circumstances of his career loom large in patriotic tradition. He was eclipsed by Iyeyasu in statesmanship, for the latter founded a constitution and established a dynasty, which lasted two hundred years, and might have lasted longer but for foreign intervention; yet Hideyoshi’s is the more picturesque, the more striking personality. Perhaps it would not be straining an historical parallel to allege that the great soldier of Kyōto prepared the way for the great legislator of Yedo as effectively as Julius Cæsar prepared the way for Augustus. Be this so or not, it is plain that the beginning of the seventeenth century after Christ in Japan and the end of the last century before Christ in Italy coincided with similar transitions from militant anarchy to peaceful despotism. The golden age of the Tokugawa may be cited as an argument for imperial rule with the pax Romana of the Cæsars. It might be supposed that the names of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi have no more virtue as a rallying-cry for their descendants than the watchwords of Roundhead and Cavalier have for us. But such is not the case. Subtly reincarnate in the cities which they glorified in life, their spirits still give battle after death in the bloodless field of civic rivalry. Tōkyō is still Yedo, the Petersburg of the empire, created by a despot’s will and the centre of law, of authority, of administration; but it is to Kyōto, as to Moscow, the holy city, that lovers of art and of religion are inevitably attracted. Hers are still the finer temples, the lovelier fabrics, the nobler legacies of Old Japan. One thing, however, she has not, which the capital has—a fitting monument of her greatest citizen. Whereas the mausoleum of Iyeyasu at Nikkō is such a masterpiece of commemorative gratitude, expressed in the language of plastic and decorative art, that “whoever has not seen Nikkō [so runs the saw] has no right to use the word kekkō (splendid),” the conqueror of Corea, the arbiter of august tea-making, lacks the tribute of a monumental tomb. This stain on the scutcheon of Kyōto is to be speedily wiped out. Now that the Emperor has transferred his court to the eastern capital and made the Tokugawa citadel his own, the western merchants are eager to redress the balance by building on the heights of Maruyama for the glory of Hideyoshi and the bewilderment of tourists such a triumph of memorial architecture that Iyeyasu shall at last he outshone and the connotation of kekkō be fraught with ampler meaning. The plans are drawn, the work begun, patriots and pilgrims have subscribed thousands of yen, the best modern artists in wood and bronze have been charged with the heavy privilege of surpassing their illustrious predecessors. Whether they succeed or not, the Hideyoshi monument was a subject so rich in suggestion, so popular in itself, so complex in its appeal, that the poet of the Miyako-odori could not wish for a better or more burning theme. And that is why the pink-and-blue geisha made their first exit through O Kuruma-yose, which Hidari Jingoro, the immortal left-handed carpenter, adorned with marvellous birds and flowers when commissioned to carve a royal gateway for his master’s, the Taikō’s, palace at Fushimi.
The next scene represented Hideyoshi’s garden. It is no ordinary garden, whatever foreigners may think, who merely see in it an appropriate background for the swaying flower-like bodies of the dancing-girls. It is a masterpiece of the celebrated æsthete, Kobori Enshu, and the artful disposition of lake and lantern, pebble and pine, may symbolise, for all I know, a divine truth or philosophic precept. My neighbour (a Buddhist neophyte, whose enthusiasm is tempered by erudition) points out to me the Moon-Washing Fountain, the Stone of Ecstatic Contemplation, and the Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortals, but it seems that the exigencies of scenic space have so fatally curtailed the Mound facing the Moon that the exact meaning of the parabolic design is made obscure, if not heretical. It is not in my power to reassure him, so I welcome with relief the reappearance of the dancers, who, bearing flowers in one hand and a fan in the other, step gaily out of the garden and, posing, perching, pirouetting, flutter with deliberate grace through a maze of correlated motions. I do not dare to ask if their gestures point a moral: it is wiser to assume with Keats that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and to follow with undistracted eye the solemn prettiness of these human dragon-flies. For their gauzy kimono sleeves and red-pepper-coloured obi recall the wings and hue of a giant dragon-fly, which dominates in its pride of national emblem the principal bridge over the Kamogawa. And, whether they poise flower on fan or fan on flower, or revolve with open fan extended behind their triple-tressed coiffure, they dart here and settle there with almost the unconscious, automatic smoothness of bird or insect. Proximity destroys this illusion. Watched from the subjacent vantage of the floor, the features of these tiny coryphées are seen to wear that fixity of resolute attention which few children when engrossed in a performance are able to repress. The art of concealing art is hard to learn. Their elder sisters smile continually behind taiko and samisen, but the gravity of the childish troupe is more in keeping with the poet’s retrospective vision.
