Kintaro fights the Earth-spider.
Such are the religious plays in their last phase of development, the fruit of a religious revival on the part of archæologists and patriots. They are a curious instance of wisely arrested growth. Had they never passed the border-line of archaic dancing, their interpreters would be a dwindling band of Shintō priestesses to gaping peasants. Had they followed in the track of popular drama, they might have been expanded to those loosely-knit and blood-curdling tableaux which delight the shopkeeper. But, being compressed within severe limits and addressed to none but educated audiences, they present in exquisite epitome the literature, the history, the musical and choregraphic art of mediæval Japan. The foreigner derives from them an impression of the beliefs and customs, the manners of speech and dress, the heroism and the dignity, of feudal times. But to a native they convey far more than this. “The Nō poetry,” writes an enthusiast, “is like a great store of the treasures of Eastern culture. It is full of allusions to the classical stories of ‘Manyōshū’ and ‘Kokinshu,’ Chinese poetry and Buddhist scriptures. Its chief characteristic is colour. The words are gorgeous, splendid, and even magnificent, as are the costumes.” But of their literary value, and how far that value is enhanced or impaired by flying puns and prismatic pillow-words, I cannot judge. The Buddhist authorship is very obvious in the case of “Aoi no Uye,” for it will be noticed that, where the miko, or Shintō priestess, failed to exorcise the Demon of Jealousy, the priest of Buddha succeeded. But perhaps, in art of this kind, so innocent of construction, so dependent on allusion, it matters very little that the author should efface himself behind the ideals advocated in his work. The Nō are frankly didactic. Piety, reverence, martial virtues are openly inculcated, though never in such a way as to shock artistic sensibilities. Beauty and taste go far to disguise all structural deficiencies.
But let us not apply to these the standard by which we judge mature drama, demanding situation, character, plot, movement. Rather compare them with the miracle-plays and mysteries of the Chester or Coventry collection, which hover between scriptural tableaux and Gothic farce of a peculiarly gross kind. There is no beauty in those rhymed versions of “The Descent into Hell,” “Adam and Eve,” or “The Temptation in the Wilderness.” The authors had such small sense of decency and congruity, that after a serious attempt to handle a solemn vision in “Pilate’s Wife’s Dream,” you are confronted with this stage-direction: (“Here shall the Devil go to Pilate’s wife and draw the curtain, as she lieth in bed, but she, soon after that he is come in, shall make a rueful noise, running on the scaffold with her skirt and her kirtle in her hand, and she shall come before Pilate like a mad woman.”) Imagine the wildest of kiōgen incidents invading a Nō! How shocked a Japanese audience would have been! If the Nō seem occasionally naïf and puerile, the gross enfantillage of European miracle-plays none but readers of them can believe. And, when we reach the tedious “Moralities,” which coincided in this country with the advent of the Protestant Tudors, and were therefore written a century later than the best of the Nō, the palm of sacred drama for beauty, interest, and pathos must still be awarded to the disciples of Buddha. Could anything less human or less dramatic be imagined than a cast of personified abstractions, bearing such names as Good Counsel, Knowledge, Abominable Living, and God’s Merciful Promises? We must console ourselves with the reflection that, when once the stage had freed itself from ecclesiastical fetters, the popular drama in England shot far ahead of popular drama in Japan. No student of dramatic art could think for a moment of bracketing Chikamatsu with Shakespeare.
POPULAR PLAYS