But I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the immaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. “I have cast the world,” he says, “and think me as nothing,
“Yet I feel cold on snow-falling day,
And happy on flower day.”
Let me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his physical existence.
Yone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before he was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students, suffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not tried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some friends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin Miller. In 1897 he published Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a Homeless Snail, and in the next year The Voice of the Valley, a little book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to England, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised himself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the Brixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of verse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn Press (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books, some bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet, From the Eastern Sea, and containing, besides those sixteen pages of poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new pieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino. I knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the Embankment in the evenings, or under those “lamp-lights of web-like streets bathed in the opiate mists,” that he and Yoshio Markino have used so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small man, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with black hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese hair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with broadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman’s, like that of a woman controlling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a cigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might serve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those days), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise that he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations were of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held that it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he had read. “I hate your Longfellow,” he said, “and I love your Keats,” and in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an important tendency of his own.
He left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had some difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding on the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and travelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published The Summer Cloud in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a two-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by the Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, The Pilgrimage, has been issued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews.
These five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain verse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of the writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the Brixton Road is From the Eastern Sea, “by Yone Noguchi (Japanese),” but though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was turned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The imagery of Noguchi’s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery in Synge’s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine’s poetry French, but the imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless if the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and not a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living breath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but with his conception of the poet, and with his poetry.
Noguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which was issued three years later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike himself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats’ to his own, and further removed than Keats’ from that of the hated Longfellow.
Symons, writing of Verlaine, says: “Is not his whole art a delicate waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they are, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us, and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily, experience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate part of our spiritual life.” Noguchi lives almost continuously in those moods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his aim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a vessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those moments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult to make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing of a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my duty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In The Poet he says:
“The roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die.