Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/30

18 tone of these works was undoubtedly responsible for the large number of political novels which came to be written in Japan at the time. Japanese critics attempted to evaluate the native literature as they thought Europeans might, and in the search for a Japanese Shakespeare or a Japanese Goethe such writers as the eighteenth-century dramatist Chikamatsu were glorified as never before, while the fame of other writers whose works bore no obvious relationship to the European ideas of literature suffered accordingly. Essays with such titles as “The characters of Chikamatsu’s heroines” replaced earlier ones on the importance of literature as a means of encouraging virtue and chastising vice. It was inevitable that Japanese novelists and dramatists should then have begun to write in a revolutionarily different manner. Not only were they interested in aspects of society which had been ignored by their predecessors, but the very language that they used was markedly different. Previous to the Meiji Restoration there had existed a great gap between the colloquial and literary languages. Even the writers of popular romances had used a modified form of the older literary language with its distinctive grammar and vocabulary. But with the large-scale translation of works from English and other European languages it became necessary to make increasing use of the colloquial language in literary expression, for it was found hopelessly awkward to render the conversational approach of the English novel into the flowery patterns of literary-Japanese. The new colloquial style was used not only in translations, but in all works which had been influenced by European example.

There were, it is true, violent protests from various quarters against the adulation accorded to European examples, but although successful in some political and religious matters, such protests failed in so far as literature was concerned. In the past seventy years or more Japanese literature has been intimately