SOURCE: Dixon, J. M. “Chômei and Wordsworth: A Literary Parallel.” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 20 (1893): 193-204.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1892, Dixon compares and contrasts Chōmei's poetry to that of William Wordsworth.]

There are few countries upon which nature has lavished so much beauty as Japan, and her inhabitants have not shown themselves heedless of their privileges. In the domain of art the beauties of nature have been reproduced by Japanese artists in a way that has delighted the world, and effected a revolution in Western ideas of what constitutes beauty in ornament. In the domain of literature the Japanese have shown less power and originality. If the inhabitants of Europe have been fettered by conventionality in expression, this has been still more the case in Japan. It may be said with truth that except in a small department of composition, having an affinity with our sonnet,¹ they have furnished nothing new or fresh in the realm of literature. But still we should expect to find a certain amount of truthful utterance respecting the aspects of nature, such as we find in English poetry since the time of Cowper. Before Cowper's time classical and Hebraic influences had been too strong in Europe for the growth of what we might call in a restricted sense “natural religion.” A recluse in European countries, till Rousseau took up his abode on St. Peter's isle in the Lake of Brienne, was always a religious devotee, a man of introspective habits who retired from the world to make up his account with his Maker. This habit of theological introspection, it is true, is absent in our Elizabethan poets, but then classical traditions were all powerful in their interpretation of nature. Shakespeare's world is not simple outside nature as he saw it, but a world semi-Italian in its ideas and vocabulary. The prettiest song which he wrote is the sevenade in Cymbeline; and it opens with a classical conceit:—

                    Hark! hark the lark at heaven's gate sings,
                                                  And Phœbus 'gins arise
                              His steeds to water at those springs
                                        On chaliced flowers that lies;
                                        And winking Mary-buds begin
                                        To ope their wondering eyes:
With everything that pretty is, my lady sweet, arise;
                                                                                Arise, arise!

It was Wordsworth's mission in English poetry to remove this foreign element of nature interpretation, and with a mind wholly receptive to study nature at first-hand and record the impressions which his mind received. He wished as much as possible to be a child again, and with this view he ran a tilt against theological dogmas like that of Original Sin which seemed to him to cast a slur upon nature. He thus ignored in his treatment of the world the problems of sin and atonement, and brought himself in touch with all such as, in any land and conforming to any religion, sought to enjoy the works of the great Creator. When, therefore, we find a Japanese literary character of the 12th century retiring to the hills and seeking to find communion with the mountains, the streams, with animate and inanimate life, we at once think of contrasting him with our high-priest of nature. This is why I have linked together Chōmei and the bard of Rydal Mount. Both were recluses; both were devout admirers of nature, and receptive in their attitude towards her. Chōmei, the son of a priest in the province of Yamashiro, was born in the middle of the 12th century. Disappointed in his hopes of worldly promotion, he sought retirement in the sequestered village of Ohara. Afterwards he became for a time the guest of Sanetomo at Kamakura, but again withdraw from the world, passing the remainder of his life in the province of Etchū. He is highly esteemed as a poet, and many of his pieces are popular. The passage offered in translation gives a very fair example of his philosophy and style. Though a good Buddhist, he does not seem to have been in any way a devotee, but rather to have mildly conformed with the requirements of that religion, whose tenets were no doubt congenial to him. In one passage of the extract occurs a reference to sin, the appearance of snow suggesting to him sins which accumulate and then vanish away. To Christians the reference at once recalls the passage in Isaiah in which the promise is made that “sins which are as scarlet shall be made white as snow.” But there seems little beyond a surface connection between the two statements. According to the Buddhist creed, sins are washed away by devotion, by prayer, and by good deeds. Chōmei confesses that he was lax in attending to the rites of his religion; certainly Wordsworth was the reverse of punctilious in these matters. Both of them seem to have found their chief delight in studying the varying aspects of nature. But Wordsworth's attitude towards society was infinitely more sympathetic and kindly, while in the background of his solitary walks and musings among the hills were an affectionate household and the realization of all that is most delightful in home life. No doubt he was out of touch with town life, and disliked the din and rush of the city, but he was not indifferent to the sufferings and struggles of humanity and would have rejected the callous indifference of Chōmei as animalistic. Many of Chōmei's moral musings, indeed, remind us strongly of the sentimentalism of a mock-antique balled like Edwin and Angelina:—

Alas! the joys that fortune brings
          Are trifling and decay,
And those who prize the paltry things
          More trifling still than they:
And what is friendship but a name,
          A charm that luils to sleep—
A shade that follows wealth or fame,
          But leaves the wretch to weep.

