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in flames. With a crash like thunder, in the foreground the house of Hagen falls, and whilst the mighty conflagration flares up in the distance, the Rhine overflows to rushing music and submerges the whole stage. With this scene of unequalled dramatic splendor ends the im

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mense dramatic cycle of the Niebelungen Ring," and, quite apart from the music, we may well be impressed with the poetical genius which has welded all these strange elements of Scandinavian and Germanic myth into such a whole.-Contemporary Review.

JAPANESE MINIATURE ODES.

THERE are, probably, few nations that do not point to their poetical literature as their chiefest glory. In England, in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, the national poets are by their countrymen awarded the palm over the great prose writers, while even in France itself, where, to an outsider, the distance between a Pascal and a Racine, between Voltaire as author of Mahomet and the Henriade and Voltaire as author of the Siècle de Louis XIV. apears like a yawning chasm, the compatriots of those writers are very loth to allow so trenchant a judgment, and would often seem, indeed, entirely reversing it, to point to the laurels of a Racine, a Corneille, and even a Boileau as the chief national title to imperishable renown.

In Japan, however, this rule does not hold. There the prose and the poetry of the classic age take equal rank in the popular appreciation, and, indeed, in countless cases it is the same men and the same women that have attained to equal celebrity both as prosaists and as poets. The foreign critic will feel disposed to re-echo this impartial judgment; for it will strike him forcibly, on perusing the classic literature of Japan, that the same faults and the same excellencies stamp all its productions (except, perhaps, the very earliest) the same insinuating graces of style, the same love of nature, the same pathetic, and, to us Westerns, modern-seeming, tenderness, the same harping upon a few ideas, and the same absence of philosophic depth. Few tasks, indeed, could be more difficult than to have to draw any code of morals, any approach to a system of metaphysics from the writings of the poets of Japan-an admission which will appear to many Western readers to be the acknowledgment of a grave deficiency, while others, perhaps, who, in this utilitarian age, would welcome a beauti

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ful thing all the more warmly for its being useless, may be weak-minded enough to feel a certain satisfaction on learning that there is at least one literature wholly governed by the precept that delight-not instruction should be poetry's end and aim, and that the poet's mission is fully accomplished if he leaves our minds dazzled with the graceful flights of his imagination, and our ears ringing with the most harmonious cadences. It is not, however, pretended that the great family likeness running all through the productions of the Japanese classic age, and which is but a natural result of a concentration and unity of national life almost unparalleled in the history of any other land, amounts to an absolute identity of characteristics in their various branches; nor can it be here attempted to discuss in detail the features of a whole literature. Not even an appreciation of the poetry as a whole comes within the scope of this paper. But, leaving aside the religious songs and the longer odes of the earliest ages, as well as the lyric drama of a somewhat later period, we must content ourselves with a few criticisms and illustrations of the thirty-one syllable stanzas, so well known to every student of Japanese literature under the name of "Shorter Odes," and which have not only, from the 9th century downwards, been by far the most popular form of poetical composition, both with writers and readers. among the natives themselves, but are also, in the opinion of those outsiders, best qualified to pronounce on such a subject, the most characteristic of all the productions of the Japanese muse.

A poem complete in thirty-one syilables! Strangely as such an idea may strike a European, the notion of an epic in a dozen cantos would seem to these Easterns to the full as strange, and vastly more appalling; for in no other quarter

of the globe does the doctrine that "brevity is the soul of wit" find so many votaries. A prosody which knows nothing of either rhyme or assonance, alliteration, parallelism, quantity or accentual stress, may likewise appear a contradiction in terms. What then, in Japan, constitutes the difference between prose and verse, if all these distinguishing marks be missing? Well; in order that a composition may be rhythmical, the words of which it is composed must be so arranged as to fall into lines of either five or seven syllables, which lines must succeed one another in a certain order; and that order, in the thirty-one syllable odes, is 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. Also many inversions unknown in prose are permitted; plays upon words and a peculiar kind of terms called "pillow-words," are introduced for the sake of grace and euphony, and, above all, no barbarous Chinese expression must ever cross the poetic threshold. So much for the outer form, touching which, indeed, if all its minutiæ were to be noticed, a sufficiently long treatise might be written by any Japanese scholar who did not pause to ask himself whether it would be ever read. What will be of wider interest is the contents of these miniature poems.

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a dream when one awaketh❞—all these hundreds and hundreds of volumes of thirty-one syllable odes cannot but treat of a multiplicity of subjects. In most of the collections, indeed, the poems are regularly classified under various heads: first Spring, wherein the odes on the different flowers of that delightful season succeed each other in the order in which such flowers bloom-first the plum-blossom, and then the cherry, the most precious of all flowers; after that, in early summer, the wisteria, accompanied by the cuckoo, which, on the first

day of the fourth moon, takes the place left vacant by the nightingale on the preceding evening (the last evening of spring); and so on, down to the end of winter. Next comes incipient love, followed by all the other phases of the tender passion-and a large and important division this is-while elegies, travelling odes, acrostics, and odes congratulatory and miscellaneous bring up the rear. Such is, in brief, the order followed in the Collection of Odes Ancient and Modern, published A.D. 905, by command of the Mikado Daigo, and from which, as the most celebrated of the Poetical Collections of the Twenty-one Reigns, the majority of our illustrations will be drawn.

