Dorothy Menpes - Japan

MISS POMEGRANATE

JAPAN A RECORD IN COLOUR BY MORTIMER MENPES TRANSCRIBED BY DOROTHY MENPES PUBLISHED BY ADAM & CHARLES BLACK SOHO SQUARE LONDON W.

Published December 1901
Reprinted May 1902, January 1903, January 1904
January 1905

TO MY FRIEND

THE LADY EDWARD CECIL

TO WHOSE ENTHUSIASTIC SYMPATHY

MY WORK IN JAPAN

OWES SO MUCH OF THE SUCCESS

IT HAS ATTAINED

Note

In this book I endeavour to present, with whatever skill of penmanship I may possess, my fathers impressions of Japan. I trust that they will not lose in force and vigour in that they are closely intermingled with my own impressions, which were none the less vivid because they were those of a child,for it was as a child, keenly interested in and enjoying all I saw, that I passed, four or five years ago, through that lovely flower-land of the Far East, which my father has here so charmingly memorialised in colour.

DOROTHY MENPES

November 1901.

ART AND THE DRAMA

AN ACTOR

I always agree with that man who said, Let me make the nations songs and I care not who frames her laws, or words to that effect, for, in my opinion, nothing so well indicates national character or so keenly accentuates the difference between individuals and nations as the way in which they spend their leisure hours; and the theatres of Japan are thoroughly typical of the peoples character. It would be utterly impossible for the Japanese to keep art out of their lives. It creeps into everything, and is as the very air they breathe. Art with them is not only a conscious effort to achieve the beautiful, but also an instinctive expression of inherited taste. It beautifies their homes and pervades their gardens; and perhaps one never realises this all-dominating power more fully than when in a Japanese theatre, which is, invariably, a veritable temple of art. But here with us in the West it is different. We have no art, and our methods merely lead us to deception, while we do not begin to understand those few great truths which form the basis of oriental philosophy, and without which perfection in the dramatic art is impossible. For example, the philosophy of balance, of which the Japanese are past masters, is to us unknown. The fact that Nature is commonplace, thereby forming a background, as it were, for Tragedy and the spirit of life to work, has never occurred to us; while the background of our Western play is not by any means a plan created by a true artist upon which to display the dramatic picture as it is in Japan, but simply a background to advertise the stage-managers imitative talent. The result is, of course, that the acting and the environment are at variance instead of being in harmonic unity. But we in the West have not time to think of vague things, such as balance and breadth and the creating of pictures. What we want is realism; we want a sky to look like a real sky, and the moon in it to look like a real moon, even if it travels by clock-work, as it has been known to do occasionally. And so real is this clock-work moon that we are deceived into imagining that it is the moon, the actual moon. But the deception is not pleasant; in fact, it almost gives you indigestion to see a moon, and such a moon, careering over the whole sky in half an hour. In Japan they would not occupy themselves with making you believe that a moon on the stage was a real onethey would consider such false realism as a bit of gross degradationbut they would take the greatest possible pains as to the proper placing of that palpably pasteboard moon of theirs, even if they had to hold it up in the sky by the aid of a broom-stick.