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between honour and dishonour, between treachery and good faith, and we had at last reached the dividing line which makes or mars a nation worthy of the name, it was then, and only then, that we declared for war.'

When and what the end of the war will be, none can venture to foretell, but the responsibility for it—a responsibility stretching back over a long space of yearsalready belongs to history. Again I must quote the words of the Prime Minister:

'With whom does the responsibility rest . . . for all the lamentable sufferings which now confront the world? One Power and one Power only, and that Power is Germany.'

In vain does Germany protest against this verdict. In one quarter-and a vitally significant one-she has already allowed judgment to go by default against her. Italy, though the ally of the two Germanic Powers, remains neutral, and she remains so on the ground that her treaty obligations do not oblige her to support them in a war of aggression. Neither Germany nor AustriaHungary has ventured to challenge this plea.

VALENTINE CHIROL.

Art. 8. THE CLASSICAL DRAMA OF JAPAN.

By one of the more unexpected turns of chance there has come into my possession a most interesting and, I think I may safely say, unique set of documents relating to one of the greatest and least-known arts of the world, the art of the classical Japanese drama, generally called Noh (accomplishment). These papers consist of notes and lectures by the late Ernest Fenollosa, sometime Imperial Commissioner of Arts in Tokyo. Prof. Fenollosa's life was one of the romances of scholarship. It might not be too much to say that he saved Japanese art to Japan; he did at least as much as any other single person. So far as possible, I shall print these documents as they stand.-E. P.*

The Japanese people have loved nature so passionately that they have interwoven her life, and their own, into one continuous drama of the art of pure living. I have written elsewhere † of the five Acts into which this lifedrama falls, particularly as it reveals itself in the several forms of their visual arts. I have spoken of the universal value of this special art-life, and explained how the inflowing of such an Oriental stream has helped to revitalise Western Art, and must go on to assist in the solution of our practical educational problems. I would now go back to that other key, to the blossoming of Japanese genius, which I mentioned under my account of the flower festivals; namely, the national poetry, and its rise, through the enriching of four successive periods, to a vital dramatic force in the 15th century. Surely literature may be as delicate an exponent of a nation's soul, as is art; and there are several phases of Oriental poetry, both Japanese and Chinese, which have practical significance and even inspiration for us, in this weak, transitional period of our Western poetic life.

We cannot escape, in the coming centuries, even if

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* For earlier bibliography of the Noh I would refer to Capt. F. Brinkley's 'Japan, its History, Arts and Literature' (London: Jack), Vol. III (1903), pp. 21-48; on pp. 37 ff. he gives a translation of one of these plays; also to an essay by F. V. Dickins, in Vol. II of his work Primitive and Medieval Japanese Texts' (Oxford, 1906), with a translation of another play; and to Prof. M. C. Stopes' 'Plays of Old Japan' (London, 1913), in which she gives a list of English references to the Noh, and of plays translated.

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Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art,' by Ernest Fenollosa. London: Heinemann, 1911.

we would, a stronger and stronger modification of our established standards by the pungent subtlety of Oriental thought, and the power of the condensed Oriental forms. The value will lie, partly, in relief from the deadening boundaries of our own conventions. This is no new thing. It can be shown that the freedom of the Elizabethan mind, and its power to range over all planes of human experience, as in Shakespeare, was, in part, an aftermath of Oriental contacts-in the Crusades, in an intimacy with the Mongols such as Marco Polo's, in the discovery of a double sea-passage to Persia and India, and in the first gleanings of the Jesuit missions to Asia. Still more clearly can it be shown that the romantic movement in English poetry, in the later 18th century and the early 19th, was influenced and enriched, though often in a subtle and hidden way, by the beginnings of scholarly study and translation of Oriental literature. Bishop Percy, who afterwards revived our knowledge of the medieval ballad, published early in the 1760's the first appreciative English account of Chinese Poetry; and Bishop Hood wrote an essay on the Chinese theatre, seriously comparing it with the Greek. A few years later Voltaire published his first Chinese tragedy, modified from a Jesuit translation; and an independent English version held the London stage till 1824. Moore, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge were influenced by the spirit, and often by the very subject, of Persian translations; and Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality' verges on the Hindoo doctrine of reincarnation. In these later days India powerfully reacts upon our imagination through an increasingly intimate knowledge.

