ies on the
dead, laments over the uncertainty of life. A chief place is given
to the seasons, the sound of purling streams, the snow of Mount
Fuji, waves breaking on the beach, seaweed drifting to the shore,
the song of birds, the hum of insects, even the croaking of frogs,
the leaping of trout in a mountain stream, the young shoots of fern
in spring, the belling of deer in autumn, the red tints of the
maple, the moon, flowers, rain, wind, mist; these are among the
favorite subjects which the Japanese poets delight to dwell upon.
If we add some courtly and patriotic effusions, a vast number of
conceits more or less pretty, and a very few poems of a religious
cast, the enumeration is tolerably complete. But, as Mr.
Chamberlain has observed, there are curious omissions. War
songs--strange to say--are almost wholly absent. Fighting and
bloodshed are apparently not considered fit themes for poetry."[V]

The drama and the novel have both achieved considerable development,
yet judged from Occidental standards, they are comparatively weak and
insipid. They, of course, conspicuously reflect the characteristics of
the social order to which they belong. Critics call repeated attention
to the lack of sublimity in Japanese literature, and ascribe it to
their inherent race nature. While the lack of sublimity in Japanese
scenery may in fact account for the characteristic in question, still
a more conclusive explanation would seem to be that in the older
social order man, as such, was not known. The hidden glories of the
soul, its temptations and struggles, its defects and victories, could
not be the themes of a literature arising in a completely communal
social order, even though it possessed individualism of the Buddhistic
type.[W] These are the themes that give Western literature--poetic,
dramatic, and narrative--its opportunity for sustained power and
sublimity. They portray the inner life of the spirit.

The poverty of poetic form is another point of Western criticism. Mr.
Aston has shown how this poverty is directly due to the phonetic
characteristics of the language. Diversities of both rhyme and rhythm
are practically excluded from Japanese poetry by the nature of the
language. And this in turn has led to the "preference of the national
genius for short poems." But language is manifestly the combined
product of linguistic heredity and the social order, and