Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/217

THE HEIAN EPOCH compose a stanza on a given subject. Sometimes Chinese poetic models were followed; sometimes Japanese; sometimes both. But it is not to be understood that the rhyming terminals of Chinese verse formed at any time a visible feature of Japanese poetical composition. Here, indeed, is exposed one of the most irrational conceits that the literature of any country furnishes. Many of the Japanese poetasters of the Heian era took infinite pains to compose couplets which, they supposed, would satisfy the rhyming requirements of Chinese verse if the Chinese sounds of the ideographs were accurately given and Chinese syntactical order duly preserved. But the true Chinese pronunciation of an ideograph was never known in Japan, and the Chinese order of words had to be changed to make a sentence intelligible to Japanese ears. Hence a verselet laboriously constructed according to the Chinese laws, lost its rhyming terminals altogether when the ideographs received their true pronunciation, and, in fact, retained nothing of its original character except the sense. To expect that an English verbatim translation of the Bucolics of Virgil must fall naturally into hexameters and pentameters, were not more reasonable than to anticipate that a Japanese rendering of a Chinese couplet should preserve the rhyme and metre of the Chinese original. It was characteristic of the silly artificialism of the time that men's energies should be absorbed in the manufacture of 191