and the few trees and rocky fields of modern Gort. But in the 'Nishikigi'
the tale of the lovers would lose its pathos if we did not see that
forgotten tomb where 'the hiding fox' lives among 'the orchids and the
chrysanthemum flowers.' The men who created this convention were more
like ourselves than were the Greeks and Romans, more like us even than
are Shakespeare and Corneille. Their emotion was self-conscious and
reminiscent, always associating itself with pictures and poems. They
measured all that time had taken or would take away and found their
delight in remembering celebrated lovers in the scenery pale passion
loves. They travelled seeking for the strange and for the picturesque: 'I
go about with my heart set upon no particular place, no more than a
cloud. I wonder now would the sea be that way, or the little place Kefu
that they say is stuck down against it.' When a traveller asks his way of
girls upon the roadside he is directed to find it by certain pine trees,
which he will recognise because many people have drawn them.

I wonder am I fanciful in discovering in the plays themselves (few
examples have as yet been translated and I may be misled by accident or
the idiosyncrasy of some poet) a playing upon a single metaphor, as
deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese
painting. In the 'Nishikigi' the ghost of the girl-lover carries the
cloth she went on weaving out of grass when she should have opened the
chamber door to her lover, and woven grass returns again and again in
metaphor and incident. The lovers, now that in an aery body they must
sorrow for unconsummated love, are 'tangled up as the grass patterns are
tangled.' Again they are like an unfinished cloth: 'these bodies, having
no weft, even now are not come together, truly a shameful story, a tale
to bring shame on the gods.' Before they can bring the priest to the tomb
they spend the day 'pushing aside the grass from the overgrown ways in
Kefu,' and the countryman who directs them is 'cutting grass on the