Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/100

74 been introduced, but no development in construction and character-drawing, as we understand those terms, no change in the peculiar ethical and feudal teachings of the Yedo period, has supervened. Enter a Tōkyō theatre to-day, and you will find yourself in old Japan, among resplendent monsters, whose actions violate our moral sense, yet exhibit a high and stern morality by no means out-moded through the advent of modern ideas.

Beauty and duty are the hall-marks that stamp authentic die plays which delight and instruct the Japanese. A race of artists, they expect and obtain such stage-pictures as no other stage affords. To watch act after act of their spectacular tragedies is like looking through a portfolio of their best colour-prints. One revels in the rich series of glowing hues, flowing lines, majestic contours. And, whereas in a play by Shakespeare or Molière, however sumptuously mounted, the European actor often spoils the picture by inability to wear the garb and adopt the gait of more ceremonious ages, becoming a vociferous fashion-plate, a strenuous caricature, the Oriental actor never does so. He has not been forced to acquire having never lost, the dignified movements proper to more deliberate dress. His pictorial charm is enhanced by his faculty of sublime repose. Fidgety "supers" are unknown. Moreover, visible beauty, of which the credit may be stared between costumier and stage-manager, is supplemented by the invisible beauty of ideas. The author can give free rein to fancy. Dragons and demons, ogres and magicians, will not be wasted on prosaic pittites, who starve their imagination by feeding it once a year on vulgarised pantomime, because to them music-hall ditties are more congenial