Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/214

 sake of displaying his opulence. To play the samisen was the accomplishment of a legislator; to turn a couplet the proof of a statesman's capacity. It is impossible to recognise the Japanese of later eras in some of the hysterical creatures with whom history peoples the Heian Court. The stoical samurai, whose first rule of conduct was imperturbability whatever gusts of passion assailed him, had no representative among these voluptuaries of the capital: they were as emotional as the weakest of women. The disappointment of not meeting his lover, or of brief separation from her, produced an access of weeping that drove a man to his couch, and no one thought shame of shedding floods of idle tears in the presence of verdant spring and solemn autumn, or of sobbing in unison with the cricket's chirp and the stag's cry. At no time in the nation's story did wifely fidelity fall so low in public esteem. Widows took a second or a third husband without compunction. Divorced women did not forfeit their eligibility for new ties. Wives had often two or three "protectors." Husbands made a boast of the number of mistresses they supported. A wife was put away or a mistress deserted in the ordinary routine of daily doings. An extraordinary and scarcely comprehensible mania for poetical composition contributed to this immorality. It would have been almost a sacrilege to limit the success of a gracefully turned couplet. Men and