Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/140

112 divine truth or philosophic precept. My neighbour (a Buddhist neophyte, whose enthusiasm is tempered by erudition) points out to me the Moon-Washing Fountain, the Stone of Ecstatic Contemplation, and the Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortals, but it seems that the exigencies of scenic space have so fatally curtailed the Mound facing the Moon that the exact meaning of the parabolic design is made obscure, if not heretical. It is not in my power to reassure him, so I welcome with relief the reappearance of the dancers, who, bearing flowers in one hand and a fan in the other, step gaily out of the garden and, posing, perching, pirouetting, flutter with deliberate grace through a maze of correlated motions. I do not dare to ask if their gestures point a moral: it is wiser to assume with Keats that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," and to follow with undistracted eye the solemn prettiness of these human dragon-flies. For their gauzy kimono sleeves and red-pepper-coloured obi recall the wings and hue of a giant dragon-fly, which dominates in its pride of national emblem the principal bridge over the Kamogawa. And, whether they poise flower on fan or fan on flower, or revolve with open fan extended behind their triple-tressed coiffure, they dart here and settle there with almost the unconscious, automatic smoothness of bird or insect. Proximity destroys this illusion. Watched from the subjacent vantage of the floor, the features of these tiny coryphées are seen to wear that fixity of resolute attention which few children when engrossed in a performance are able to repress. The art of concealing art is hard to learn. Their elder sisters smile continually behind taiko and samisen, but the gravity of the childish troupe is more in keeping with the poet's retrospective vision.