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THE PLAY BEGINS

[Click to view picture.] DIONYSUS makes drama. Before this god of vegetation came to Greece there was ritual but no drama. There were masked animal dances that stretched far back to primitive initiations, and there were chants sung and danced at the tombs of dead heroes who had become gods. The peculiar and dramatic thing about Dionysus was his story of death and rebirth. His body had been rent apart, and scattered like leaves in the fall, and he had been reborn as the earth is reborn each spring. When the leader of the worshippers in goat-skins, dancing and chanting the story of their hero before his altar, began to act out the god's life in his own person he had to do something inherently dramatic. He had to leave the circle to meet his death in the woods, and he had to return to tell of his death and his rebirth. All Greek drama retains the distinctive forms of the service at Dionysus' altar--the dancing, chanting chorus, the hero who is killed, the messenger who tells of his death and rebirth, the return of a god. Thespis fused the mimetic worship and the ritualistic choruses, and he added an actor. They credit him, too, with the invention of the mask worn by actors and chorus. But the evidence is as slight as the supply of masks left from Attic Greece. Today we have only such replicas in marble or terra cotta as this votive offering in a Roman tomb.

[Click to view picture.] THESPIS may have invented the mask or merely borrowed and improved it. The mask was inevitable in Greek religious drama, and it held on even into comedy that became domestic farce. Spirits that come out of graves--not to mention gods--are hardly likely to take the forms of villagers. Even in New Guinea a man will wear a mask when he is going to raise the dead. If he has the sensitive mind of a Greek, he will know that a human face is absurdly inappropriate to a god. To an Athenian of the time of Phidias the natural thing was for an artist to create the face of Dionysus out of wood and leather, cloth and cork and paint, and give it appropriate and absolute values. "Moreover, the mask had certain practical advantages. It could contain a kind of megaphone to throw the voice across the great spaces of the open air theatres. It could be made a little larger than life in order that 40,000 might see it. With many tragic masks to choose from, the three actors to whom Greek tragedy was limited could play many parts in the same play. This mask of a courtezan on the later Graeco-Roman stage carries us on to the days when the stock figures of Latin drama--the glutton, the miser, the rascally servant, the young hero--had been reanimated into the fixed types of the Commedia dell' Arte of the sixteenth century with their half-masks.

[Click to view picture.] IN Japan the mask begins in demonology, and ends in the most refined and recondite dramatic form in the world. In the eighth century a force of twenty devil-dancers, equipped with exceptionally potent masks each containing four lozangular eyes, kept the palace free of demons. By the fifteenth century the Japanese had developed a form of masked religious drama as perfect within its own limits as the Greek, and presenting surprising parallels to that highest of tragic forms. Today the drama of the Greeks is a little bundle of manuscripts, and their theatre a dubious tradition. Even the ways of Shakespeare's playhouse are difficult to learn. But this No drama of Japan exists today as complete, as pure, as uncorrupted by man and time, as when the Shoguns first saw it four centuries and a half ago. The masks of the No, clean cut, sharply characterized, quite perfect in their sublimation of the realistic, stand close to the top of the art of the false face; only the more vigorous and expressive masks of the Negro excel them. Here is a mask used in the religious dances of the eleventh century from which No sprang. Few of these older masks have reached the western world; they are treasured reverently in the Buddhist temples and imperial collections.

[Click to view picture.] OFFICIAL religions are thoroughly confused in Japan. Transmigrational Buddhism, plentifully encrusted with demoniacal and heroic legends, reached Japan in the sixth century. In the course of thirteen hundred years it has managed to fuse with the mild spiritism and nature worship of the Shinto faith of old Japan, just as it fused with the ancestor worship of China. The origins of the No drama lie in this curious and obscure mingling of religions, and they are as curious, as obscure, and as mingled. Two sources are Buddhist; one of these is courtly and one religious. The Chinese brought to Japan a court dance which still persists. In it the actions of a hero are dramatized in a series of postures against a background of music. The Buddhists brought, too, their miracle plays. In the temples, to the accompaniment of scriptural readings, a masked god and a certain number of subordinate figures danced holy pantomimes. As with our own miracle plays of the middle ages, the comic element had a way of squeezing itself in, requiring masks which, some authorities think, may have been remotely derived from Greek low comedy. This grotesque mask from the twelfth century was one of those used for the Gigaku dance, in which the pantomime of Buddhism began to fuse with a more native form.

