woman at the "Japanese Village" in London. As well, says Mr. Isawa, take a jinrikisha-man for referee on questions of grammar and diction, as such a woman for an authority on a matter so delicate as musical intervals. According to Mr. Isawa, the second, fourth, and sixth in the classical music of Japan are identical with the same intervals of the modern European scale, but the third (major third) is sharper, and the seventh flatter. The popular or samisen scale is different. Like the scale of mediæval Europe we still quote Mr. Isawa it has for its chief peculiarity a semitone above the tonic, which is one among various reasons for believing the samisen, together with its scale, to have found its way here from the Spaniards at Manila, and not from Luchu according to the current Japanese opinion. Mr. R. Dittrich, the latest investigator, diverges from all his predecessors, and establishes three separate scales, which are properly pentatonic, but sometimes made heptatonic through the addition of two auxiliary notes. These generally omitted notes are to our ears the most important of all, namely the third and the sixth.
Be the scale what it may, the effect of Japanese music is, not to soothe, but to exasperate beyond all endurance the European breast. Miss Bacon, in her charming book entitled Japanese Girls and Women, demurely remarks: "It seems to me quite fortunate that the musical art is not more generally practised." That is what every one thinks, though most Europeans of the sterner sex would use considerably stronger expressions to relieve their feelings on the matter. Japanese music employs only common time. Harmony it has none. It knows nothing of our distinction of modes, and therefore, as a writer on the subject has pointed out, it lacks alike the vigour and majesty of the major mode, the plaintive tenderness of the minor, and the marvellous effects of light and shade which arise from the alternations of the two. Perhaps this is the reason why the Japanese themselves are so indifferent to the subject. One never hears a party of Japanese talking seriously about music; musical questions are never, discussed in the newspapers; no one goes to a temple service
