The Spirit of Japanese Poetry/Chapter 5
V
THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN
I
The conservatism of Japanese "poetry" often proved to be a cowardice with little claim to wisdom; the poets (here I mean chiefly the thirty-one-syllable Uta writers) had been taught it was a dignity to rigidly observe the ancient form and spirit. Though I admit that changes are not always a triumph, and that modernity is not an emancipation altogether, their loyalty was more or less a literary superstition. They had to appear at least under a self-denying guise. Uniformity was their special virtue, individuality was regarded by them to be little short of vulgarity. Their poems turned to be the expression of an etiquette whose formality took the place of life and beauty; no sudden change was permitted in their old kingdom. And any conscious introduction of foreign elements, any advance in diction, imagery, or motive, was not readily recognised. The limitation which originated as a test of strength now degenerated to a confession of weakness. There was a time when we thought that nothing could be more perfect than our little poems, and they are remarkable, in fact, but “for what they are not, rather than for what they are,” as W. C. Aston cleverly put it; indeed, wonderful in their felicity of phrase, melody of versification, and true sentiment, within their narrow limits. But that was ages ago. The Uta poets had been already for a long time a sort of dilettantes who did no small harm to the development of our Japanese poetry, which, under any circumstances, could not be left alone to be ruined. Modern Japan is the age of evolution and expansion; our poetry also began to undergo their influence. It would be more proper, however, to say that the Uta poets were left undisturbed with full freedom to stick to the original key if they wanted to, while the younger poets for themselves started a new form of poem called Shintaishi, meaning the new-styled poem, with larger scope and greatly increased resources; it is well-nigh reaching already to some achievement.
It is true that the simplicity of our old Uta poets was a source of charm and often surprise, and at the same time it was rather tragic for the poets to be forced to keep it up. They were obliged to make a completely unconditional surrender to the ancient form and thought, and to spin from the same old subjects. The changing seasons, the voice of a running stream, the snow-capped Fuji Yama, waves on the beach, the singing of insects or birds, a cherry-blossom, maple-leaves, Spring rains, longing for home, and the like, were the subjects. The Uta poets lamented over the dead, and complained enough about the uncertainty of life; but their voices were not from their actual study of real life; they never speculated of Heaven and where they should go after death. Repetition is not without delight entirely when it is musical; but we shall grow very tired of being suggested the same thing all the time; monotony is often suicidal. But our shintai-shijin (the new-styled poem-writers) broke off at once from such a prejudice which is, at its best, the refuge of an impoverished mind; and they left the old home of restriction and flew out into the freedom of nature and life. We may say that our Japanese poetry received a baptism; and it seems it has somehow revived.
Not only the subjects, the form of the poetry as well underwent a change. The modern poets could not rest satisfied with the hereditary shape, which consisted of five phrases of lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables, 31 syllables in all. (And there is another shorter form, consisting of 5, 7, and 5, which you already know in Hokku.) To-day they make their own forms to fit their own songs; some use lines of 5 and 7, repeating them to a considerable length as they wish, while some use lines of 7 and 6; many forms like 5 and 5; 7 and 7; 8 and 6; 7 and 8; 7 and 4; 7 and 6; 3, 3, and 4; 4, 7, and 6; 5, 7, and 7; 5, 7, and 5; and others have been invented to advantage. But since every syllable of the Japanese language ends in a vowel, and there are only five vowels, no poet could be successful in the use of rhyme: the result would be only intolerably monotonous if we used it. However, there are many who attempt to overcome the weakness; and even alliteration has been introduced. We have a trick of words in Uta poetry called makura kotoba or “pillow-words,” standing at the beginning of a verse, and serving, as it were, as the pillow upon which it rests; it might be said to be an adjective in many cases; but always it is unintelligible and often absurd. Another bit of word-jugglery is the “pivot-words”; a word or a part of a word is used in two senses; one, with what precedes, the other with what follows. The use of such artifices is utterly despised by our modern poets. The old poets tabooed in their poetry the introduction of a monosyllable Chinese word, which the shintai-shijin freely use; and again the latter are not shy about using even English. Like the English poets, they have begun to use the personification of abstract qualities. In one word, they are not so very different from them in writing lyrics, ballads, allegories, epics, and so forth. However, it may be some time yet before we see real development of the drama. Some ten or fifteen years ago the poems of “storm and stress” overflowed in Japan; in this phase our poets were not far behind their Western brothers.
