



Produced by David Starner, Marlo Dianne, Charles Franks,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








CERTAIN NOBLE PLAYS OF JAPAN:

From The Manuscripts Of Ernest Fenollosa,

Chosen And Finished

By Ezra Pound

With An Introduction By William Butler Yeats




INTRODUCTION


I

In the series of books I edit for my sister I confine myself to those
that have I believe some special value to Ireland, now or in the future.
I have asked Mr. Pound for these beautiful plays because I think they
will help me to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic
movement. I am writing these words with my imagination stirred by a visit
to the studio of Mr. Dulac, the distinguished illustrator of the Arabian
Nights. I saw there the mask and head-dress to be worn in a play of mine
by the player who will speak the part of Cuchulain, and who wearing
this noble half-Greek half-Asiatic face will appear perhaps like an image
seen in revery by some Orphic worshipper. I hope to have attained the
distance from life which can make credible strange events, elaborate
words. I have written a little play that can be played in a room for so
little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price.
There will be no scenery, for three musicians, whose seeming sun-burned
faces will I hope suggest that they have wandered from village to village
in some country of our dreams, can describe place and weather, and at
moments action, and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and
dulcimer. Instead of the players working themselves into a violence of
passion indecorous in our sitting-room, the music, the beauty of form and
voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance.

In fact with the help of these plays 'translated by Ernest Fenollosa and
finished by Ezra Pound' I have invented a form of drama, distinguished,
indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its
way--an aristocratic form. When this play and its performance run as
smoothly as my skill can make them, I shall hope to write another of the
same sort and so complete a dramatic celebration of the life of Cuchulain
planned long ago. Then having given enough performances for I hope the
pleasure of personal friends and a few score people of good taste, I
shall record all discoveries of method and turn to something else. It is
an advantage of this noble form that it need absorb no one's life, that
its few properties can be packed up in a box, or hung upon the walls
where they will be fine ornaments.


II

And yet this simplification is not mere economy. For nearly three
centuries invention has been making the human voice and the movements of
the body seem always less expressive. I have long been puzzled why
passages, that are moving when read out or spoken during rehearsal, seem
muffled or dulled during performance. I have simplified scenery, having
'The Hour Glass' for instance played now before green curtains, now among
those admirable ivory- screens invented by Gordon Craig. With
every simplification the voice has recovered something of its importance
and yet when verse has approached in temper to let us say 'Kubla Khan,'
or 'The Ode to the West Wind,' the most typical modern verse, I have
still felt as if the sound came to me from behind a veil. The
stage-opening, the powerful light and shade, the number of feet between
myself and the players have destroyed intimacy. I have found myself
thinking of players who needed perhaps but to unroll a mat in some
Eastern garden. Nor have I felt this only when I listened to
speech, but even more when I have watched the movement of a player or
heard singing in a play. I love all the arts that can still remind me of
their origin among the common people, and my ears are only comfortable
when the singer sings as if mere speech had taken fire, when he appears
to have passed into song almost imperceptibly. I am bored and wretched,
a limitation I greatly regret, when he seems no longer a human being but
an invention of science. To explain him to myself I say that he has
become a wind instrument and sings no longer like active men, sailor or
camel driver, because he has had to compete with an orchestra, where the
loudest instrument has always survived. The human voice can only become
louder by becoming less articulate, by discovering some new musical sort
of roar or scream. As poetry can do neither, the voice must be freed
from this competition and find itself among little instruments, only
heard at their best perhaps when we are close about them. It should be
again possible for a few poets to write as all did once, not for the
printed page but to be sung. But movement also has grown less expressive,
more declamatory, less intimate. When I called the other day upon a
friend I found myself among some dozen people who were watching a group
of Spanish boys and girls, professional dancers, dancing some national
dance in the midst of a drawing-room. Doubtless their training had been
long, laborious and wearisome; but now one could not be deceived, their
movement was full of joy. They were among friends, and it all seemed
but the play of children; how powerful it seemed, how passionate, while
an even more miraculous art, separated from us by the footlights,
appeared in the comparison laborious and professional. It is well to
be close enough to an artist to feel for him a personal liking, close
enough perhaps to feel that our liking is returned.