[Click to view picture.] BUDDHA is complacent. Demons, gods, and ancestors may cling to his vestments. He accepts their attentions as part, perhaps, of the discomforts this side of Nirvana. In Japan Buddhism found one of the most primitive forms of religion, the Shinto worship of nature forces and a myriad of beneficent spirits. All Japan is dotted with shrines of local deities, kindly though mysterious beings that crept out of the ancestral forest when fetishism was dying. For centuries these spirits have appeared at regular intervals to repeat the story of their advent in the pantomimic dances of masked priests. Even great cities like Tokyo are well supplied with such local spirits, and once a year the god climbs up on a platform in the street to dance the story of his coming. Before the No drama was invented, dances of this sort were accompanied on the lute. The next step was the introduction of song. In the Japanese renaissance the nobles were already singing together with all the enthusiasm of a German Sangerbund, and soon they made verses and music to be sung as an accompaniment to a dance. At the same time the Shinto priests introduced songs of the god-spirit as they danced the yearly story of its advent. Thus was the ground prepared for that rare, lovely, and aloof art, the No drama of dance and dialog and lyric song. Here is another of the Gigaku masks which antedated those of the No.

[Click to view picture.] QUITE as old a thing as the return of a spirit in a mask was the ancient celebration which sent to the Shinto temples the actors who were needed to make ritual dances into drama. This thing was the country festival of spring planting and autumn reaping. As everywhere the world over, rude comedy arose in these simple attempts at generative magic and celebration. The end of such buffoonery was another of the many forms of the masked dance in Japan--the Dengaku or "rice-field music." Soon there developed roving acrobats and jugglers, clowns and comedians, who spread the fun of seed time and harvest time all round the year. The priests of Shinto and Buddha brought these Dengaku gamesters into the temples to draw crowds to the periodic festivals. These players began to devise farces, and ended with the comedy called Kiogen. Presently they were trying their hand at tragic subjects, the legends of spirits and heroes. The god-dancer appeared in their midst, sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a hero. A Dengaku troupe was invited to the court of the Shogun, and under the stimulus of such patronage arose suddenly from god-dance, country farce, and the songs and dances of the court the precise and lyric drama called No. Here is the mask of a fool, Baka, typical of the country farces and the false face clownery still to be seen in temple yards and religious processions.

[Click to view picture.] SOMETHING besides masks and demons was necessary to the making of a dramatic art so refined as the Japanese No. This was the ancient aristocratic culture of Nippon. Gods, spirits, and heroes can make religious pantomime, but only the critical soul of man can make a delicate, mannered, yet austere art-form. The No is a group of five or six very short dance-dramas given at court or in a special theatre on a single day. There is a pattern in each, and a pattern in the group. First comes a congratulatory play in which the gods bestow their blessing; next a battle-piece, a kind of sympathetic magic, for the gods and the emperors pacified the country by ejecting the demons. After that comes a "wig-piece," or quiet love story; then a play of the spirits to signify the passing of this transitory life; next a play of an admonitory nature, often farcical, and finally another congratulation. In each verse play there are always three chief characters who speak together developing some facet of legend. A chorus interjects comment. At the close the chief character dances while music and chorus continue their interpretation. The drama of it is spiritually intense, the form fragile and precise. The fusion of dialog, dance, and music is the secret of its brief lyric perfection. Here is a No mask, grave, austere.

