Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/38

34. Practise non-practice. Taste non-taste"; let me here add one more line: "Express in non-expression." To attach too closely to the subject matter in literary expression is never a way to complete the real saturation; the real infinite significance will only be accomplished at such a consummate moment when the end and means are least noticeable, and the subject and expression never fluctuate from each other, being in perfect collocation; it is the partial loss of the birthright of each that gains an artistic triumph. I have a word which is much used carelessly in the West, but whose true meaning is only seldom understood, that is the word of suggestion. I have an art; that is the art of suggestion. What suggestion? you might ask. I will point the way, if you are given a right sort of artistic susceptibility, where the sunlight falls on the laughter of woods and waters, where the birds sing by the flowers; again I will point, if you are able to read the space between the lines, to the pages of the Japanese seventeen-syllable Hokku poems, the tiniest poems of the world.

I do never mean that the Hokku poems are lyrical poetry in the general Western understanding; but the Japanese mind gets the effect before perceiving the fact of their brevity, its sensibility resounding to their single note, as if the calm bosom of river water to the song of a bird. One of the English critics exclaims from