I hope the stage-carpenter atoned for his unorthodox abbreviation of Enshu’s lesson in landscape by the exquisite view of the monastery of Uji Bridge. Nestling in the lap of pine-forested hills, this ancient temple of Byōdō-in has been for at least six hundred years the protective centre of vast tea-plantations where is grown the finest tea for native taste, called Gyokuro, or Jewelled Dew. But Uji Bridge is famous also for its fire-flies, which on warm nights flash like living jewels beside the stream, to the joy of countless sightseers, eager to catch and cage them. Throughout the ensuing dance many eyes were diverted from the geisha to the sparkling play of emerald motes across the mimic Ujigawa. This time the girls wore kerchiefs such as peasant women wear when, with heads thus guarded and skirts rolled upward to the knee, they toil among the tea-plants. Then, unfolding and waving the kerchiefs, while a soloist intoned a rhapsody in honour of “the Great Councillor, whose memory lives for ever in the fragrant sweetness of the Jewelled Dew,” they moved in pairs along the platform, alternately kneeling and rising, with arms extended or intertwined, their gradual retrocession signifying, as I learn, the reluctant withdrawal of summer.
Autumn succeeds. Momiji-Yama, or Maple Mountain, deeply mantled in myriads of reddening leaves, gives the cue to the now melancholy, almost stationary languor of gliding figures: no longer dragon-flies or humming-birds, they drift slowly, one by one, into the crimson gorge, and are lost among the maple-leaves. At this point the floral march of the seasons is abruptly broken, as if to forbid too hasty interpretation, by the fall of tricolour curtains, richly embroidered in scarlet, blue, and gold with Hideyoshi’s crest, the large fan-like leaf of the Pawlonia Imperialis.
The five-storeyed pagoda of Omuro Gosho, outlined in snow against the wintry landscape, signalises an ascent from temporal to eternal beauty. To this monastic palace ex-mikados came after abdication; it had no abbots but those of imperial blood. And the next scene, presenting the Daibutsu, or great Buddha of Hideyoshi, is elegantly illustrative of the Buddhist teaching of permanence in transition. The first wooden image, 160 feet high, erected by the Taiko in 1588, was destroyed by earthquake in 1596. After his death his widow constructed a second in bronze, which was almost completed save for the casting of the head when fire devoured it in 1603. Lastly, his son, Hideyori, persuaded by perfidious Ieyaysu to waste his substance in rearing a yet more colossal figure, was forbidden to consecrate it by a message from the Shōgun, who chose to discover in the Chinese inscription on the bell (“On the east I welcome the bright moon, on the west I bid farewell to the setting sun”) a prophecy of his own waning and Hideyoshi’s waxing radiance. A second earthquake in 1662, corrosive lightnings in 1775 and 1798, consumed successive Buddhas in the same shrine, but the present god, whose gilded head and shoulders alone are visible, scaling fifty-eight feet from ground to ceiling, has defied the strokes of fate for ninety-nine years, and recalls to pious beholders the original builder’s piety, triumphant at last through the irresistible resurrection of deity.
Resurrection—the recurrence of spring and the renovation of fame—crowns the final movement of this transcendental ballet. The Hideyoshi monument, as it partly is and wholly shall be, rises tier above tier on heaven-scaling stairs, approached by temples and groves which will one day vie in splendour with the carven gateways, the gigantic cryptomerias of Nikkō. In a joyous finale the dancers pose, wreathed about the central summit of the monument, while cascades of red and green fire play on them from the wings; then, strewing the steps with cherry-blossom and waving provocative clusters in the faces of the spectators as they pass, the double stream of geisha flows back with graceful whirls and eddies between banks of deafening minstrelsy; the curtains rustle down, the fires flicker out; the Miyako-odori is no more.
As I ponder on this fascinating little spectacle, planned by artists and presented by fairies, the memory returns of a ballet, incalculably more magnificent, which the rich municipality of Moscow organised in honour of Nicholas II., Emperor of all the Russias, on the occasion of his coronation. I remember that thousands of roubles were expended; that the decorations and costumes blazed with ostentation; that armies of half-dressed women performed acrobatic feats in searching electric light. If any flowers of imagination had bloomed in the contriver’s mind, they had been pitilessly crushed by costumiers, scene-painters, and ballet-masters. The result was a meretricious chaos of meaningless display. Hidden from the eyes of Moscow merchants and revealed to the patient artisans of Kyōto is that spirit of beauty, which, out of cotton and paper and Bengal lights can fashion a poem, so lovely that its simple schemes of form and colour haunt the memory like music, so profound that the deepest instincts of the beholder may be stirred by communion with the faith in which his fathers laboured and died.
It may well have been, however, that the shaven stripling beside me who so kindly unravelled threads of occasional doctrine from the glistening web of Terpsichore was almost alone in his desire to be edified. As he formally took his leave, most of the pittites rushed with laughter up the hill to the Chionin Temple, before which stands a marvellous and patriarchal cherry-tree. Lamps were hung in its far-reaching boughs, and all night long the light-hearted Kyōto citizens chattered and sang beneath its multitudinous blossom.
