Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/142

 much in common with the works of Juvenal and Aristophanes, it seldom recalled Wycherley or Congreve. If it sometimes raised a laugh at the grosser phases of life, it scarcely ever became a vehicle for presenting to public imagination the immoral in company with the attractive. And the new civilisation may be said to have purged it of all evil elements. In modern Japan a year's advance represents, in many cases, a decade of progress. The present generation of Japanese are probably as far removed from the license of pre-Meiji days as the English of our era are from the indecencies of "The Rake's Progress" and "Tristram Shandy."

The social status of the actor has not yet been appreciably raised. The theatre, indeed, is no longer avoided by the upper classes, but only as a point of special complaisance do they occasionally admit the stars of the stage to their company. In no small degree the actor himself is responsible for this anomaly. With little hope of improving his station, he pays little heed to the obligations of respectability. He apparently thinks that a vicious life cannot add much to the disabilities under which he already labours. At the same time fate, with its usual waywardness, impels the professional danseuse (geisha) to seek in the actor's unconventional society solace for the orderly services that she is obliged to render in aristocratic circles whence the actor is ostracised. With these "butterflies of the banquet," the ob-