Of all the excellencies of the ancient Japanese poets, none can have a greater charm for the modern English reader than their passionate love of nature, and their tender interpretation of her mysteries— qualities which are inherited by their otherwise strictly practical descendants at the present day. Take, for instance, the following stanza :

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we should remember that to one nation alone, in all the annals of literature, was it given to know exactly the limits of true taste; and that if the Japanese sometimes sin against Greek ideas of moderation, we later Europeans could scarcely venture to throw at them the first stone. Possibly, too, a tendency to exaggeration was, in Narihira's case, but a family failing. At least, we find a halfbrother of his-also a grandee of the then Mikado's court-giving vent to very ridiculous sentiments at the aspect of a celebrated cascade. He says:

The roaring torrent scatters far and near Its silv'ry drops. Oh! let me pick them up. For when of grief I drain some day the cup, Each will do service as a bitter tear! From this to avowed caricature is but a step; and the poet Tadaminé is himself laughing when he writes of another waterfall:

Long years, methinks, of sorrow and of care Must have pass'd over the old fountain-head Of the cascade; for like a silv'ry thread It rolls adown, nor shows one jet-black hair! It would be impossible to accuse the Japanese of want of imagination when we find them capable of so bold an idea as is contained in the following "miniature ode" on the wild geese :

What junk, impell'd by autumn's fresh'ning gale,

Comes speeding t'ward me? 'Tis the wild geese driv'n

Across the fathomless expanse of heav'n, And lifting up their voices for a sail. Yet it is certain that some of the most powerful aids to imagination are wanting among them; and of one of these aids in particular, the use of impersonationwhich to us Europeans is naturally suggested by the genders of nouns either in our own or in kindred and well-known tongues the Japanese are almost entirely deprived by the very different nature of their language, which does not so much as possess words answering to our "he" and "she" to distinguish a man from a woman. Death with his sickle, or Flora leading back the May, would appear to these simple-minded Orientals as queer and far-fetched a notion as would that of stationing upon bridges, and in other public places, big statues of scantily-dressed females supposed to represent Commerce and Agriculture, or Philosophy and Religion, or some such other abstract ideas. It would probably

be hard to get them at all to understand what was meant, and when they did at last understand, they would most assuredly burst out laughing. Indeed, in the whole course of his Japanese reading, the present writer does not remember to have met with more than one clear instance of impersonation. It occurs in a stanza on Old Age, which, though seemingly intended to be joking, may perhaps be thought to have in it a certain touch of pathos:

Old Age is not a friend I wish to meet; And if some day to see me he should come, I'd lock the door as he walk'd up the street, And cry: "Most honor'd Sir, I'm not at home!"

To conclude, from the last few stanzas quoted, that the poets of Japan are much given to the comic, were to conclude wrongly. They are almost always serious, too monstrously serious, perhaps, for European taste; and as for the commentators, they are hopelessly serious, insisting on discovering allusions where there are none, and meanings that were never meant. We read, for example, the following stanza :

With roseate hues that pierce the autumnal haze,

The spreading dawn lights up Akashi's shore!
But the fair ship, alas! is seen no more,
An island veils it from my loving gaze;

and, as we read, the explanation that suggests itself to our untutored minds is, that the tiny ode means just what it says, and that the poet, apparently putting the words into the mouth of some high-born damsel of the Mikado's court, simple intends to represent her as watching with tender eyes the departing junk that bears her lover from her side. But no! the writings of so celebrated and so ancient a person as the author of the ode are not to be treated in this offhand manner. All kinds of mystical interpretations are suggested: [as that, for instance, the reference is to the frank innocence of childhood, which all too soon disappears behind the rocky islands and makes shipwreck on the sands of life. Of one commentator it is reported that he pondered constantly on this stanza during the space of three years, and was at last rewarded by an insight into its secret intention. Unfortunately the outcome of his meditations has not been handed down to us.

But the elegy is, of all the forms of poetry, that in which the Japanese may most truly be said to excel, even when-by an usage which would jar on European taste, but which, in their so differently constituted language, is extremely graceful and even pathetic-they introduce plays upon words into the midst of the most serious thoughts. The poet Tsurayuki thus laments the death of a friend, who, like himself, belonged to that bright galaxy that shone in the court of Kiyoto at a time when almost all Europe was sunk in dark and hopeless barbarism:

So frail our life, perchance to-morrow's sun May never rise for me. Ah! well-a-day! While lasts the twilight of the sad to-day, I'll mourn for thee, O thou beloved one!