The sentimentalism in each case is shallow and unsatisfactory, the misanthropy is a temporary phase of mind, the result of pique. “Life,” says Chōmei; “is empty as the cast-off shell of a cicada.” Here he speaks not as a philosopher but as a disappointed man of the world. His blood does not grow richer and warmer by his secluded life among the hills; it seems to grow thinner and colder, and his whole being looks forward to the happiness of a mere passivity. It is not the gladness that accompanied the development of Wordsworth's life, spent also avowedly in conformity with nature, and with a desire to prove as receptive as possible to its influences. On his sixty-third birthday Wordsworth writes in a different strain from Chōmei, very at nearly the same age:

Teach me with quick-eared spirit to rejoice
In admonitions of Thy softest voice!
Whate'er the paths these mortal feet may trace
Breathe through my soul the blessing of Thy grace,
Glad, through a perfect love, a faith sincere
Drawn from the wisdom that begins with fear,
Glad to expand.

This last phrase seems to sum up the whole divergence. Wordsworth's life among the hills was a life of yearly expansion: Chōmei's was confessedly spent in a contraction that was finally to end in absorption in the Infinite. Self was to the latter a “floating cloud,” a “drop of dew,” soon to melt in the infinite and be heard of no more. The ideal of his solitary life was tranquillity, the absence of worry, offence, and anxiety. He refrains from all attempts to proselytize, or preach to others. “These remarks of mine,” says he, commenting upon the satisfaction he finds in living so simple a life, “these remarks are not intended as a sermon addressed to the well-to-do.” Here comes in the national indifferentism which so often strikes the Western mind as strange, and which, though pleasing at first because of its inoffensiveness, is in the end irritating from its complete lack of moral glow and strength and warmth. We are reminded of the old question of Cain; “Am I my brother's keeper?” It is the æsthetic as distinguished from the religious frame of mind. Now, Wordsworth is not an indifferentist, but has always a didactic aim more or less in view. At the close of the Prelude addressing Coleridge, he writes:—

Prophets of nature, we to them (the nations) will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the Earth
On which he dwells.

No indifferentism is to be found in an utterance like this. Again, in Chōmei's attitude to flowers and trees, we find an affinity to the ways of the modern æsthete, pleased with the hue or curve of a bough or blossom. “On my way home from the moor of Amazu,” he remarks, “I am frequently rewarded by finding a choice bough of cherry or maple or a cluster of fruit, which I offer to Buddha or reserve for my own use.” Was Cain's offering of a similar gift to Jehovah rejected purely because of the mental attitude of the giver, or because of the nature of the gift? Is there any underlying moral in the Bible story? Can culled flowers and fruits be made to speak the language of moral truth? Or is their mission in this respect limited to the department of æstheticism? It is certain that Wordsworth had a repugnance to the plucking of flowers and twigs, as if it were a kind of sacrilege:—

                                                            Then up I rose
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being.

The remembrance struck him afterwards with pain, and he proceeds to advise his daughter to leave such scenes in peace:—

Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand
Touch—for there is a spirit in the woods,

The beauty of a creature is, so to speak, its own, and is independent of locality, while the beauty of the vegetable world belongs to the creative spirit of the Universe. Here comes in the Pantheism of Wordsworth, a Pantheism strictly conservative of the individual as a free agent, and dealing directly with the world of things. It was a protest against an irreverent attitude towards mountains, groves, and brooks, all of which silently interpret the mind of their Creator, if we will but read the lesson:—

One impulse from a vernal wood
          Will teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
                    Than all the sages can.

It will be found that, when Wordsworth uses the objects of the vegetable or inanimate creation for a poetical purpose, they are never dissevered from their surroundings. It is the “primrose by the river's brim”; “the meanest flower that blows”.

                    A host of golden daffodils,
          Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Or, when he talks of the modest Celandine:—

Thou dost show thy pleasant face
          On the moor, and in the wood,
In the lane—there's not a place,
                    Howsoever mean it be
          But 'tis good enough for thee.

