Page:Kojiki by Chamberlain.djvu/16

vi instance authenticity is sufficiently proved by internal evidence. It is hard to believe that any forger living later than the eighth century of our era should have been so well able to discard the Chinese “padding” to the old traditions, which, after the acceptance by the Court of the “Chronicles of Japan,” had come to be generally regarded as an integral portion of those very traditions; and it is more unlikely still that he should have invented a style so little calculated to bring his handiwork into repute. He would either have written in fair Chinese, like the mass of early Japanese prose writers (and his Preface shows that he could do so if he were so minded); or, if the tradition of there having been a history written in the native tongue had reached him, he would have made his composition unmistakably Japanese in form by arranging the characters in the order demanded by Japanese syntax, and by the consistent use of characters employed phonetically to denote particles and terminations, after the fashion followed in the Rituals, and developed (apparently before the close of the ninth century) into what is technically known as the “Mixed Phonetic Style” (Kana-mazhiri), which has remained ever since as the most convenient vehicle for writing the language. As it is, his quasi-Chinese construction, which breaks down every now and then to be helped up again by a few Japanese words written phonetically, is surely the first clumsy attempt at combining two divergent elements. What however is simply incredible is that, if the supposed forger lived even only a hundred years later than A.D. 712, he should so well have imitated or divined the archaisms of that early period. For the eighth century of our era was a great turning point in the Japanese language, the Archaic Dialect being then replaced by the Classical; and as the Chinese language and literature were alone thenceforward considered worthy the student’s attention, there was no means of keeping up an acquaintance with the diction of earlier reigns, neither do we find the poets of the time ever attempting to adorn their verse with obsolete phraseology. That was an affectation reserved for a later epoch, when the diffusion of books rendered it possible. The poets of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries apparently wrote as they spoke; and the test of language alone would almost allow of our arranging their compositions half century by half century, even without the dates which are given in many instances in the “Collection