Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/26

14 echo in the sweetly nostalgic recollections of his Japanese imitator. Or, the portrait of a Taoist immortal, filled by the Chinese artist with an intense sense of mystery, becomes, in an almost direct Japanese copy, a charming composition of the immortal, his magic toad, pine-trees and clouds.

In this attitude we may find what the Japanese call miyabi, literally, “courtliness”, for Japanese literature is prevailingly aristocratic in tone. This does not mean, of course, that there have been no folk ballads, and no novels designed to meet the tastes of the lower classes, but Japanese popular literature has not been of very great importance, at least until recent centuries, and even such works are likely to display far greater elegance than their Western equivalents do. Most of the poetry in the official anthologies was composed by courtiers, and this highly refined art has been so widely disseminated at all levels of society, that the images most likely to come to a peasant-poet’s mind today are those first used centuries ago by a prince at the court. There is a difference in this respect between the Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. In China, most of what we think of as literature—love poetry, the drama, the novel, etc.—was considered beneath the dignity of the educated writers, and we possess relatively few works of merit in these genres when compared with the vast bulk of Chinese literature. In Japan, even emperors were not ashamed to write love poetry, and the novels and dramas written by members of the court gave the tone to later works in these forms. But it was not only in the strict sense of having been written by aristocrats that the literature is aristocratic, for we may discover a constant tendency even in the popular literature for it to develop into more refined forms. Again and again we read how some new verse form or theatrical entertainment, originally intended merely as amusement for the lower classes, was purified and codified by persons who saw the