[Click to view picture.] MASK and ritual and legend unite the perfection of Greek tragedy with the perfection of the Japanese No. Both dramas are religious and both spring out of services commemorating the appearances of gods. Both are lyric, as well as dramatic, and both are founded upon music and dance. They share the chorus, and the human actions and sorrows in both are lifted up into a healing understanding by its interpretation. Both draw upon heroes and beings of the spiritual world for people and stories. Both put forward a simple ethical lesson. They have rich costumes and characterizing masks in common. The Greek, like the No drama, was given in the open air upon a bare and formalized stage. The resemblances are so many that certain reckless scholars are tempted to trace these features of the No back to Greece via the conquests of Alexander, and the spread of classical influences in art across India and China with merchants and travelers. Yet essentially No is a product of the religion of Japan, and of the probity of a race at its highest point of progress. Of Greek tragedy and the No it is truer to say that both sprang from the common religious nature of man, caught up and beatified at a moment of exceptional racial exaltation. This old man, Sanko, is one of the three hundred masks employed for various parts in the two hundred No plays now extant.

[Click to view picture.] THE masks and the plays, the acting traditions and the stage of the No drama have come down through four centuries unchanged. The plays are acted on a square platform backed by a wall on which a pine tree is painted in a certain fashion as a symbol of undying strength. The wooden floor beneath an overhanging roof is made resonant to the feet of the dancers by great jars cunningly placed beneath the boards. The long "bridge" or wooden walk leading to the actors' room is similarly resonated, and along its length are planted three symbolic pines. All this has never changed. And so with the actors. Whether they appear in unmasked characters or are hidden behind the faces of old men, spirits, or such lovely women as this, they must learn their art by a training that has not deviated from the time when their forefathers played the same parts. The movement of their bodies is fixed by diagrams accompanying the written texts. The niceties of interpretation are preserved wholly by the training of masters. The pose for looking at the double reflection of the moon in two tubs is reverently learned with the same precision as the movement of the arm when the fan serves as teacup, sword, or pen. Here in the No, hard on the heels of Greek tragedy, the mask finds itself at its highest point of perfection in a theatre that unites religious ritual and dramatic art.

[Click to view picture.] WHEN the mask comes out into public entertainment it is in danger. Only the exceptional minds of the Greeks and the Japanese--temperate, contained, yet spirited--have been able to make the legend of masked ritual into the finest drama. The Chinese have turned it into a thesis-play. This drama of the Buddhist temples of the continent is purely admonitory. Like the sermons of John Wesley and Billy Sunday, it warns you of the consequences of sin. Upon stages in the temple yards, the priests appear in spectacles that are at the same time edifying and amusing. To encourage the Chinese to lead virtuous lives, and thus at death to travel a step nearer the blessed, permanent extinction of Nirvana, the Buddhist and Taoist priests depict the judgment after death, and the horrors of punishment in the hells of purgatory. Gorgeous costumes, masks lovely, horrible, or bizarre, and pantomime of a vivid nature unite to impress the occasion on the minds of the people. Yet even the most revolting tortures are mitigated by a kind of grotesque humor that makes the lesson bearable as well as impressive. This devil lictor from the seventh court of purgatory suggests the masked devil of the European mystery play who popped damned souls into hellmouth to the great delight of the mediaeval audience.

[Click to view picture.] THE Chinese have one hundred and twenty-eight hells in the ten purgatories through which the soul passes from life to life on its way to Nirvana. There are hot hells, cold hells, and dark hells; hells where those who practice medicine without a degree and those who refuse to ransom grown-up slave girls are rolled out flat on a sheet of ice with equal impartiality; hells where those who stop funeral processions and those who promote litigation join in the pleasures of salt pits and brine wells, sit upon spikes, drink abominable drugs, or slip and fall upon a path of well-oiled beans--all, perhaps, merely to pass from the body of a lawyer into that of a coolie or even a dog. Yet this charming little girl with the quizzical smile upon her mask is among the attendants in the First Court of Purgatory. She is one of four servants waiting upon the beneficent Buddhist madonna Kuan-yin, who attends the hellish court doubtless to see that justice is properly tempered. When the Taoist priests act out this scene in their religious and admonitory drama of the after-world, Kuan-yin sits in the centre at the back with her eight merciful hands and her many other charms displayed against the scenery of the island of P'u-t'o, lit by candles on the backs of birds.