It was in the early fifteenth of Meiji (1882) when the Shintaishi were first introduced by the professors of the Imperial University, the late Masakazu Toyama, Tetsutaro Inouye, and others, who published their collections of new poems and translations from the Western poets. But in fact there was not much to consider till Toson Shimazaki appeared some ten years later.
II
Shimazaki’s Wakanashu enthroned him at once as the master of Shintaishi; in that respect he reminds us of Bryant, who suddenly illumined the dearth of early American poetry. (How undeveloped was this new-style poem before his appearance like a comet!) Even Shimazaki’s actual work of his early days, A Ramble in the Forest for instance, with quite an interesting interruption in a sort of duet:
Mountain Spirit.
“The deer, when they fall to death,
Return to love of their wives.
“The fields and hills, when they wither away,
Return to Spring a thousand years old.”
Tree Spirit.
“Let us bury the old fallen leaves
Under the shadow of leaves, tender, green.
“Awake from winter’s dream-road,
Come to this forest of Spring.”
might be called a Japanese interpretation of Thanatopsis. We have more than one reason to compare him with Bryant. He began his work at the right time when it was easier for a poet to sing, and at the same time easier for us to listen; it was in the idyllic years, if we may say so (though they passed quickly as anything else in Japan) those four or five years we enjoyed before the China-Japan war which changed abruptly the aspect, atmosphere, and aspiration of the country, vivified the sense of life, and raised the question of the relation of man with man as well as of country with country. It was perfectly natural for Shimazaki to start as a poet of Nature; as I understand, the landscape school of poetry is always first to appear in any country. On reading his poems to-day we cannot help showing our dissatisfaction with his want of persistence and minute observation; and we need more enthusiasm, and some higher poetic dash. But his tone, sentiment, and responsive imaginativeness which were brewed in the time when criticism was not so keen, and the impression of foreign knowledge not so strong as to-day, must be regarded fairly; they give a delightful relief to our minds. In them he has a strong claim. He was a poet of sentiment, almost inclined to be sentimental; he was always delicate, and often sad. (I should like to know where is a Japanese poet who is not sad.) He hated, as any other Japanese poet, the song of wisdom, faith, and liberty; he was flexible in his mind, extremely facile in ear and voice. His voice was that of a youth which has never received any deep scratch from life; and his love, which was passionate enough, but not from real experience, was only a speculation of his dream; and then, the shade and colour of his love were very young, always fresh. He was a poet of Spring, when the flowers commingle with the birds to complete a beautiful concert.
He was not a Tennyson who had a Keats and a Shelley for his predecessors; in one sense, he was an originator. We cannot so severely criticise his diction, which, in fact, cannot be compared with that of a later poet who has boundless vocabularies at his command. He is a poet of a few words; with a few words, he wrote a far better poem than you could expect. And he was not a poet of a few great poems; we must see him as a whole; it is true that he has no wonderful expressions nor separate lines for quotation. However, it is delightful to notice that he could not pretend to a feeling which he did not enjoy, nor did he hunt emotion and rapture for writing’s sake as do the later poets. His cadences and pauses were so pleasing. He was meditative, but not slow and also not profound; in one word, he was elementary. And that is one reason why even to-day all the beginners of Shintaishi should go to him first; he is the father of the “new-style” poem in that sense. (That is also like Bryant in America.)
In those days Rossetti and Swinburne were not known in Japan, and Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Longfellow were the only names. However, I am not sure at which shrine he burned his incense, although it is clear enough that he was greatly influenced by the Western magic. He who sang the nature and beauty of love in his first book of verses, began to weave the grief and tears of love in his Ichiyoshu; here I notice a certain touch of Saigyo Hoshi, that great sad poet of the Kamakura period, whose Oriental longing was deepened by Occidental suggestiveness. He associated nature with the ineffable yearning of art; and he entered into the bosom of silence to seek his own home of poetry and ideal.
