VI

In the plays themselves I discover a beauty or a subtlety that I can
trace perhaps to their threefold origin. The love-sorrows, the love of
father and daughter, of mother and son, of boy and girl, may owe their
nobility to a courtly life, but he to whom the adventures happen, a
traveller commonly from some distant place, is most often a Buddhist
priest; and the occasional intellectual subtlety is perhaps Buddhist. The
adventure itself is often the meeting with ghost, god or goddess at some
holy place or much-legended tomb; and god, goddess or ghost reminds
me at times of our own Irish legends and beliefs, which once it may be
differed little from those of the Shinto worshipper.

The feather-mantle, for whose lack the moon goddess, (or should we call
her fairy?) cannot return to the sky, is the red cap whose theft can keep
our fairies of the sea upon dry land; and the ghost-lovers in 'Nishikigi'
remind me of the Aran boy and girl who in Lady Gregory's story come to
the priest after death to be married. These Japanese poets too feel for
tomb and wood the emotion, the sense of awe that our Gaelic speaking
country people will some times show when you speak to them of Castle
Hackett or of some Holy Well; and that is why perhaps it pleases them to
begin so many plays by a Traveller asking his way with many questions, a
convention agreeable to me; for when I first began to write poetical
plays for an Irish theatre I had to put away an ambition of helping to
bring again to certain places, their old sanctity or their romance. I
could lay the scene of a play on Baile's Strand, but I found no pause in
the hurried action for descriptions of strand or sea or the great yew
tree that once stood there; and I could not in 'The King's Threshold'
find room, before I began the ancient story, to call up the shallow river