The connection between Buddhism and geishadom was recalled to me in a much less poetic setting by a peculiar play, which for seven nights filled the commodious theatre of Tsuruga, a delightful port overlooking the finest harbour on the Sea of Japan. The piece was called “Shimazomasa,” and the audience was moved to extraordinary demonstrations of delight by a very long soliloquy delivered for at least ten minutes by a Buddhist priest, who, seated on a mat in the centre of the stage and tapping his knees with a fan, excited my liveliest curiosity as to the purport of his tirade. Could it be a parody on pulpit eloquence? Would these pious townsmen, whose bay was lined with temples, tolerate such mockery of sacred things? The curtain fell and drew up again: the actor was forced to repeat his glib soliloquy. Then, to my extreme bewilderment, the priest was no more seen, and a tortuous but intelligible melodrama ensued, revealing the thefts and treacheries of a geisha, who came in the last act to a miserable end. The next night I returned, and being in time for the first act, which I had missed on the previous occasion, discovered that the plausible preacher was the geisha disguised. She had escaped from prison, and was recounting to herself the advantages which she expected to reap from the garb of a friar. “Young girls will come to me, craving amulets and charms for their lovers. Thus I shall know the names of honourable young men, who will not be slow to make my acquaintance. And, when we have sipped tea and talked of many pleasant things together, at the right time I shall whisper that it is no priest who is honoured by their august friendship, but Shimazomasa, the geisha. Moreover, I am sure to succeed, for a preacher ought to be a good-looking man. It is then easier for the hearers to keep their eyes fixed on his face; otherwise their eyes wander and they forget to listen.” It has been pointed out to me since that passages in this delectable sermon were taken bodily from the “Makura Zoshi” (“Pillow Sketches”), the work of a lady-novelist of the eleventh century. But plagiarism is no sin in the eyes of a Japanese dramatist, and the great merit was to have hit on an original situation. The manager of the theatre was so conscious of this, that, when a second play, entitled “Pistorigoto” (“Robbery under Arms”), failed to draw as well as its predecessor, he boldly transferred the incident without rhyme or reason to the plot, which was neither improved nor worsened by the addition. I was grateful, too, to the author of “Shimazomasa” for a touch of fancy, which redeemed the realism of his sensational story. During a love scene between three suitors and the heroine, who had regained for a time prestige and prosperity, a symbolic geisha, bearing no relation to the personages of the piece, chanted in an upper barred chamber, adjoining the outer wall of the tea-house in which the action was proceeding, snatches of erotic song, praising the joys of love but foretelling the heavy Nemesis which, sooner or later, overtakes light women. In a play of Æschylus this would have been Erinyes on the Atridean roof, terrible and invisible, presaging doom. But I fear that he who wrote “Shimazomasa” had no deeper design than the interpolation of a taking song, since popular drama is as untroubled as the popular mind by haunting shadows of death and destiny.
VULGAR SONGS
[VULGAR SONGS]
“As for the common people, they have songs of their own, which conform as far as possible to classical models, but are much mixed with colloquialisms, and are accordingly despised by all well-bred persons. The ditties sung by singing-girls to the twanging of the guitar belong to this class.”—B. H. Chamberlain.
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—
“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.’”
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.
Joy drew the rickshaw,
Heaven takes vengeance,
Empty the larder,
Rickshaw of fire.
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.
For the moon, cloud-wrack;
For the flower, tempest;
For the truth, this world;
Wanting the hour.
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:
“Never the time and place, and the loved one altogether.”
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 phœnix. This pouring of foreign wine into native bottles produces a quaint blend. A girl thus reproaches her lover with
Inconstancy.
My heart to body
Fuel to engine;
Thy heart an air-ship
Loose in the sky.
Here the similes are plain and forcible. The next poem is less lucid:
Despair.
Borne in no road-car,
Endless the railway,
How shall poor I reach
Station at last?
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.
Only your likeness!
Faithful? I know not.
Could I but take one,
Too, of your heart!
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.
White snow of Fuji
Loosened at sunrise;
Maiden’s shimada
Loosened for sleep.
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 chōchō 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.
Mock not the puckered
Bloom of a dried plum;
Once on its fresh spray
Nightingales wept.
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.
As vine weds ivy,
So would I clasp him;
If the man will not,
What can be done?
Jealousy exorcised from Aoi-no-Uye. (Nō).
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:
“Mukōjima,
Cherry-blossom,
Sliced dumpling,
Boiled eggs,
Girl, come here!
Drinking, sleeping,
Heigh-ho! Tra-la-la!”
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:
“Ho! now is the time;
Ho! now is the time;
Ha! Ha! Psha!
Even now
My boys!
Even now
My boys!”
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.
TAKING THE WATERS