A point which should never be forgotten is, that almost all the classical literature of Japan was written by and for a small circle of lords and ladies, princes and princesses, at the Imperial court. For if, without entering into speculations on the reason of so strange a phenomenon-less strange to one who should adopt the theory of an original distinction of race between the nobles and the plebeians of Japan-if we keep this fact in mind, we shall have a key to the interpretation of most of the characteristics of a highly peculiar literature. Where, indeed, if not in the ante-chambers of a court, should verbal harmony and all the softer graces of style be pursued to a degree showing that manner more than matter is held to be the one thing needful to poet and prosaist alike ? Under what other circumstances should we be more likely to find piquancy take the place of profundity, and sentiment. the place of passion? For the highborn poets who passed from one viceroyalty to another, and for the poetesses who, in damask and brocade, spent their days amid the magnificence of the palace of the "Son of Heaven," few circumstances could arise which might have made them able to fathom the depths of the human heart or have brought them face to face with those moral problems that must suggest themselves to such as, conscious of rightdoing in themselves, yet have to fight an unequal battle with all the evil powers of the world. The, in Japan, all but preponderating influence of women was

also thrown into the scale; at least it may, we trust (even in our days, when this has become rather a delicate subject), be permitted us to hold that female writers are more likely to abound in subtle graces than in vigor and in philosophic depth.

Here are a few more miscellaneous examples of "miniature odes :"

REPROACH ADDRESSED TO THE NIGHTINGALES.

Whom would your cries, with artful calumny, 'Tis your own pinions flitting through these Accuse of scatt'ring the pale cherry-flow'rs?

bow'rs

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of the above stanza, the justly celebrated Of the Buddhist bishop Henjō, writer author of the preface to the Collection of Odes Ancient and Modern, says: "The bishop was a skilful versifier, but in real feeling he was lacking: I might liken him to one that should conceive an artificial passion for the mere painted semblance of a maiden." Of the already quoted poet Narihira, it is said in the same place: "His stanzas are so pregnant with meaning, that the words suffice not to express it. He is like a closed flower that hath lost her color, but whose fragrance yet remaineth." Here is another sample of his obscure style :

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E'en when on earth the thundering gods held Was such a sight beheld? Calm Tats'ta's flood,

Stain'd, as by China's art, with hues of blood, Rolls o'er the peaceful moors and fields away.

*This stanza is necessarily rather an imitation of the original than a translation of it.

The allusion is to the crimson and scarlet of the autumn maples.

But we must not go on quoting for ever-if, indeed, quoting it can be called, where, in the place of the originals which the translator so much delights in reading, those he writes for are reduced to reading the translator. A few words in conclusion. If a moral, a lesson must perforce be drawn from the works of the classic poets of Japan, it might, perhaps, be formulated in three simple words: "Life is brief." Life is brief. Let us make the best of it; for we know not what comes after, nor if anything comes after. Let us pluck the flowers of spring before they fade; let us hark to the note of the cuckoo, as, in the reddening summer dawn, his shadow flits for an instant across the face of the sinking moon; let us love; let us be merry-not wildly or grossly, like the fool of Scripture, but with all comeliness and grace, as befits high-born and cultivated men and maid

ens.

From those that are dominated by such an ever-present idea-albeit that it is less often proclaimed than understood. -sadness cannot long be absent: hence the power of their elegies, and the tender grace of their conception of nature. For, be it observed, in ages of faith natural beauties are but little understood or appreciated. How, indeed, can they be greatly valued by men who look upon them as snares and hindrances, turning away the soul from the contemplation of higher and worthier objects? and the remark that it is only in these latter days of lukewarm conviction that we Europeans have really begun to enter into the meaning of outward nature is a trite one. Love nature, love life and enjoy it, would seem to be the burden of the songs of the poets of Japan; but yet they never can forget how soon the life to which they so greatly hold will end, how soon the natural beauties they so dearly prize will-for each one, at least-pass hopelessly away. One of the poets of the eighth century has expressed this in a more direct, as well as in a more graceful manner than any of his compeers. Writing, as he did, just before the time. when the "shorter odes" of which we have been treating became almost the sole recognised form of poetical composition, his poem, which is a much longer one, does not strictly belong to the sub

But it so exactly

ject of this paper. reproduces that idea which may be called the fundamental idea of Japanese poetry, that we think our readers will not quarrel with us for quoting it. There is a short prose superscription which runs thus:—

Easy to accumulate and hard to avoid are the eight greater tribulations. Hard to obtain and easy to exhaust are the joys of an hundred years. What the ancients deplored, I too have now reason to lament, and have therefore composed this ode to give vent to my grief at the turning grey of my hairs :ODE ON THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF LIFE. Proem.

'Twere idle to complain,

Or think to stem unvarying nature's course,
And backward to its source
Turn the swift torrent of the years again,
That, with resistless force,
Rolls down with age and sorrow in its train.

Strophe.

Lo! where the virgin choirs are playing,
As tender virgins may befit,

When, hand in hand, they go a-maying,
And through the merry dance they flit :
Bracelets of gems and gold
Around their arms are roll'd;
And, lightly, sleeve in sleeve entwin'd,
What time the tender virgins go a-maying,
Their crimson robes all carelessly are swaying
As breathes the listless wind.
But eager time cannot be staying:

Their beauty loses its delight;

Already through their locks come straying
Pale threads of silv'ry white;

Already do the wrinkles furrow

The features erst so blithe and gay, And fades the smile which seem'd to borrow

The sweetness of the flowers of May: Such is, alas! dread time's inevitable sway!

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