The west, both to Chōmei and to Wordsworth, was a quarter from which came comfort in meditation. The valley in which the Japanese sage lived opened out, he remarks, to the west, the home of the happy, whence comfort came to him in his meditations. To Chōmei it was a mild influence, significant of complete rest hereafter, when his soul would be lost in the infinite; while Wordsworth refers to it as a goal, whither he is travelling and where possibly will be granted a larger and a fuller life:—

                    Stepping westward seemed to be
                    A kind of heavenly destiny;
          I liked the greeting; 'twas a sound
          Of something without place or bound;
          And seemed to give me spiritual right
          To travel through that region bright.
The voice was soft, and she who spake
          Was walking by her native lake:
                    The salutation had to me
          The very sound of courtesy:
          Its power was felt; and while my eye
          Was fixed upon the glowing Sky,
          The echo of the voice enwrought
          A human sweetness with the thought
Of travelling through the world that lay
                    Before me in my endless way.

It will be observed in the extract that Chōmei refers to the cuckoo as having a mournful note. In this conception of the bird he follows the Chinese tradition, for in Chinese poetry it is always spoken of as having a sad and mournful cry. There is a transmigration story in Chinese literature, which makes the Emperor Bō of Shoku turn into a cuckoo after death, whence its Chinese name of Bō-tei. According to another tradition it tears its mouth in crying and blood issues forth, whence a second name given to the birk, Tei-ketsu or “Wailing-at-blood.” Japanese writers have not clung to this foreign conception of the cuckoo, but, on the contrary, are loud in singing its praises as a herald of joy. In one of his poems Chōmei himself speaks of it as a pleasant visitant, much in the manner of Michael Bruce (or John Logan?)—“I was struck dumb with pleasure for a few minutes after hearing the cuckoo's note, sounding for the first time in the year.”

The bird is also credited with cherishing deep love for its mate, and the fact that it does not hatch its young is frequently commented upon. In Japanese poetry we find it usually associated with the moon, the Tachibana or orange shrub, with rain, with clouds, and with the Uyonohana (Dendzia Scrabra). Several of the valleys in the neighbourhood of Kyōto, where the bird is rare, were noted for its song, and thither parties used to go when spring-time returned to enjoy the luxury of hearing its notes.

In Mr. Chamberlain's delightful volume, Japanese Classical Poetry, two lyrics culled from the Manyefushifu (Manyōshū) will be found, which address the cuckoo in the most friendly terms:—

Though through the livelong day
          Soundeth thy roundelay,
                    Never its accents may
                    Pall on my ear:
          Come, take a bribe of me!
          Ne'er to far regions flee:
          Dwell on mine orange tree,
                                                            Cuckoo so dear!

(p. 95.)

The above is anonymous. A few pages further on occurs the second lyric, witten by Hironoha, and bearing the date, a.d. 750:

Near to the valley stands my humble cot,
          The village nestles 'neath the cooling shade
          Of lofty timber; but the silent glade
Not yet re-echoes with the cuckoo's note.
The morning hour e'er finds me, sweetest bird!
          Before my gate; and, when the day doth pale,
          I cast a wistful glance adown the vale;
But e'en one note, alas! not yet is heard,

(p. 113.)

Still again, among the Short Stanzas, (p. 119) in a piece attributed to Hitomaro, the cuckoo is associated with the wisteria as representative of early summer:—

In blossoms the wisteria-tree to-day
Breaks forth, that sweep the wavelets of my lake:
When will the mountain cuckoo come and make
The garden vocal with his first sweet lay?

This is far from the Chinese mythological and classical-Japanese notion, which makes the bird a herald of death and dissolution, whose note summons a soul to begin the ascent of the mountain of death. The same struggle is noticeable in English poetry between an unpleasing foreign and a pleasant indigenous conception of the cuckoo. Readers of Horace will remember the passage in the first Book of his Satires (VII, 31), where, in a street encounter, a passer by calls a rustic, cuculum that is, “lazy lubber,” by way of contempt²:—

Magna compellans voce cuculum.

