Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/90

66 Yacco, were freely described as the Henry Irving and Ellen Terry of the Far East. Most of the critics, expecting too much and understanding too little, went empty away, or if they derived any pleasure from the entertainment, derived it from purely æsthetic and undramatic qualities. For a week the stars shone on empty benches; but then the fashionable and artistic public, which has a habit of ignoring the professional critic, became aware of the fact that a miniature comedy and tragedy of rare delicacy and charm, as naïf as they were beautiful, could be seen, and seen only for a few afternoons, in the prosaic neighbourhood of Netting Hill. Success was assured, and we are promised a return visit in the autumn. But the critics were partly justified in their cold reception of alien art. They had come for drama and been put off with pantomime. "If this be Japanese drama," they said, "a little of it goes a long way. We have had enough." Had they been given drama as it is played in Tōkyō, with long, irrelevant scenes and a plot requiring four hours to unravel, how much more discontented they would have been!

It is a pity that the advertising note was pitched too high. Good wine needed less bush. There is no "Japanese Court Company," but his Majesty the Emperor was once present at a performance by Mr. Kawakami during a garden-party in the grounds of the Marquis Kuroda. Mr. Kawakami is certainly not the "Henry Irving of Japan," for that title, whatever be its precise meaning, belongs rather to Ichikawa Danjuro, associated for more than half a century with the impersonation of historical and mythical heroes. But he holds a high and honourable position among actors of the sōshi school, as they are called—a school