Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/59

Rh is realised through silence, its highest reach seen in their motionlessness of posture. It is true, though it may sound arbitrary to say it, that the real actors on the stage–not more than three in one play, as it is the simplest affair, this No (is that not enough characters, again I ask, to make poetry move?)–find their secret of fire or passion where the audience lose themselves. This No house is a sacred hall dedicated to poetry and song, where the actors and audience go straight into the heart of prayer in creating the most intense atmosphere of grayness, the most suggestive colour in all Japanese art, which is the twilight soared out of time and place; it is a divine sanctuary where the vexation of the outer world and the realism of modern life leave to follow, when on the stage, the eight persons of the chorus in two rows, with profile to the audience, and the musicians, a flute and two tambourines, with their backs to the wooden end wall at the back of the stage, take their own proper places, and the flute sends out, as the beginning of the performance, the thrill of invocation ages old, as if a cicada whose ghost-voice curses the present Japanese “civilisation.” It is an oasis in the human desert of modern life, this little hall of the No play, where I often spend the whole day, as the performance begins usually as early as nine o’clock in the morning, and gain the thought that artistic Japan is not wholly lost; and I feel there