Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/179

 seven, seven followed by five, in changeless alternation. What Chinese intercourse did was to supply a medium for transcribing these stanzas, and to suggest the custom of composing them as a pastime at social réunions. The art itself had long existed in Japan, but from the middle of the seventh century it became a polite accomplishment. The Japanese stanza defies translation in any other language. It is a verbal melody which cannot be transposed; cannot be played on a foreign instrument. There is virtually no such thing as versified narrative; no subject is treated continuously in varying phases. In Occidental poetry the cadence of the verse is the accompaniment of the idea; in Japanese poetry, the idea is set to the cadence. The Greeks by a laboured organisation of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, strove to impart to their chorus harmonic as well as metrical value. The Japanese, by a regular alternation of syllabic chords, succeeded in combining the effects of music and metre. The embodied idea is seldom more than a mere suggestion; the whisper of a thought pervading the melody. The music is everything. To seek in the productions of such an art high displays of dramatic imagination, is as idle as to render these snatches of music into the rhymed verses of Western metrical art. To form a true conception of Japanese poetry one must read it in the original.

It is easy to understand that in an age when the passion for verbal melody attained such pro