[Click to view picture.] PURGATORY, as pictured in the Chinese admonitory drama, is a place of orderly processes and variegated officials. The ten courts are presided over by kings of impressive aspect as well as virtue. They are assisted by all manner of functionaries. There is, for example, a person named General Bull in the first court. He is the beadle, and his mask presents him as a bovine creature, because the bull is sacred to Yama, lord of the infernos. To summon a culprit or a witness from the other world the judge employs a sheriff of human form, because the devil-policemen cannot stand the light of day. This sheriff is a man who has committed suicide with a rope. His tongue hangs out in an alarming manner, but on his dunce cap are four words assuring those whose virtuous actions he sees that they will enjoy good fortune. The judge is provided with two assistants, a civil officer and a military man. This martial mask is as thoroughly adorned with symbolic flourishes as the face of any general on the popular Chinese stage. The secular theatre, which is as moral and almost as admonitory as the priestly performances, has substituted makeup for mask. The strictest of traditions prescribe white powder and paint for a perfidious statesman, red for an upright man, black for a brutal character. Over these ground colors play bizarre and brilliant curves.

[Click to view picture.] THE official religions of China are even more confused than Christianity from Christ to Channing and from Gregory to Straton. Confucianism is a rational ethic which took a little ancestor worship out of the past. Taoism is an intellectual philosophy heavily decorated with the wildest kind of polytheism from demons to the distinguished dead. Buddhism started out to be a rational and atheistic theory that no power but your mind could free you from the law of reincarnation--a law that made every man his own ancestor and his own god or demon--and Buddhism ended by allying itself with Taoism and acquiring sky gods, animal gods, ancestor gods, fairies, and mythological heroes who only just escaped deification. When a birthday or a wedding occurs among the best families of China, this amazing pantheon parades in masks as a prelude to the play which usually celebrates such an occasion. These deities and heroes have come to congratulate the celebrant and to bestow on him long life, wealth, and progeny. Among the well-wishers, if he is a governor or an emperor, are the Twenty-eight Patriarchs, the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas associated with the rain-making dragon, and the fairies of the hundred flowers, the thousand flowers, and the ten thousand flowers. This is one of the gods of the Twenty-eight Lunar Mansions, an animated constellation.

[Click to view picture.] ANCESTORS make the best gods. They are human, easily understood and managed. Yet at a certain point of intellectual growth man stops turning his dead into deities, and makes mythological heroes of them instead. Troy marked this stage for the Greeks. Most of the so-called ancestor worship of China lies this side of godhead. In the congratulatory play which used to be given upon an emperor's birthday, there were all manner of ancestors present in masked form, as well as sky-gods and fairies. Twenty-one masks revealed the cast of the great mythological romance Fung shen yen i. The most interesting character is Kiang Tse-ya. He became chief counsellor to the emperor at eighty when the ruler found him fishing with a straight iron hook out of his goodness of heart. Such virtue, so the book says, attracted the fish as well as the emperor. How close the good man came to being made a god may be seen from the fact that the words: "Mr. Kiang is here!" written on the door of a house is highly esteemed as a method of frightening away a demon. Had he lived a few centuries earlier, he would as surely have achieved deification as Yun Siao, the nature goddess of the Three Fairies Island. She is charming enough in this mask, but her only claim to religious fame seems to be that she is the owner of a pair of shears capable of cutting gods and men in two.