“The light of the moon,
Shining quiet,
Why does it make me think
Incessantly?
The shadow of the moon
Has no voice,
But it does steal
Into one’s bosom
Oh! I who am going to die
From the world and love!
My thought which I do not tell,
And this shadow of the moon,
Which is more silent?
Which more sad?”
However, from the oppression of life’s meaning, he could not stay young and dreamy, and suddenly stopped singing when he left Tokyo for Shinano, where he became a school-teacher. When he appeared again in literature, it was as a successful novelist. His life as a poet was short, but monumental.
We must come to Bansui Tsuchii to find a representative of the culture and knowledge that advanced in no small degree with the Imperial University as their centre. (By the way, Tsuchii is a University man.) His real qualification as a poet is rather doubtful, but at the same time he is a living proof that a made poet, when he is properly made, is not altogether unacceptable. It is true that he made his Western learning help him to make a better display. It goes without saying that he was never moved by sudden instinct and quickening pulses; but he was glad to scrutinise the phases of Nature, and the universal soul and ideal. He observed wisdom through Hugo and perhaps Schiller (he did not confine his reading to the English poets), and he was pleased to add his own endorsement to them. The admirable part is that his poetical attitude was always sincere, his conception of life grave and just, but without tenderness. He was the first to wrestle with Eternity, and he did not return without something to his profit. His intellectual faculties were very well balanced, almost to the discreetest degree; and under their right guidance he expressed his poetical thought, but that is not to say fire. So his poem was a result, not a first intention, whatever. His deliberation and thought were praiseworthy; ethics was always in his view.
“Ané (elder sister) and Imo (younger sister), who were fed
By the same Nature’s, the same mother’s honourable hands,
The flower of the sky is called Star,
The star qf our world ia called Flower.
“This and that are parted afar,
But their odour is the same, Star and Flower,
Laughter and Light they interchange sweet,
Every Eve, Flower and Star.
“But when the clouds of the dawn grow white,
And the flower of the sky fades away,
Do you not see a drop of dew?
The star of our world is crying.”
We notice that many young poets grew nursed by wrong poets, and were carried away by the wild and fantastic passion and fire of a thoughtless youth. But there is no sounder poet than this Tsuchii, whose noble attitude of reverence toward the Western knowledge kept him at the proper place, and even helped him find the right clue of poetical mystery as he wished. Although his individual note was not impressive, his poems prove his clear truimph over that knowledge and culture which did not appear to him as a distraction; and I will say that he was their best harvester. He was wise to desert his fellow university poets of pseudo-classicism like Takejima or Shioi, and he gained a voice sonorous and rhapsodic, though not particularly rich, yet always attractive, from his excursion into the Chinese diction. Shimazaki was frequently effeminate, but Tsuchii was manly. He was always correct, and comprehensive, so then he lacked a touch of illusion. I am ready to say that he was quite commonplace, but he succeeded in making his commonplaceness often suggestive. I believe that it is no small art.
Those who wished for a deeper colour and variety of diction than Shimazaki’s, and showed a fatigue at his monotony, open their arms to welcome Kyukin Susukida. Susukida enshrined Keats in his heart; like him he is a poet of Youth and Beauty, to whom Nature appeared as a background. At least so he was in his earlier books, Yukuharu and Botekishu. I do not say that he did not understand Nature, but he did not attempt to see her with his naked eyes, and he tried to robe her with his own idealistic robes. He did not incline to solve Nature and Life as Tsuchii, but he made them a symbol of love and poetry, through which he looked for salvation. He was a dreamer, but he never speculated in thought. He was simple. He hated the world vulgar and material. He is a poet of unerring culture who built the house beautiful, which he peopled with his choicest images and longing, who put beauty and melody of language before everything else. He has been verily often criticised as a classicist. It is true that his taste was refined by virtue of his training, and he could be quite graceful even when he had nothing to say. On the other hand, his mind never rose high, he brought no particular message to our life. His chief merit must be valued through the channel of his language which gives us a delightful change from Shimazaki; indeed, he is the master of art, he had no competitor in its beauty. However, in his later work, there is plenty of reason to believe that he was trying to escape from his culture and classicism which benefited him at the beginning; it is almost tragic to see his struggle. His hands are too delicate after a long habit of wearing gloves; he is not accustomed so well to the open air. His views of life and beauty are far more advanced in his Nijugogen and Hakuyokyu than in his earlier books; but it seems that he could not leave his classicism entirely. If he were smaller or larger than himself, I should say that he would be better off; his strength is, after all, his weakness.
