Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/105

slaughter, and then with great deliberation draws a knife across his stomach, until his admirably twitching limbs are covered with gore. At this point the squeamish foreigner is apt to leave the theatre, but the Japanese babies do not blench at blood, and are taught by such sights from their earliest years that superb indifference to death, that supreme attachment to honour, which no other nation displays to the same degree. Hara-kiri cannot be approved by utilitarians, but it implies a higher pitch of heroism than you find in a British melodrama, where the hero and villain are probably engaged in selfish rivalry for the hand of the same young woman, and merely differ in the choice of means to gratify the same desire. I find an exquisite instance of Japanese subtlety in the mingled ferocity and devotion of their popular plays, which please at once the devil and the angel cohabiting the human heart. If the devil gloat over blood-shedding, the angel exults in death for an ideal. The devil holds the knife and the angel rams it in. Nor must you suppose that the playgoers who revel in such incidents regard them as part and parcel of an effete morality. Every few years the partisans of Western ethics are startled by similar tragedies. The assassins or would-be assassins of Viscount Mori in 1887, of Count Okuma in 1889, of the Czarevitch in 1891, of Li Hung Chang in 1895, were prepared to pay with their own lives for what they deemed dishonourable concessions to foreigners. The young girl, Yuko Hatakeyama, who cut her throat in expiation of the outrage offered to the Czarevitch; the young wife of Lieutenant Asada, who, learning of his death on the battlefield, slew herself before his portrait, that she might follow him; the forty soldiers, who took their own lives because the Govern-