‘They came and told me they had been for a walk behind the monastery and found some meadow-sweet growing near a pond. I asked them to bring me some, which they did, and put the flowers in a bowl along with some lemons on stripped stems. It really looked very pretty.
‘When it was dark I went back to the chapel and spent the night in confession and prayer, weeping bitterly the whole while. Towards daybreak I dozed for a moment and dreamt that I saw one of the monks (the one who seems to act as a sort of steward here) fill a bucket of water and put it on the seat on my right. I woke up with a start and knew at once that the dream had been sent to me by Buddha. It was certainly not of a kind to bring much encouragement.[8] Presently some one said that it was now broad daylight, and breaking off my prayers I came down from the chapel. I found, however, that it was really still quite dark. Only across the surface of the lake a whiteness was creeping, against which were dimly outlined the figures of some twenty men clustered together on the shore. They seemed all to be gazing intently at something that was hidden from me by the shadow of the cliff. But though I could see nothing I knew that from the dark place would presently issue the boat for which they were waiting. A priest, who had just come from the early morning service, was standing on the cliff watching the boat put out from the shore, and as it drew further and further away from him, it seemed to me that he gazed after it almost wistfully. Should I too, if I had been here as many years, grow weary of the place and long for escape? It may be so. “This time next year!” the young men on the boat shouted; and by the time the priest had called “goodbye” they were already mere shadows in the distance. I looked up at the sky. The moon was very slim. Its narrow bow was reflected in the lake. A rainy wind was now blowing and presently the whole surface of the water became covered with glittering ripples. The young men on the boat had begun to sing, and though their voices were faint I could hear what song they were singing. It was “Haggard has grown the face ...” and the sound of it brought back the tears to my eyes.
‘Ikaga Point, Yamabuki Point,—promontory after promontory was now emerging from the darkness. And as my eye travelled along the shore I suddenly saw something moving through the reeds. Before I could see clearly what it was I began to hear the noise of oars, then the low humming of a rowers’ song. A boat was drawing near. Some one standing further down the shore called out as it passed “Where are you making for?” “For the temple,” a voice from the boat answered, “to fetch the lady....”
‘How my heart beat when I heard those words! It seems that despite all my precautions he[9] caught wind of my plan, and sent some servants to escort me; but by then I suppose I had already started. They were at first wrongly directed; hence the delay. The boat pulled inshore, room was made for us, and soon we were on our homeward way, the oarsmen singing lustily. As we passed along the side of Seta Bridge it began to grow quite light. A covey of sand-plovers, with much frilling of wings, flew right across us; and indeed, before we reached the quay where two days ago I had taken boat, we had seen many lovely and moving sights. A carriage was waiting for me at the quay and I was back in the City soon after the hour of the Snake (10 a.m.). No sooner did I reach home than my women gathered round me full of lurid stories about all that had been going on in the world since my departure. It is really very odd that they should still think such things have any interest for me; and so I told them.’
In the Izumi Shikibu Nikki, the record of a love-affair which took place in 1003–1004, we find the romantic diary already becoming a rather effete and self-conscious genre. This little book (some forty pages) is utterly lacking in the intensity and directness of Lady Gossamer’s journal; it has been translated into English[10] and the environment of the story is so new to European readers that its weakness as literature tends to be condoned. Another work which preceded Genji by a few years was the Makura no Sōshi or ‘Pillow Sketches’ of Sei Shōnagon. This is a spirited commonplace-book, but it contains no connected narrative and therefore does not here concern us. The greater part of it was translated by the late Abbé Noël Péri, and no doubt his translation will one day be published.
The Art of Murasaki
Most critics have agreed that the book is a remarkable one and that Murasaki is a writer of considerable talent; but few have dealt with the points that seem to me fundamental. No one has discussed, in anything but the most shadowy way, the all-important question of how she has turned to account the particular elements in story-telling which she has chosen to exploit. The work, it is true, is a translation, and this fact prevents discussion of Murasaki as a poet, as an actual handler of words. But it has for long been customary to criticize Russian novels as though Mrs. Garnett’s translation were the original; nor is there any harm in doing so, provided actual questions of style are set aside.
One reviewer did indeed analyse the nature of Murasaki’s achievement to the extent of classifying her as ‘psychological’ and in this respect he even went so far as to class her with Marcel Proust. Now it is clear that, if we contrast Genji with such fiction as does not exploit the ramifications of the human mind at all (the Arabian Nights or Mother Goose), it appears to be ‘psychological.’ But if we go on to compare it with Stendhal, with Tolstoy, with Proust, the Tale of Genji appears by contrast to possess little more psychological complication than a Grimm’s fairy tale.
Yet it does for a very definite reason belong more to the category which includes Proust, than to the category which includes Grimm. Murasaki, like the novelist of to-day, is not principally interested in the events of the story, but rather in the effect which these events may have upon the minds of her characters. Such books as hers it is convenient, I think, to call ‘novels,’ while reserving for other works of fiction the name ‘story’ or ‘romance.’ She is ‘modern’ again owing to the accident that medieval Buddhism possessed certain psychological conceptions which happen to be current in Europe to-day. The idea that human personality is built up of different layers which may act in conflict, that an emotion may exist in the fullest intensity and yet be unperceived by the person in whom it is at work—such conceptions were commonplaces in ancient Japan. They give to Murasaki’s work a certain rather fallacious air of modernity. But it is not psychological elements such as these that Murasaki is principally exploiting. She is, I think, obtaining her effects by means which are so unfamiliar to European readers (though they have, in varying degrees, often been exploited in the West) that while they work as they were intended to do and produce aesthetic pleasure, the reader is quite unconscious how this pleasure arose.
What then are the essential characteristics of Murasaki’s art? Foremost, I think, is the way in which she handles the whole course of narrative as a series of contrasted effects. Examine the relation of Chapter VIII (The Feast of the Flowers) to its environment. The effect of these subtly-chosen successions is more like that of music (of the movements, say, in a Mozart symphony) than anything that we are familiar with in European fiction. True, at the time when the criticisms to which I refer were made only one volume of the work had been translated; but the quality which I have mentioned is, I should have supposed, abundantly illustrated in the first chapters. That to one critic the Tale of Genji should have appeared to be memoirs—a realistic record of accidental happenings rather than a novel—is to me utterly incomprehensible. But the first painted makimonos that were brought to Europe created the same impression. They were regarded merely as a succession of topographical records, joined together more or less fortuitously; and Murasaki’s art obviously has a close analogy with that of the makimono. Then there is her feeling for shape and tempo. She knows that, not only in the work as a whole, but in each part of it there is a beginning, a middle and an end, and that each of these divisions has its own character, its appropriate pace and intensity. It is inconceivable, for example, that she should open a book or episode with a highly-coloured and elaborate passage of lyrical description, calculated to crush under its weight all that follows. Another point in which she excels is the actual putting of her characters on to the scene. First their existence is hinted at, our curiosity is aroused, we are given a glimpse; and only after much manoeuvring is the complete entry made. The modern novelist tends to fling his characters on to the canvas without tact or precaution of any kind. That credence, attention even, may be a hard thing to win does not occur to him, for he is corrupted by a race of readers who come to a novel seeking the pleasures of instruction rather than those of art; readers who will forgive every species of clumsiness provided they are shown some stratum of life with which they were not previously familiar.