Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/21



country for most travellers is very like a theatre. They arrive in holiday mood, resolving to be pleased, since otherwise their judgment in choosing that country rather than another, their faculty of appreciating what so many have proclaimed delectable, might seem at fault. Should their choice have fallen on Japan, be sure that eulogistic notices from the pens of Sir Edwin Arnold and M. Pierre Loti have prepared them to enjoy the daintiest of comediettas. They reach the enchanted shore. They pass swiftly from one aspect of fairyland to another. Nothing happens to shake their preconceived conviction that in the Land of the Rising Sun Nature began and Art completed a yellow paradise. They do not heed the jeremiads of resident aliens, nor the bitter cry of outcast professors, who gather thorns where the tourist is dazzled by cherry-blossom. The picturesque unreality of common things abets illusion. Surely these dolls' houses of wood and paper, these canopies of rosy bloom and curtains of purple wistaria, the gigantic cryptomeria, the tentacular pines, the azure inland sea and snow-streaked Fuji—itself surely all these compose a superb mise en scène for poetic