Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/64

44 have the gift of sympathetic intuition, so as to divine what tale of terror, what burden of grief, obscure to him, is yet manifest enough behind quaint mask and rigid gesture to the heirs of national hagiology. The solemnity and pathos of each dramatised incident in the life of hero or saint is emphasised by the time-honoured locutions of mediæval Japanese, which of course convey by mere association, as Elizabethan English to us, the tone and atmosphere of dead centuries. Yet, independently of the musical old speech, so cumbrous and so courteous, it is impossible to miss the meaning of these tiny tragedies, enacted as they are by instinctive masters of gesticular eloquence. The writer was particularly fortunate in gaining admission to a series of Nō produced by the Umewaka company or society, which has this advantage over the other five organisations, diverging on points of textual accuracy and stage ritual, that it traces unbroken descent through its chief from the Kanza school of music appertaining to the Yusaki family of Nara. When Commodore Perry forced open the door of the East in 1854, hitherto closed for more than two hundred years to Western barbarians, Mr. Umewaka captained a little band of Nō players attached to the then all-powerful household of Keiki, the last of the Tokugawa Shōguns.

Then followed bloody civil war, the bombardment of Kago-shima and Shimonoseki, and the restoration of the Emperor to supreme power. The ex-Shōgun immured himself, a private gentleman, in strict seclusion. His company of players was of course disbanded, but little by little, from rare representations in the houses of friends to more frequent revivals, consequent on growing fame, their erudite and