My play is made possible by a Japanese dancer whom I have seen dance in a
studio and in a drawing-room and on a very small stage lit by an
excellent stage-light. In the studio and in the drawing-room alone where
the lighting was the light we are most accustomed to, did I see him as
the tragic image that has stirred my imagination. There where no
studied lighting, no stage-picture made an artificial world, he was able,
as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting crossed-legged or as
he threw out an arm, to recede from us into some more powerful life.
Because that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded,
but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind. One realised anew,
at every separating strangeness, that the measure of all arts' greatness
can be but in their intimacy.


III

All imaginative art keeps at a distance and this distance once chosen
must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and
dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial
expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door. Our
unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it
in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or a
plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate
from the world and us a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to
pass for a few moments into a deep of the mind that had hitherto been too
subtle for our habitation. As a deep of the mind can only be approached
through what is most human, most delicate, we should distrust bodily
distance, mechanism and loud noise.

It may be well if we go to school in Asia, for the distance from life in
European art has come from little but difficulty with material. In
half-Asiatic Greece, Kallimachos could still return to a stylistic management
of the falling folds of drapery, after the naturalistic drapery of
Phidias, and in Egypt the same age that saw the village Head-man carved
in wood for burial in some tomb with so complete a naturalism saw, set up
in public places, statues full of an august formality that implies
traditional measurements, a philosophic defence. The spiritual painting
of the 14th century passed on into Tintoretto and that of Velasquez into
modern painting with no sense of loss to weigh against the gain, while
the painting of Japan, not having our European Moon to churn the wits,
has understood that no styles that ever delighted noble imaginations have
lost their importance, and chooses the style according to the subject.
In literature also we have had the illusion of change and progress, the
art of Shakespeare passing into that of Dryden, and so into the prose
drama, by what has seemed when studied in its details unbroken progress.
Had we been Greeks, and so but half-European, an honourable mob would
have martyred though in vain the first man who set up a painted scene, or
who complained that soliloquies were unnatural, instead of repeating with
a sigh, 'we cannot return to the arts of childhood however beautiful.'
Only our lyric poetry has kept its Asiatic habit and renewed itself at
its own youth, putting off perpetually what has been called its progress
in a series of violent revolutions.

Therefore it is natural that I go to Asia for a stage-convention, for
more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action and
perhaps for those movements of the body copied from the marionette shows
of the 14th century. A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of
some common-place player, or for that face repainted to suit his own
vulgar fancy, the fine invention of a sculptor, and to bring the audience
close enough to the play to hear every inflection of the voice. A mask
never seems but a dirty face, and no matter how close you go is still a
work of art; nor shall we lose by staying the movement of the features,
for deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body. In
poetical painting & in sculpture the face seems the nobler for lacking
curiosity, alert attention, all that we sum up under the famous word of
the realists 'vitality.' It is even possible that being is only possessed
completely by the dead, and that it is some knowledge of this that
makes us gaze with so much emotion upon the face of the Sphinx or Buddha.
Who can forget the face of Chaliapine as the Mogul King in Prince Igor,
when a mask covering its upper portion made him seem like a Phoenix at
the end of its thousand wise years, awaiting in condescension the burning
nest and what did it not gain from that immobility in dignity and in
power?


IV

Realism is created for the common people and was always their peculiar
delight, and it is the delight to-day of all those whose minds educated
alone by school-masters and newspapers are without the memory of beauty
and emotional subtlety. The occasional humorous realism that so much
heightened the emotional effect of Elizabethan Tragedy, Cleopatra's old
man with an asp let us say, carrying the tragic crisis by its contrast
above the tide-mark of Corneille's courtly theatre,