Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/15

Rh our Japanese minds always turn, let me dare say, to something imaginative.

It is my own opinion that the appearance of Basho, our beloved Hokku master, was the greatest happening of our Japanese annals; the Japanese poetry, which had been degenerating for centuries, received a sudden salvation through his own pain and imagination. His greatest hope, to become a poet without words, was finally realised; he was, as I once wrote on the Buddha priest in meditation:

He feels a touch beyond word, He reads the silence's sigh, And prays before his own soul and destiny: He is a pseudonym of the universal Consciousness, A person lonesome from concentration."

When the Japanese poetry joined its hand with the stage, we have the No drama, in which the characters sway in music, soft but vivid, as if a web in the air of perfume; we Japanese find our own joy and sorrow in it. Oh, what a tragedy and beauty in the No stage! I always think that it would be certainly a great thing if the No drama could be properly introduced into the West; the result would be no small protest against the Western stage, it would mean a real revelation for those people who are well tired of their own plays with a certain pantomimic spirit underneath.