In Drayton we discover this South-European conception, which had come to him through Italian literature:—

“No nation names the cuckoo but in scorn,”

It was regarded as a type of selfishness and of unwarranted intrusion into domestic privacy and harmony. The coarse allusions to the cuckoo as an adulterous bird, so common in Elizabethan poetry, die out in the XVIIIth century. The term “cuckold,” used contemptuously for weakling, lingered on, and is perhaps last to be met with in Burns's drinking song, Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut. A recent editor of a book of college songs has been censured for reproducing the term:—

Wha first shall rise to gang awa.
A cuckold, coward loon is he!

Milton in his first sonnet names it ‘rude bird of hate’—he calls upon the nightingale to sing:—

          Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate
Foretell my hapless doom in some grove nigh.

In another sonnet he classes it contemptuously with asses, apes, and dogs, animals which have a harsh and unpleasing cry:—

When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.

John Bunyan likewise treats the cuckoo very disparagingly, blaming it because it is neither the first to welcome our spring, nor bring us its first tokens. He calls it a “yawling-bawling cuckoo”:—

          And since, while here, she only makes a noise
So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,
The Formalist we may compare her to,
For he doth suck our eggs and sing “Cuckoo”!

It must be remembered that the earlier English conception of the bird, like our later and present attitude towards it, is altogether different, being thoroughly friendly. The first English song set to musical notes addresses the cuckoo as a cheerful bird, the messenger of spring:

Summer is y-comen in,
          Loud sing, cuckoo:
          Groweth seed
And bloometh mead
And spring'th the wood now:
          Sing, cuckoo.
.....          Merry sing, cuckoo!
          Cuckoo, cuckoo!
Well sing thou, cuckoo!
Nor cease thou never now.

The poets of the XVIIIth century reverted to this earlier attitude:—

Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green,
          Thy sky is ever clear,
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
          No winter in thy year!

This freshest and brightest of XVIIIth century lyrics, originally published by Logan in 1770, is now generally ascribed to his friend Michael Bruce. This lyric is a landmark in English poetry, the bugle-note of a new era. Its influence on Wordsworth was undoubted. That a poet should dare to adress seriously so commonplace a thing as a cuckoo, Scottice “gowk,” otherwise “fool,” was a new thing in polite literature. Here we establish a community with the nature lovers of old Japan, who made excursions to the green valleys of Yamato that they might listen to the cuckoo's voice. It is a noticeable fact that Miss Wordsworth, in her life of her relative, brings in his attitude towards the cuckoo as illustrative of his treatment of nature. While Tennyson, speaking of the bird, uses the language of mere sensation:—

The cuckoo told his name to all the hills,

Wordsworth speaks in the language of ideas,

O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird,
          Or but a wandering voice?

Our present attitude toward the bird may be summed up in the lines of a recent contributor to the London Spectator; and it will be seen how closely this attitude approaches that of the Japanese, as unaffected by Chinese influences:—

Forbid the solace of home to know,
          Or dutiful ministry's crowning grace,—
Some twist primeval has hardened so
          In the long career of a vagrant race;
                    Though he build no timely nest,
                    Or semblance of a nest,
                    In the way admired and best,
His lay enchains the ear
With an elfin power to cheer,—
                    Cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!

Note.—The Japanese cuckoo, of which there are four varieties, is migratory like the European bird. These sub-orders are:—

Cuculus canorus, L. (Common Cuckoo)—Kakko, Ōmushikui; Cuculus intermedius, Vahl. (Himalayan Cuckoo)—Tsutsudori, Ponpondori; Cuculus poliocephalus, Lath. (Little Cuckoo)—Hototogisu, Tokiwadori, Imosedori; Cuculus hyperythrus, Gld. (Amoor Cuckoo)—(wintering in China and the Philippines) Jyu-ichi, Jihishinchō. Of these the third variety is undoubtedly the poets' favourite. It is believed to deposit its eggs in the nest of the Uguisu (Cettia cantans) or Japanese nightingale. The Common Cuckoo makes use of the nest of the Japanese Bunting (Hōjiro). Our English cuckoo lays its eggs in the nest of the wagtail, which makes an affectionate foster-mother; and also in the hedge-sparrow's nest. The words of the Fool in Lear will be remembered:—

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it had its head bit off by its young.

Notes

1. ‘The beautiful rhymeless short ode of Japanese poetry, for the knowledge of which we are indebted to Mr. Chamberlain.’—Theodore Watts on the Sonnet in Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed.

2. Compare the modern Scotch gowk=‘stupid fellow.’