Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/22

4 comedy! And when "the crowd" enters, a smiling crowd of straw-sandalled rickshaw-runners, of kneeling tea-house girls, and shaven babies, arrayed like bright-winged butterflies, churlish indeed were the spectator who should refuse to smile back and cheer with the best. Then consider the privileges which he may enjoy in that admirably arranged theatre. Were he in his own country, the footlights divide him for a few hours at most from actors whose privacy, however coveted, he may seldom hope to invade. But on Japanese soil he may often obtain, by fee or favour, like the stage-struck noble of Molière's and Shakespeare's time, familiar acquaintance with performance and performers. The latter are, on the stage, his puppets; off the stage, his friends. Indeed, he confounds the two, and ends by treating them with affectionate condescension. This attitude, which he half-involuntarily assumes from an ever-present consciousness of superior civilisation (as he considers it), deceives only himself. The polite but thoughtful patriot, perceiving that his temples are regarded as bric-à-brac, his race as a race of ingenious marionettes, protests in vain against the unwelcome flattery of surprised admirers. "To this kind of people," wrote Mr. Fukai, one of the ablest journalists in Tōkyō, "our country is simply a play-ground for globe-trotters, our people a band of cheerful, merry playfellows. Painstaking inquiries are made about Japanese curios and objects of art—sometimes important, no doubt, but sometimes ridiculously trivial—while the investigation of such subjects as the ethical life, the social and political institutions, are far too much neglected. The history of the nation is ignored, and our recent progress is supposed to be