As to the drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in which we have come to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction," no knot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession of scenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy, or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be called epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it most obviously differs from the Greek drama. It has no intellectual content, or very little. And, perhaps for that reason, it has had no development, but remains fossilised where it was in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, these actors, I felt, are the only ones who could act Greek drama. They have, I think, quite clearly the same tradition and aim as the Greeks. They desire not to reproduce but to symbolise actuality; and their conception of acting is the very opposite of ours. The last thing they aim at is to be "natural." To be unnatural rather is their object. Hence the costume, hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. And how effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic drama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetry in England, if we had as a living tradition anything analogous to work upon!
Waking in the night, I heard the sound of running water. Across my window I saw, stretching dimly, the branch of a pine, and behind it shone the stars. I remembered that I was in Japan and felt that all the essence of it was there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon and stars. All their life, as all their art, seems to be a mood of these. For to them their life and their art are inseparable. The art is not an accomplishment, an ornament, an excrescence. It is the flower of the plant. Some men, some families of men, feeling beauty as every one felt it, had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should say--it is the Japanese view--to suggest it. To them the branch of a tree stands for a forest, a white disk on gold for night and the moon, a quivering reed for a river, a bamboo stalk for a grove. Their painters are poets. By passionate observation they have learnt what expression of the part most inevitably symbolises the whole. That they give; and their admirers, trained like them in feeling, fill in the rest. This art presupposes, what it has always had, a public not less sensitive than the artist; a similar mood, a similar tradition, a similar culture. Feel as they do, and you must create as they do, or at least appreciate their creations.