[GEISHA AND CHERRY-BLOSSOM]
Nothing is more difficult to eradicate than a British misconception of foreign defects. French lubricity, German clumsiness, Russian cruelty, are quite as much articles of faith on this side of the Channel as Albion’s perfidy on the other. Similarly, it is useless to controvert the popular opinion that the geisha is generally pretty and always improper. Her detractors have seen an English opera bearing her name and traducing her character: it is enough; they know. Nevertheless, this opinion is founded on imperfect knowledge, and requires much modification before it can be received as even partially true. Etymologically, a gei-sha is an accomplished person; socially, she is an entertainer, who has been trained from the age of seven or eight to dance or sing for the amusement of guests at a dinner-party. Probably her parents have leased her for a certain number of years to a teacher, who undertakes to board and train her, to procure engagements and to chaperon her, to pay a fixed sum to her family as well as a tax to the Government, in return for all of which a sufficient recompense is assured by the fees which a talented artist is able to earn. Less frequently she lives at home and obtains engagements through an agent, who receives only a percentage of her gains. The training is continuous and severe. To a foreigner the dancing will appear graceful but monotonous; it has none of the free, vigorous motion which we associate with the term: on the other hand, for the connoisseur each gesture is significant, each pose symbolic. To appreciate many of the “dances,” requiring hours of patient rehearsal, it would be necessary to catch continual allusion to poems, legends, and flowers, with which the treasure-house of Japanese memory is stored. Those who would deny the applicability of the term “music” to “the strummings and squealings of Orientals,” would yet admit that both the koto and samisen (the stringed instruments most in vogue) are not to be mastered without constant practice, and the irregular rhythm of the songs, with their abrupt intervals and capricious repetitions, cannot be easy to render until the voice has attained extreme flexibility. On the mysteries of Japanese music, however, seeing that the best authorities are at variance, only an expert dare pronounce judgment. To return to the question of the social status of the geisha, I should say that it corresponds more exactly with that of a Parisian actress than of an Athenian hetaira. Convention having banished the actress from the Japanese stage, the geisha takes her place as the natural recipient of masculine homage. She is much courted, and sometimes makes a brilliant match. There are a large number who make the profession an excuse for attracting rich admirers, just as the name of “actress” in more Puritan climes will cover a multitude of sins. But a professional courtesan she is not: her favours are not always for sale to the highest bidder. When her short reign is over at the age of twenty-five, she generally imparts to a younger generation the secrets of professional success. Among these the art of conversation is not the least important. To parry indiscreet advances and to bandy compliments enter as much into her rôle as the playing of “Kitsune ken” or “fox-forfeit,” in which no little agility is needed to represent at the right moment the fox, the man, and the gun on facile fingers. Childish of course the geisha is, like most of her younger countrywomen; sometimes dangerous and fickle, as her popular nickname of “Nekko,” the cat, testifies; but virtuous as well, in many cases, where she has enough independence and strength of character to resist the flattering importunity of fame’s innumerable suitors.
If one of these aspire to win her affection, or merely to make her acquaintance, he has many advantages over the callow youths who wait, like lackeys, at the stage-door of a Western theatre. He is spared the preliminary purgatory of appealing letters, of supplicatory presents, which may easily fail to secure the desired access. He is not forced to share with a crowd of jealous or indifferent strangers the bitter joy of her nightly apotheosis, when her smiles and wiles must be lavished in promiscuous appeal. He has merely to dine at the tea-house with which she, or her employer, has made a mutually advantageous contract: there, on sufficient notice, she will arrive with her duenna, ready to perform, if need be, for his delight alone, while the semi-privacy of the entertainment affords him every opportunity of pressing his suit. As a rule, however, the geisha performs in parties of two, or three, or more, according to the number of guests. Often the convivial character of the occasion tends to lower the standard of art involved; indeed, such feasts are apt to degenerate into orgies. To realise the æsthetic possibilities of an art which is only at its lowest bacchanalian, we must quit the tea-house, that temple of the senses, and seek the sacred city of Kyōto, where palace and monastery raise, like antique junks, their majestic or quaintly carven heads above white waves of cherry-blossom....
It is April. While English weather is struggling in spasmodic furies of wind and rain to escape the clutch of winter, here the enfranchised spring creeps, fairy-like, from plain to height on rosy sandals. First Tōkyō, whose hundred miles of unpaved thoroughfare fatigue the foot and offend the eye with naked dreariness, is clothed with draperies of fleecy pink. The spacious parks of Ueno and Shiba are thronged with gazing multitudes, who ride or saunter all day long through flower-encumbered avenues. At night the river-reaches of Mukōjima are packed with pleasure-boats, whose lanterns gleam like fire-flies beneath the pale mass of overhanging bloom. Yamaguchi San, who by trade is a rice merchant but by nature a poet, has written in the intervals of business, which is not brisk at this time of year, a little sheaf of poems, each consisting of three lines, which run perpendicularly down strips of iridescent rice-paper. So far as their purport can be construed into grosser forms of verse, I take it to be as follows:
“Put on your brightest kimono,
O Haru San, and let us go!
“Bring ivory chop-sticks, lacquer-cup,
And rice and wine, that we may sup.
“On honourable trees is set