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above you! I never saw anybody doing it - with the sun high above him. Lagoon-bathing is a delight, provided you go out before the sun has risen high above you or has passed well over you and is down in the west. And provided also there are no sharks. We were lucky in our lagoon; it was too shallow for them. It was also too shallow for canoeing, and we longed to canoe. But one cannot have everything. To have had sharks would certainly have spoiled bathing, and might also have interfered with the canoeing. Our lagoon was a beautiful thing; but there are a lot of curious things in lagoons never mentioned by hibiscus romanticists such as poison-fish and devil-fish, sulphurous rocks, fearsome eels of inordinate length and startling stripes who too closely resemble snakes, and yards of unpleasant sea-slug. But you get used to these as the small boy paddling on the South Coast gets used to crabs; and, for myself, I felt I would risk a lot to be cool.

That view over the lagoon and the Pacific is a thing of loveliness never to be forgotten, but, alas, how disappointing to find one cannot live on a view, however magnificent! The sunsets were as wonderful as the most fulsome pen of hibiscus romanticists ever described, but I should have enjoyed the ocean more if it had not been quite so empty. Save for the monthly steamer, or now and again when a native boat went fishing close to the reef at night, the vast ocean lay glittering and empty to the far horizon.

The book was true enough about the shade of the coco palms, but what it forgot to add or was the writer merely there in June when the south wind blows?-was that in a tropic shade the mosquitoes are there to enjoy it also — and you. I could write a book about mosquitoes. I know that their fame, or their infamy, is world

wide. I know they exist from Essex to Mexico, from California to Patagonia. Probably the only place where they were never known was the Garden of Eden, or, if they did exist there and did not come into being with the curse, they were merely playful and sang happily as they sat on Eve's neck. But an evil is no less an evil for being general, and it may easily be worse in one place than another. I've met mosquitoes in many places, but never as I met them in those lovely, scented, picturesque isles of the South Seas. Elsewhere they are merely in the air; in the tropics they are the air. For myself, I would rather have had lions on the island than mosquitoes. Lions, I believe, do not come into the house after you; you have to go out and look for them. A lion has its own orbit in which it revolves, and if you are wise you do not enter it unless there are ten of you to its one. Further, a lion is reported never to attack unless hungry. Therefore, if you meet one unexpectedly, and he has just had a meal, you have quite a good chance of your life. But a mosquito's orbit is the empyrean. Also he is always hungry. He never takes time off for digestion, sleep, or recreation. He never requires the first two, and you provide the third. In fact, you are his whole existence. When on a tropic island your chief desire is to sit in the shade and read or sleep. You can't do it. You must go to bed under a mosquito net. Now to be constantly going to bed is dull.

I never realized till I lived on our island how monotonous evergreen vegetation could be. I had always disliked evergreens in England and been temperamentally unable to understand the people who grew aspidistras in pots. But though the book said the islands were always green, I had never associated them with evergreens. Unfortunately they are full of aspidistras or

things like them. I felt I infinitely preferred trees that had a change of aspect

that went bare in winter, even if they did shiver a bit, and then came out fresh and green in the spring. Of course, evergreens do have new leaves sometime, but their process of getting them seems to me muddled and stuffy and none too clean like a person who never strips for a bath but washes a bit of himself at a time. It might have been better if the evergreens had been interspersed more with color. Hibiscus writers had prepared us for acres of scarlet and purple blooms, bougainvillea and crotons, hibiscus and oleander, begonias and jasmine, rioting everywhere, putting to shame the pale display of English hedgerows in summer. Just imagine, I had said to myself, vast areas of orange groves in flower! Why, an apple orchard in Kent during May will be nothing to it. There was blossom on the island, plenty of it, but everywhere it was swamped by the triumphant foliage. The book was true enough when it said that everything planted in that hot damp soil produced a hundred fold. Unfortunately the hundredfold was mainly leaf. We never saw the advertised acres of hibiscus. Even those large flaunting blooms of pink and crimson were overshadowed by the prevailing evergreen. They are to be seen to far better perfection in a garden in Southern California, say, than on a South Sea island; and the oranges there are apparently a freak variety, for they rush into fruit - two crops a year without any blossom to speak of.

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There is a brief glowing period of the island year, at the height of summer, when the flamboyants and the frangipanni are out. An avenue of flamboyant trees with their delicate leaves and brilliant scarlet blossoms against the burning blue of the tropical sky is a thing of beauty never to be surpassed

anywhere. An island garden, tended with care and imagination, can, of course, be a delight, as lovely gardens are anywhere, but the general landscape is green-in varying shades, if you will, from the black of the giant utu to the gray-green of palms, but always green, and easily to be eclipsed for variety and color any day by the mountain slopes of Switzerland when the gentians are out, Californian hillsides in the time of the golden poppies, or English buttercup-fields in June.

