Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/62

58 the point I wish to make is that the passways of the No hall mean more than the pathways of the pits of common theatres. If you cannot connect them with the “garden path” I would be glad to suggest to you, as a tea-master might when you step through the twilight by the moss-covered granite lantern in the roji, to think for a while of the shadow of summer foliage, or the stretch of a sea, or the slow fall of the evening moon, even after you have entered your own box, and be ready to enter the artistic world created by your heart gray and cold, and then you have to open the book of the libretto on your knees as the others do, with the sight of the chorus taking their own seats on the stage.

There is no other stage like this No stage, so small, being twenty-five feet square at the largest, all opened except the wall facing to the audience, where the painted old pine-tree, as old as the world, as gray as poetry, looms as if a symbol of eternity out of the mist–(think of the play of Takasago, the hosts of pine-trees in the shapes of an old man and woman singing deathlessness and peace)–the long gallery or bridge on the same level connected with the stage on the right, along which the No actors move as spectres and make the performance complete, the passage of a beginning and ending, I might say Life and Death. When you see the roof, you will be impressed by the dignity of existence itself which