Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/346

 yang. All this comes from the magistrates abandoning justice and humanity. … Clouds that float in the air for me, darken the sky! Winds that murmur and moan for me, whirl down in tempest!" Snow in the heats of summer and a three years’ drought attest the innocence of the unjustly executed Teou-ngo; and if for the epic poet of England the seasons change at the sin of Adam, for the Chinese dramatist they change at the condemnation of the innocent.

Many other examples of this prominence of Nature in the Chinese drama might be cited—for example, the description of the Yellow River in the first act of Si-siang-ki, translated by M. Stanislas Julien; but we shall prefer to observe the same feature in the lyrical drama of Japan. The characters and names of the Japanese plays translated by Mr. Chamberlain, in his Classical Poetry of the Japanese, show want of individual characterisation, and predominence of allegorical or abstract ideas and natural description. In the Robe of Feathers the dramatis personæ are a fairy, a fisherman, and the chorus; in Life is a Dream (an allegorical piece suggestive of Calderon's autos sacramentales) and the Deathstone individuality is likewise wanting. Here, however, we are only concerned with the prominence of Nature in these plays; it may be illustrated by an outline of the Robe of Feathers, as translated by Mr. Chamberlain. The play opens with a long recitative,in which the fisherman and chorus describe the beauties of Miho's pine-clad shore at dawn on a spring morning. The fisherman steps on shore and the action of the piece begins. "As I land on Miho's shore,” says the fisherman, "flowers come fluttering down, strains of music re-echo, and a more than earthly fragrance fills the air. Surely there is something in this." Suddenly he sees