We have two other interesting poets of modern Japan in Ariake Kanbara and Homei Iwano.
III
It seems to me that Ariake Kanbara had been wandering in the labyrinth of experiment (how he loved that wandering), not knowing exactly where he would come out; he has much enthusiasm; his sensitive mind made his poetical ambition quick to flame up over a new thing. His travelling guide or companion was Rossetti at first, when he strove to hold the vision and romance of his own kingdom of music and love, his eternal land of imagination and youth:
“I stand alone, and I hear
The whisper sad,–
’Tis Heaven’s whisper over the far-away sea,
Which the white sunbeams spoke.
“The voice is lone but clear,
Quiet but bright,
I can never know the whisper of the far-away sea,
The whisper of the shining sky.”
I have been thinking sometimes that he had a false start in his poetical work; it is true that he needed somebody to support him when he could not walk by himself; but even at the time when he was perfectly able to manage himself, his face still turned instinctively toward his original help. We read many reflections and echoes of Rossetti even in his latest work. (By the way, he is the author of some four books of poems, the latest being Ariake Shu.) To have a support at the start is nothing particularly bad; but at the same time it is enough of a disadvantage. It is a question of genuineness for poetry; realisation is the main thing.
He has been often charged with vagueness; I should say that he has only to smile over such a charge. We are rather glad that he has no aim of amusing his readers in fact, there he shows a poet’s dignity. Vagueness is often a virtue; a god lives in a cloud; truth cannot be put on one’s finger-tip. The darkness of night is beauty; that is only another view of the light of day. Still we know that when a poet is great, he always goes back to the simplicity of nature; there may come a time for him when he will cry for that simplicity as a child for his mother’s milk. In fact, when he returned to simplicity he was most delightful, as in the case of Browning; read one of his poems called “Shu no Madara” or “The Dark Red Shadow-Spots” with the following lines somewhere:
“Between the spaces,
Of acacia branches commingled,
Spread on
The shining crown of clouds.
Two alone in the shadowy lane,
You and I;
Oh how lovely,
The fragrance of the green!
“The breezes fan,
The leaves of the acacia trees
Turn on
Dreamily.
“The dark-red shadow-spots of the sun
Swing;
Alas, of a sudden,
My thought disordered.”
He is a builder of a brick house who sets his materials with care; he is a curio-shop keeper who arranges his bric-a-brac with no small taste. He is not a free bird who sings to a star; but he is a caged nightingale who sings beautifully. His understanding of what it is to be a poet is thorough; and he can be that quite easily. However, his poetical atmosphere is rather close and shut up; his mind is too systematic; he has too good a head to be a great poet. What is symbolism if not “the affirmation of your own temperament in other things, the spinning of a strange thread which will bind you and the other phenomena together”? Kanbara is that symbolist; he looks upon everything with his own special personality. We have no symbols in the strict literary meaning; it seems to me that he has a great chance before him; and if he can work out his own symbolism, he may create a special cult for the future generation to follow. But we are rather doubtful of the nature of his faith; I have some reason to think that his symbolism may be only a fancy, that it has no root in the ground. It may be his love, but not a purpose; and that is a weak point for him. He has elaborate adjectives, phrases, and description, but we are sure he must find some other way to make his poem alive. Truth and beauty want no explanation, nor pomp of line. His poetical mind is clear like a looking-glass which reflects every line and colour. But his enemy is himself; he has too much restraint, a certain heaviness, unmistakable difficulty with his lines, appeals too much to the reader’s eye; he has an excess of exactitude which only makes him difficult to follow. He uses too often a sharpened pencil to make a landscape of large size; it makes the picture a failure as a whole; he spoils the general effect by paying too diligent attention to details. He is a wonder of development; he is a poet of taste. He takes a little seed of a strange flower, puts it in the ground, waters it, makes it bloom, places it on a tokonoma, and gazes at and admires it from every side; he does not require a great subject to sing on. But his poetical mood is often sophisticated; he is too careful, too timid, like a shy bird. And if he grasps life’s meaning, unfortunately he kills it. It would be his triumph if he could leave out his classicism which he himself created. He has to conquer his own soul; he has to learn the emotion of faith which is primal After all, his cleverness would be only his own fault. Some critic said that Mallarmé (Kanbara’s art, which originated in Rossetti, was improved later by Mallarmé and other French poets) was obscure, not so much because he wrote differently, but because he thought differently, from other people; now I should like to say the same thing of Kanbara. He thinks with a strange thought; how many people of Japan could understand Rossetti or Mallarmé? There are so many echoes of them in Kanbara’s poems; but I do not mean to underestimate his worth; in that shade he is worthy and even wonderful.
