than a midsummer-night's dream. His audience would just as soon hear a fairy-story as a love-story. When "The Tongue-cut Sparrow" or "The Fisher-Boy of Urashima" is presented, the adults are quite as appreciative as the children. Perhaps this imaginative audience is too complaisant. It ignores the cloaked attendants, who creep about the stage to remove "properties" or in other ways assist the actors, because it knows that their black garments denote invisibility and is much too polite to perceive them. The same readiness to meet illusion half-way is shown by the retention of the hana-michi or flower-walks, two inclined platforms which slope from the stage to the back of the auditorium, trisecting the pit and enabling the actors to make their entry or exit through the midst of the spectators. On the other hand, they facilitate the execution of processional and recessional effects.
After all, the aim of Eastern art is not illusion, but edification. However clear the call of beauty, duty's voice is louder still—duty, not as we Westerns conceive it, a half-hearted compromise between our own interests and those of others, but complete moral and mental suicide. No lesson was more impressively preached to the people by the dramatists in hundreds of historical plays than the duty of obedience at any price. Iyeyasu had established a pax japonica, a golden age, in which there was no war, but a rigid system of caste upon caste: obedience was the cement which held the whole together. The cultivated samurai were not allowed to enter the theatre, but the masses were melted to tears and heated to transports of patriotic subservience by the representation of heroic self-sacrifice. As a political instrument the Greek Church is not more useful to the
