Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/180

 portions, dancing also must have been in wide favour. There is no Japanese music that will not serve as accompaniment for the Japanese stanza, and the stanza, in turn, adapts itself perfectly to the fashion of the Japanese dance. The law of the unities seems to have prescribed that the cadence of the stanza should melt into the lilt of the song, and that the measure of the song should be worked out by the "woven paces and waving hands" of the dance. That is the inevitable impression produced by Japanese poetry, Japanese music, and Japanese dancing. The affinity between them is so close that it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. The music of words, the music of motion, and the music of song rank equally in popular appreciation. Of course Buddhist music is not included in that description. Buddhist music is a wail, a threnody. It makes no appeal to the natural disposition of the Japanese, and the vogue it obtained from the Nara epoch onwards largely contributed to the growth of a dangerous form of pessimism. The tendency of the Japanese has always been to accompany their feasting and merry-making with music, versifying, and dancing. At the time now under consideration, there was the "winding water fête," when princes, high officials, courtiers, and noble ladies seated themselves by the banks of a rivulet meandering gently through some fair park, and launched tiny