Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/319

Rh honour her dishonour, but the priests of the little Myō-onji temple jealously guard a faded fragment of her wardrobe. There was never great hostility in Japan between the goddess of love and more ascetic deities. In more than one locality you will find a row of temples fronted by a row of pleasure-houses, that the pilgrims may impartially indulge body and soul.

When the Ashikaga Shōguns made Kyōto a centre of nobler art and more delicate refinement, the Scarlet Lady lost ground. The curse of Confucius, stigmatising her sex, had crossed the Yellow Sea. Painters preferred the beauty of snow and tree and bird to her fatal beauty ; poets, imbued with Buddhism, wrote passion-plays on other passions than hers. Neither in the serious Nō nor comical Kiōgen does she cut any figure at all. It would almost seem that for two centuries men found ceremonial tea-drinking and the excitements of civil war more congenial than her society.

At last the queen came by her own. When the feudal nobles went down before Iyeyasu and took his iron yoke upon their necks, the military despot was seen to be a popular liberator. Art and literature ceased to be the precious playthings of an aesthetic aristocracy. Novelists, playwrights, painters rose from the masses and worked for the masses. Rejecting in scorn the moony fetters of Chinese convention, they painted in broad colours and aimed at broad effects. Yedo, the new capital, without culture and without traditions, became their home and their hunting-ground. Of these turbulent subjects Venus Pandemos was naturally queen, and since her accession in the seventeenth century to the present day many measures