snatches of half-meaningless song, buffoonery, tomfoolery, high jinks of every sort, a very carnival of uproarious merriment. It is artless, it is thoroughly popular, in fact plebeian. Circumstances forced it to be so. The old Japanese nobility were nowise given to laughter. "Life is real, life is earnest," was their motto; and what a deadly dull life it must have been! To begin with, it was a society minus the fair sex. To admire the Court ladies toilettes, to hang on their smiles, perhaps whisper some witty gallantry in a noble dame's ear, formed no part of a young Daimyō's order of the day at the Shōgun's Court. You can see him still on the stage; for the tradition remains, though the personage himself has vanished utterly. There he sits,—his straight back a perfect lesson of deportment, his countenance impassable, his few gestures stiff as the starch of his marvellous robes, his whole being hedged round with the prescriptions of an elaborate and rigid etiquette. Remember, too, that the government was a despotism which refused to be tempered even with epigram: a single inappropriate jest might send you to languish in exile on one of the Seven Isles of Izu for the rest of your natural life. Spies swarmed everywhere; the walls—in these paper houses—almost literally had ears. The pleasures (so-called) of high life were ceremonies well-nigh as solemn as the actual ceremonial of government,—the stately Nō, or lyric drama, with its statuesque players also in starched robes and chanting in a dialect dead some centuries before, if indeed it ever had been living; or else the tea ceremonies, or the arrangement of flowers in obedience to the principles of philosophy, or the composition of verses after the model of the antique, or the viewing of scrolls painted according to ancient Chinese canons. The whole life in fact was swathed in formalism, like a mummy in its grave-clothes. The mere thought of it is enough to stifle mirth.[1]
- ↑ Though the Japanese are respecters of dignities, we have ourselves heard some who had had personal experience of life in a Daimyō's palace under the old regime, apply to it the popular verse, Kiite gokuraku mite jigoku, that is "Heav'n to hear tell about, but Hell to see."
