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93 outward semblance of women by every contrivance which the costumier and coiffeur could supply, but were required to spend their lives from childhood in feminine costume and society, that their masculine proclivities might be as far as possible obliterated. Even now their names stand first on the programme, their dressing-rooms are locked on the inside, their influence is paramount in the Actors' Guild. The supremacy of Mr. Danjuro is due in no small degree to his ability to play both male and female characters with equal éclat. Notwithstanding every precaution and privilege, the actor cannot acquire the intonation of an actress. His reedy falsetto is a poor parody of the musical tones in which Japanese women converse, and the loss to a public which has never been caressed by Sara Bernhardt's golden voice or thrilled by Mrs. Patrick Campbell's may be sympathetically imagined. But, though Tōkyō has no actresses, the Women's Theatre in Kyōto, in which are no actors, might seem a partial set-off to this deficiency. In fact, however, though the women are extremely clever in simulating the gait and gestures of men—if I had not been taken behind the scenes, I should have believed myself in the wrong theatre—they are hopelessly handicapped by physical weakness. The stage is so enormous, and the performance so long, that an artist may reckon on walking ten miles in the course of the day, while the voice is severely taxed by the prolonged stridency of declamation.

While the stage-woman, adroitly personated, is often tolerable, the stage-child is an intolerable infliction. Convention has decreed that it shall shriek all its lines on one high monotonous note, and shriek it does. There is no attempt at variety of tone