Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/75

Rh rest being Tanka of thirty-one syllables, with a few in somewhat similar short metres.

The neglect of the Naga-uta for the Tanka which is indicated by these figures was no passing phase of Japanese poetry. It has continued up to our own day, with fatal consequences, and has been a bar to all real progress in the poetic art. How a nation which possessed in the Naga-uta an instrument not unfitted, as there are examples to show, for the production of narrative, elegiac, and other poems, could practically confine itself for many centuries to a form of poetic expression within whose narrow limits nothing more substantial than aphorisms, epigrams, conceits, or brief exclamations can be contained, is a question which it is more easy to ask than to answer.

Much of the poetry of this time was the outcome of poetical tournaments, at which themes were proposed to the competitors by judges who examined each phrase and word with the minutest critical care before pronouncing their verdict. As might be expected, the poetry produced under these circumstances is of a more or less artificial type, and is wanting in the spontaneous vigour of the earlier essays of the Japanese muse. Conceits, acrostics, and untranslatable word-plays hold much too prominent a place; but for perfection of form, the poems of this time are unrivalled. It is no doubt to this quality that the great popularity of this collection is due. Sei Shōnagon, writing in the early years of the eleventh century, sums up a young lady's education as consisting of writing, music, and the twenty volumes of the Kokinshiu. Subsequent poetry is evidently modelled on it rather than on the more archaic poems of the Manyōshiu. Even at the present day the Kokinshiu is the best