To anyone who raves about the charm of tropical fruit as a diet I would recommend living on bananas for a week. It is significant that the natives of our island would pay fancy prices for apples imported from the Dominions. Bananas and oranges were the main crops, the former being in season all the year round. There was always a row of bunches slung up round any house in varying stages of ripeness. After we left I did n't look at a banana for a year. One has to live on a place to know its limitation. This sounds blasphemous applied to a South Sea isle. But think of an English village living on apples for months- and then think of an island whose main crop is bananas. True, we also had our melons and pineapples, our oranges and mangoes, but we had to await their seasons as in England we wait for our strawberries and plums; they don't grow all together and perpetually, as the hibiscus writers would have one believe. And, while you are waiting, the banana can be as monotonous as the apple. If you really wish to feast on the loveliest and rarest fruits of the earth, you do not want to live where they are grown; you must, of course, live in a city and let the freight ships and the goods trains prosaically bring you your passion fruit and grapes, your peaches and pomegranates, your jack fruit and your gua vas.

Our island natives were a charming people, even as Stevenson found their kin in Samoa. Not quite so romantic as the book said, perhaps. Instead of quaffing kava out of gourds, they drank tea made in a billy can. They rarely played the tom-tom, and never the ukulele. Instead they turned the handle of the gramophone or swung the accordion. They certainly sat in picturesque groups beneath the coco palms according to the prospectus, but they did not sing dulcet harmonies for the reason that they cannot sing dulcetly. Their speaking voices are low and pleasing. What happens to them when they attempt to sing is a mystery. They are a laughing, handsome people. When discovered in the bush, wearing the pariu, or kilt of scarlet cloth, their dark hair crowned by a flower wreath or an ivory frangipanni blossom or camellia stuck behind the ear, they were quite according to the book. Even clad in the white man's duck and the white woman's frocks, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes complete, they contrived to be good to look at. It was a pity their conversation consisted so largely of the prices of oranges and bananas. They rode bicycles and drove Ford trucks. Though the danger of being run down by a motor-car was not so great as it is at Hyde Park Corner, we were not altogether free from it. There was always the risk of dashing young N'ariki Mata rushing down with a load of fruit at the last moment to catch the monthly steamer,

or of that reckless tippler, Pukavaevae, after a billy can of bush beer, breaking the speed limit with a Ford truck and dashing you into the bush and himself into jail. They no longer spear their foes. This does not mean they forgive them, but merely that they take them to court like civilized men and Christians.

We remained on our island some eighteen months. We endured the heat of two summers. We fed innumerable mosquitoes. We bathed perpetually in the lagoon. We gazed on endless rows of coco palms. We wore wreaths of hibiscus.

We left it why? Many have gone to the South Seas and left them again more rapidly than did we. Of these the hibiscus writers give no record. Even Stevenson, one recollects, was always going away from his island in steam yachts. And does not one gather from the poignant pages of his diary and letters that, if his health had allowed, he, poor man, would quickly have left the hibiscus groves and hot noons of Samoa for the heather and mists of Scotland?

We left our island because we had proved that one can be too hot; because I grew weary of coco palms; because I tired of a sea which, though sapphire, was always empty; because I was nauseated by a diet of bananas; because man cannot live on a view alone; because because, in short, there are thorns on the hibiscus.

THE JAPANESE DRAMA 1

BY DR. A. MIYAMORI

IN Japan, no less than in Greece and many other European countries, religion is the mother of the drama. There can be no doubt that Kagura, or the sacred dance, still performed during festivals in Shinto temples, is the progenitor of all forms of Japanese drama.

Mythology has it that the Sun Goddess, disgusted at the conduct of her brother, the god Susano-ono-Mikoto, hid herself in a cave. There followed darkness throughout the universe - to the great perplexity of the myriad gods, who were at a loss to know what to do. At this critical moment, the jovial goddess Uzume performed a comic dance at the mouth of the cave and succeeded in enticing the Sun Goddess from her hiding-place. Thus, to the immense joy of the gods, light was restored to the universe. Such is the traditional origin of the sacred dance. Whatever the significance of the legend may be, certain it is that the sacred dance has existed from time immemorial. It is a pantomime in which the actors imitate the deeds of the different deities whom they impersonate. They wear grotesque masks and dance to the accompaniment of singing and of flutes and drums. The sacred dance is so simple and so primitive in plot that it possesses no literary value, but it is interesting none the less as being the parent of all forms of Japanese literary drama.