IV
I have much to say on Homei Iwano. We hear of a poet of promise with youthfulness and a certain amateurish fire, but never reaching to a state of maturity; such a poet is rarely guilty of falsehood or artificiality, but his want of the power of self-analysis is often wonderful. Iwano is one of that class.
“’Tis too sweet–ah, the joy of the world,
Spring joins with the road of dream; what a vision
(Light mist afar, sleeping flowers anear)
Goes round my spirit’s eyes.
“Let me bid my careless love adieu,
Under the window the slender rains fall on;
My yearning of the springing passion
Would live in the breeze under the cloudy sky.”
“Holding a stone which has no voice,
I cry my world away with tears;
’Tis not for love as the other people say,
’Tis not for the pain which I suffer most,
’Tis more than my pain and love;
My flesh of burning thoughts will burn,
And my hot tears alone run down,
When the loneliness in my bosom comes to flow.
Nor God nor Death is in me;
If there is a thing, ’tis this loneliness:
Now I am a prey of my own life,
And cry away this endless world with the stone;
It bears silence eternally growing,
And I pour on it my own tears.”
It is acknowledged that in his later work he has deserted the golden realm of romanticism and entered delightfully into the silver-grey cloud-land of symbolism; and he has made a better friendship with Verlaine, and taken him as a bosom friend without any proper etiquette, and even thinks that he is himself a Japanese Verlaine. I am sure that there is no slightest harm in it. I do not call his transformation to some sort of symbolism from romanticism an advance to a higher poetical plane–it is simply his line of evolution. And I see a delightful change in Iwano of to-day. But somehow I suspect that in his idea and poetry he is lusting after strange gods and kneeling to them in too free adoration. I even declare that he offends sometimes, but without any bad intention against good taste and discretion; and I espy that he appears quite glad in his own action. It is not a rebellion in his case by any means, but a revolution. But what is the saddest thing with this Iwano is that he has lately stopped singing; he is squandering his own talent and passion on novel-writing and criticism. It is not alone myself that wishes his return to poetry.
There are other names who have helped to make this new-styled poems or Shintaishi a strong literary force and brought it to the present development–for instance, Hakusei Hiraki, who grasps a large subject and executes with a rigid construction and handsome but passionless rhetoric; Tetsukan Yosano, whose life-long training in Uta-writing made his poems terse, and whose experience of life flashes sharp; Suimei Kawai, whose calm rhythm and tender beauty of feeling might suggest a Longfellow; Kagai Kodama, whose Byronic fire and surprise cannot be overlooked; and Gekko Takayasu, who is the singer of Kyoto, the old capital, where he lives, that is to say, an appreciator of quieter life and somewhat old but pleasing ideality. And lastly, we cannot forget the name of Tokoku Kitamura, a singer of Byronism, who, some years before Shimazaki, already breathed a new poetical spirit into the poetry of modern Japan; in truth, he might be termed the father of Shintaishi. The development of the last few years brought to the front two names, Hakushu Kitahara and Rofu Miki, to whose work special attention should be called.