Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/24

6 swift upward growth between the years 700 and 1000.

Beyond the year 1159 we come to a period of Japanese disaster. Civil wars rent the poetic little court circle asunder, and repeatedly devastated the entire land until civilization almost disappeared. No literature worth naming was composed for nearly five hundred years. What little continued to exist was preserved by the Buddhist monks in the partial shelter of their monasteries. Religion indeed flourished; many sects sprang up; and under the monks' fostering, there did appear about 1400 a form of drama which has been perpetuated even to our own day, and is now occasionally acted at the Japanese court.

This was the lyric drama or "No." These No consisted of short, chanted plays, two of the most noted of which our volume gives. But apart from this religiously protected drama, medieval Japan possessed no national literature. Even the older works of what might well be called the Golden Period were forgotten, locked in Buddhist shrines, and written in a Chinese-Japanese tongue no longer readable even by the superstitious possessors of the manuscripts.

From this state of constant warfare and intellectual desolation, Japan was finally rescued by Iyeyasu, who, in the year 1600, crushed his rivals in the great battle of Sekigahara, and became what we would call a "benevolent tyrant." With all power in his hands, he used it wisely and well for his people. Europeans had now begun trading with the Japanese; but the successor of Iyeyasu drove them from the country and exterminated all the followers of the Christian faith, which had been spreading rapidly through Japan. After this last terrific massacre, the court rulers completely barred Japan to foreigners, so as to prevent any further danger from foreign religions, foreign ideas, or foreign intrigues. In this secluded, hermit position, Japan remained for over two hundred years.

During these last centuries of what may be called the pre