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A form of drama, as primitive, as intense, and almost as beautiful as the ancient Greek Drama at Athens, still exists in the world. Yet few care for it, or see it. In the 5th century before Christ, the Greek Drama arose out of the religious rites practised in the festivals of the God of Wine. In the 15th century after Christ, the Japanese Drama arose out of religious rites practised in the festivals of the Shinto Gods, chiefly the Shinto God of the Kasuga temple at Nara. Both began by a sacred dance, and both added a sacred chorus sung by priests.

The transition from a dance chorus to drama proper consisted, in both cases, in the evolving of a solo part, the words of which alternate in dialogue with the chorus. In both, the final form of drama consists of a few short scenes wherein two or three soloists act a main theme, whose deeper meaning is interpreted by the poetical comment of the chorus. In both, the speech was metrical, and involved a clear organic structure of separate lyrical units. In both music played an important part. In both, action was a modification of the dance. In both, rich costumes were worn; in both, masks. The form and tradition of the Athenian drama passed over into the tradition of the ancient Roman stage, and died away in the early middle ages fourteen centuries ago. It is dead, and we can study it from scant records only. But the Japanese poetic drama is alive to-day, having been transmitted almost unchanged from one perfected form reached in Kioto in the 15th century.

It has been said that all later drama has been influenced by the Greek; that the strolling jugglers and contortionists, who wandered in troupes over Europe in the middle ages, constitute an unbroken link between the degenerate Roman actors and the miracle plays of the church which grew into the Shakespearean drama. It is even asserted that, as the Greek conquest gave rise to a Greco-Buddhist form of sculpture on the borders of India and China, Greek dramatic influence entered also into the Hindoo and Chinese drama, and eventually into the Noh of Japan. But the effect of foreign thought on the Noh is small in comparison with that of the native Shinto influences. It is as absurd to say that the Noh is an offshoot of Greek drama as it would be to say that Shakespeare is such an offshoot.

There is, however, beside the deeper analogy of the Japanese Noh with Greek plays, an interesting secondary analogy with the origin of Shakespeare's art. All three had an independent growth from miracle plays-the first from the plays of the worship of Bacchus, the second from the plays of the worship of Christ, the third from the plays of the worship of the Shinto deities and of Buddha. The plays that preceded Shakespeare's in England were acted in fields adjoining the churches, and later in the courtyards of nobles. The plays that

preceded the Noh, and even the Noh themselves, were enacted, first in the gardens of temples or on the dry river-beds adjoining the temples, and later in the courtyards of the daimio. On the other hand, the actual modus of the Shakespearean drama is practically dead for us. Occasional revivals have to borrow scenery and other contrivances unknown to the Elizabethan stage, and the continuity of professional tradition has certainly been broken. But in the Japanese Noh, though they arose one hundred years before Shakespeare, this continuity has never been broken. The same plays are to-day enacted in the same manner as then; even the leading actors of to-day are blood descendants of the very men who created this drama 450 years ago.

This ancient Lyric Drama is not to be confounded with the modern realistic drama of Tokio, with such drama, for instance, as Danjuro's. This vulgar drama is quite like ours, with an elaborate stage and scenery, with little music or chorus and no masks; with nothing, in short, but realism and mimetics of action. This modern drama, a ghost of the 5th period, arose in Yedo some 200 years ago. It was an amusement designed by the common people for themselves, and was written and acted by them. It therefore corresponds to the work of Ukiyo-ye in painting, and more especially to the colour prints; and a large number of these prints reproduce characters and scenes from the people's theatre.

As the pictorial art of the 5th period was divisible into two parts-that of the nobility, designed to adorn their castles, and that of the common people, printed illustration, so has the drama of the last 200 years been twofold-that of the lyric Noh, preserved pure in the palaces of the rich; and that of the populace, running to realism and extravagance in the street theatres. To-day, in spite of the shock and revolution of 1868, the former, the severe and poetic drama, has been revived, and is enthusiastically studied by cultured Japanese. In that commotion, the palaces of the Daimios, with their Noh stages, were destroyed, the court troupes of actors were dispersed. For three years after 1868 performances ceased entirely. But Mr Umewaka Minoru, who had been one of the soloists in the Shogun's central troupe, kept guard over the pure

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