The earlier and limited edition of this work of Ernest Fenollosa contains four plays, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. The larger edition contains fifteen plays and abridgements and all of Fenollosa’s notes concerning the Japanese stage that I have yet been able to prepare for publication. This Japanese stuff has not the solidity, the body, of Rihaku (Li Po). It is not so important as the Chinese work left by Fenollosa, but on the other hand it is infinitely better than Tagore and the back-wash from India. Motokiyo and the fourteenth-century Japanese poets are worth more than Kabir. Fenollosa has given us more than Tagore has. Japan is not a Chinese decadence. Japan “went on with things” after China had quit. And China “quit” fairly early: T’ang is the best of her poetry, and after Sung her art grows steadily weaker. It would be hard to prove that the Japanese does not attempt (in his art, that is) to die in aromatic pain of the cherry blossom; but his delicacy is not always a weakness. His preoccupation with nuances may set one against him. Where a Chinese poet shows a sort of rugged endurance, the Japanese dramatist presents a fine point of punctilio. He is “romanticist” against the “classical” _and_ poetic matter-of-factness of the Chinese writer. The sense of punctilio is, so far as I can make out, a Japanese characteristic, and a differentiating characteristic, and from it the Japanese poetry obtains a quality of its own. The poetic sense, almost the sole thing which one can postulate as underlying all great poetry and indispensible to it, is simply the sense of overwhelming emotional values. (For those who must have definitions: Poetry is a verbal statement of emotional values. A poem is an emotional value verbally stated.) In the face of this sense of emotional values there are no national borders. One can not consider Rihaku as a foreigner, one can only consider him human. One can not consider Odysseus, or Hamlet, or Kagekiyo as foreigners, one can only consider them human. At one point in the Noh plays, namely in the climax of _Kagekiyo_ we find a truly Homeric laughter, and I do not think the final passages of this play will greatly suffer by any comparison the reader will be able to make. If I had found nothing else in Fenollosa’s notes I should have been well paid for the three years I have spent on them.