A Tale of Old Japan is reprinted fromthe Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes (Vol.II., p. 308), where it is entitled The TwoPainters: A Tale of Old Japan.
DEDICATION.
The appearance of this poem in its presentform is due chiefly to the demand created forit by a vanished hand. It was set to musicas a cantata by Coleridge Taylor, someyears ago. He thought it his best work.Hardly a week has passed since then withoutsome performance of it, in some part of theworld; and it may be said that the musiche wrote for it has won the lasting affectionof the thousands that have heard it. Hewas, in two works, the most vital andspontaneous musician of his time. The firstwas his youthful setting of Longfellows Hiawatha. Then came many years ofexperiment with European subjects, disappointment,and apparent failure. In theEastern theme of A Tale of Old Japan hefound something which (as those who knowhis history will understand) enabled him todraw the bow across his own heart-strings, and, from the first note to the last, he gavein it the most pathetic, the most hauntingexpression, to his own spirit. To me it wasa most moving fact that his great geniusshould have shown so scrupulous and infinitelypainstaking a regard for the words of thepoem. He submitted to their narrowroom, but in a way that suggests quite newpossibilities in the wedding of music andverse. He preserved every cadence of everyline, and yet he gave the freedom of music tothe whole, in a way that poets had ceasedto think possible. It is therefore to hismemory that I would dedicate the poem, alltoo poor a chrysalis as it must seem for thoseexquisite wings.