Page:The Sacred Tree (Waley 1926).pdf/39

 not the outcome of those clever pieces of small observation by which the modern novelist strives to attain the same effect. Still less is it due to solid character building; for Murasaki's characters are mere embodiments of some dominant characteristic; Genji's father is easy-going; Aoi, proud; Murasaki, long-suffering; Oborozukiyo, light-headed. This sense of reality is due rather, I think, to a narrative gift of a kind that is absolutely extinct in Europe. To analyse such a gift would require pages of quotation. What does it in the last resort consist in, save a preeminent capacity for saying the most relevant things in the most effective order? Yet, simple as this sounds, I believe that in it rests, unperceived by the eye of the Western critic, more than half the secret of Murasaki's art. Her construction is in fact classical; elegance, symmetry, restraint—these are the qualities which she can set in the scales against the interesting irregularities of European fiction. That such qualities should not be easily recognized in the West is but natural; for here the novel has always been Gothic through and through.