f
emptiness. Their rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paper
walls, and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old palatial
rooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a background of gold-leaf
emerge and fade away suggestions of river and coast and hill, of
peonies, chrysanthemums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds and
pools, of all that is elusive and choice in nature; decorations that are
also lyric poems, hints of landscape that yet never pretend to be a
substitute for the real thing. The real thing is outside, and perhaps it
will not intrude; for where we should have glass windows the Japanese
have white paper screens. But draw back, if you choose, one of these
screens, and you will see a little landscape garden, a little lake, a
little bridge, a tiny rockery, a few goldfish, a cluster of irises, a
bed of lotus, and, above and beyond, the great woods. These are royal
apartments; but all the cost, it will be seen, is lavished on the work
of art. The principle is the same in humbler homes.

People who could so devise life, we may be sure, are people with a
fineness of perception unknown to the West, unless it were once in
ancient Greece. The Japanese indeed, I suspect, are the Greeks of the
East. In the theatre at Kyoto this was curiously borne in upon me. On
the floor of the house reclined figures in loose robes, bare-necked and
barefooted. On the narrow stage were one or two actors, chanting in
measured speech, and moving slowly from pose to pose. From boxes on
either side of the stage intoned a kind of chorus; and a flute and
pizzicato strings accompanied the whole in the solemn strains of some
ancient mode. I have seen nothing so like what a Greek play may have
been, though doubtless even this was far enough away. And still more was
I struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to the tragedy, and
I found the young and old Japan confronting one another exactly as the
young and old Athens met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the
_Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount Fuji; the
actors two groups of young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of
the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were
climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they
meet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not
unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, like
those of Aristophanes, were with the old