“Narrow in its scope and resources, it is chiefly remarkable for its limitations—­for what it has not, rather than what it has.  In the first place there are no long poems.  There is nothing which even remotely resembles an epic—­no Iliad or Divina Commedia—­not even a Nibelungen Lied or Chevy Chase.  Indeed, narrative poems of any kind are short and very few, the only ones which I have met with being two or three ballads of a sentimental cast.  Didactic, philosophical, political, and satirical poems are also conspicuously absent.  The Japanese muse does not meddle with such subjects, and it is doubtful whether, if it did, the native Pegasus possesses sufficient staying power for them to be dealt with adequately.  For dramatic poetry we have to wait until the fourteenth century.  Even then there are no complete dramatic poems, but only dramas containing a certain poetical element.

“Japanese poetry is, in short, confined to lyrics, and what, for want of a better word, may be called epigrams.  It is primarily an expression of emotion.  We have amatory verse poems of longing for home and absent dear ones, praise of love and wine, elegies 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.