The literary dramas of old Japan are divisible into four classes: the

1 From the Japan Advertiser (Tokyo American daily), February 5

Yokyoku, or No play; the Kyogen, or comic interlude; the Kabuki play or drama for the regular theatre; and the Joruri, or puppet play.

The Yokyoku, or texts of musical dramas known as No, are short, serious plays, generally in two scenes. Their plots are derived chiefly from Japanese history, myth, and folklore, and from certain Japanese stories such as the Story of Genji and the Story of the Taira Family. In addition to dialogue and monologue, they contain descriptive passages. The loveliest inspirations are often found in the monologue of the protagonist and in the so-called Michiyuki, or 'songs of travel,' which indeed form the most important part of the descriptive passages and narrate in a few exquisite lines the journey, sometimes covering hundreds of miles, made by some person in the drama.

Most dramas of this type are written in the colloquial language of the Kamakura Period (1186-1332), and the greater portion of the descriptions and occasionally some of the dialogue are of a piece with the lyric and epic poetry of the latter half of the Heian Period (794-1186), with the lyric element predominating. The verse is largely composed of a succession of seven- and five-syllable lines, the standard metre of Japanese poetry. Profusely adorned with classical Japanese and Chinese poems, this order of drama also abounds in historical references and in quotations from Buddhist scriptures. For this reason the No plays prove too difficult for

ordinary comprehension without special study.

These dramas disclose another pronounced characteristic in the frequent use of ingenious plays upon words, a device which is a distinguishing feature of Japanese classics and one that adds considerably to the beauty and melody of such compositions. It detracts from the originality, but not from the merit, of the No plays, that the most beautiful passages in them are upon examination only too often found to be undigested borrowings from the Story of Genji, the Story of the Taira Family, the Rise and Fall of Minamoto and Taira Families, the Record of Great Peace, the Collection of Odes Ancient and Modern, and so on, so that the No plays are often with justice likened to a patchwork of brocade.

The plan of these plays is generally the same simple framework- being often but a narration of the ups and downs of fortune of some historical or fictitious character and a sermon on the uncertainty of human life. First, for instance, appears a Buddhist priest making a pilgrimage through several provinces; next appears a ghost in human shape, who relates to the priest his experiences and adventures as a mortal and confesses that he is a ghost; finally the priest prays for the peace of the departed, and upon this the ghost vanishes. Such is the most typical plan. Buddhist doctrines, in particular the doctrine of karma, pervade these plays, and in some of them, called 'god-plays,' the history of certain Shinto shrines is related, or the spirits of Shinto deities appear and perform miracles.

The actors performing the principal rôles wear masks of wood, and dance to the accompaniment of a flute, two hand-drums, and, in some cases, of a drum struck with a stick. The manner

of the dancing is usually extremely slow, solemn, and full of dignity. The play, from start to finish, is chanted, somewhat like an oratorio; and the chanting of the protagonist's part while he dances falls almost entirely to the chorus. This chorus consists of ten or twelve men, seated motionless at the side of the stage. These also sing the narrative portions.

The technical principles governing the No plays are symbolism, conventionalism, mysticism, and unrealism, if I may be permitted to use such a term; for these plays seem to aim at carrying the imagination of the audience away from real life. Let me cite one or two instances of this conventionalism. Upon the No stage a palace, a house, a cottage, a hovel, are all represented by four posts covered with a roof; the fan which the actor usually carries does duty often enough as a lute, a shield, a wine-holder, wine cup, or some such object; the walking of a few steps on the stage often signifies the traveling by the character of hundreds of miles and the attainment of a far-off destination.

The No plays are somewhat deficient in lucidity and coherence, but exceedingly beautiful both in style and content, so that a mere reading of them tends to elevate one's feelings and thoughts. Brevity and quietness characterize these dramas and their performance; their plots and sentences are simple but charged with significance; chanting is done in 'cloudy' and subdued voices, and the difference between the voices of male and female characters is hardly noticeable save to a specialist; the music is calm and grave; mystic, lustreless masks are used.

The word No signifies 'performance' or 'accomplishment.' Etymologically the word is an abbreviation of sarugaku-no-no, sarugaku being a corruption of sangaku, or 'scattered music,' that is, 'popular music.' Tateki Owada

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