So much for theory.  I should like to suggest, however, that it is very probable many attempts at these difficult forms of poetry will be attempted by English poets within the next few years.  There is now a tendency in that direction.  I do not know whether such attempts will be successful; but I should like you to understand that for Western poets they are extremely difficult and that you ought to obtain from the recognition of this fact a new sense of the real value of your own short forms of verse in the hands of a master.  Effects can be produced in Japanese which the Greeks could produce with few syllables, but which the English can not.  Now it strikes me that, instead of even thinking of throwing away old forms of verse in order to invent new ones, the future Japanese poets ought rather to develop and cultivate and prize the forms already existing, which belong to the genius of the language, and which have proved themselves capable of much that no English verse or even French verse could accomplish.  Perhaps only the Italian is really comparable to Japanese in some respects; you can perform miracles with Italian verse.

CHAPTER V

SOME FOREIGN POEMS ON JAPANESE SUBJECTS

The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.  You will commonly find references to Japanese love poems of the popular kind made in such a way as to indicate the writer’s belief that such poems refer to married life or at least to a courtship relation.  No Western writer who has not lived for many years in the East, could write correctly about anything on this subject; and even after a long stay in the country he might be unable to understand.  Therefore a great deal of Western poetry written about Japan must seem to you all wrong, and I can not hope to offer you many specimens of work in this direction that could deserve your praise.  Yet there is some poetry so fine on the subject of Japan that I think you would admire it and I am sure that you should know it.  A proof of really great art is that it is generally true—­it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.  What do you think of the fact that the finest poetry ever written upon a Japanese subject by any Western poet, has been written by a man who never saw the land?  But he is a member of the French Academy, a great and true lover of art, and without a living superior in that most difficult form of poetry, the sonnet.  In the time of thirty years he produced only one very small volume of sonnets, but so fine are these that they were lifted to the very highest place in poetical distinction.  I may say that there are now only three really great French poets—­survivals of the grand romantic school.  These are Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, and Jose Maria de Heredia.  It is the last of whom I am speaking.  As you