Page:The Sacred Tree (Waley 1926).pdf/23

 an ill-used step-child, somewhat in the manner of the edifying stories told in the Fairchild Family, but wholly lacking in the occasional felicities which spring unexpectedly from Mrs. Sherwood's pen. It is, however, a short book (only about 200 pages) and that is the best that can be said for it.

In none of these works is there any ability or desire to portray character. That is not in itself fatal to a work of fiction. The Arabian Nights are without it, and it exists only in the most rudimentary form in Defoe. But if this resource be neglected, something must take its place. There must be a fertility of narrative invention (as in Near Eastern fiction) or the building up of effect by sequences of actual word-texture (as in Virginia Woolf). Otherwise not literature but mere perfunctory anecdote will result, as has indeed happened in the case of Genji's predecessors.

Now Murasaki herself has every quality which these earliers writers lack. She exploits character, in a very restrained way, it is true, but with an unerring instinct how to produce the greatest effect with the least possible display. And to this she adds not only an astonishing capacity for invention, but also a beauty of actual diction unsurpassed by any long novel in the world. For none of these qualities was she indebted in any way to such of her predecessors as survive. Concerning lost works it is useless to speculate.

I have said that besides the three early stories there are other prose works which have some bearing on the history of Japanese fiction. To begin with there are the Tales of Ise, written somewhere about 890 They consist of 125 short paragraphs (often only two or three lines) containing little poems and a description of the circumstances under which they were written. They appear to concern the love-adventures of a single person, but are quite