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,"