[Click to view picture.] IN the Rome of Buddhism--the city of Lhassa, to which the religion came from India as late as Christianity came to Rome from Judea--the faith of Gautama is even more corrupted by tales of saints and demons than it is in the Taoist temples of China. The masks of Tibet reflect this. In the lamaseries--those hospices of the Tibetan monks which infest the country as monasteries infested mediaeval Europe--there are masks which carry us back to the days when magic and the medicine man, demons and rainmakers held sway without the aid of revealed and codified religion. Among such ancient masks from western Tibet is this portrait of an Indian Brahman with the third eye of wisdom in his forehead, as well as masks of a famed hermit from that holy land, a Hindu layman, Mara, the evil principle, and a dolphin-like seamonster. The presence of such every-day figures as a Hindu, a Brahman, and a hermit indicated, even centuries ago, the practical, workaday nature of the Tibetan holy drama. Simple and rude in its technique, a mere pantomimic pageant of a moralistic nature, it is a spectacle which proves to the public the practical advantages of salvation by Lamaism.

[Click to view picture.] THE lamas of the Tibetan monasteries are monopolists of the holy drama. Yet they provide no theatre and no stage, no scenery and no dialog to aid in its presentation. The performances take place in the temple yard. Outcries and interjections are the only sounds heard above the tramp of feet, the swish of garments, and the row of trumpets, gongs, and cymbals. Ghoulish clowns, the Atsara, open and close the pantomimes in Lhassa by dashing into the courtyard, leaping and whirling and turning handsprings, or subsiding into a slow and mystical movement of body, hands, and fingers. They are clothed in tight-fitting one-piece suits painted with the bones of skeletons, and on their heads they wear this grisly mask. Its flesh-colored surface, laced with meandering veins of blood, suggests a flayed head or a ghastly, fattened skull. The pantomime which follows the appearance of the Atsara is the story of man's temptation by the forces of evil and his rescue through the power of the church. Demons offer temptations to a masked man. At first he resists, then is about to succumb, when, in answer to the pleadings of his friends, the lamas and the guardian powers intervene, and he turns towards them. Then follows a merry lambasting of the demons, whose clothes are as well stuffed as the clubs of the gods.

[Click to view picture.] IN Lhassa masked festivals are common. At New Year's there are carnivals. In the third month, when holy dishes are emptied, and sacred pictures hung up, the lamas provide admonitory pantomimes. And throughout the year in Tibet and in China the temples of Lamaistic Buddhism hold solemn processions of the masked powers of the faith. At New Year's in Pekin the priests of the Yung-ho-kung temple present a varied pantheon to the public gaze. There are Red, Black, and Blue Kings, the Guardians of the World, each provided with the lozangular eye of wisdom in his forehead the better to penetrate past, present, and future. Like the Heavenly Kings, the Green-blue, Brown, and Light-blue Officials have a wreath of skulls on their foreheads. Each has ninety-one sons, but their only companions in the processions are eight generals and twenty-eight kinds of demons. This is the mask of one of the sixteen Dharmapala, who, like the kings of England, are defenders of the faith. Their defensive methods are not the same, however, for they spy the enemies of Buddha from afar, and appal them with a ring of flame.

[Click to view picture.] CHINA makes the mask into a moral lesson and a horrible example. Asia to the south of her turns the false face toward art for art's sake. Through Burmah, Siam, Sumatra, Java, and Ceylon--in all of southern Asia where the Mohammedan does not bar the graven image--the mask has left the service of the temple for the service of the theatre. And as the mask goes out of the temple, so religion goes out of the theatre. The drama is only half legend, the rest is contemporary fiction. The mask itself has found a careless and neglectful master. Sometimes it is used in the plays, sometimes not. The twilight of the gods falls upon masks and demons. The false face does not hold the high place it has known in savage New Guinea and barbarous Africa and among the Greeks and the Japanese. In Siam, for example, not all the characters wear masks, and those that wear them do not speak. This is the mask of the White Demon.

[Click to view picture.] EAST and West have met in the Siamese theatre and curbed the masks and legends of the gods. Before the Europeans came Siam knew only masked pantomime, and its stories were the stories of gods and Buddhas. Soon speaking characters invaded the dumb-show, and were lording it over the false faces. Today the masked figures in the spoken plays are a memory of a faded and shrunken art. The theatre of the old days is visible only in some occasional production of a masked and operatic ballet wherein monkeys fight with demons and many strange and curious things occur. The troupes of actors that go up and down the country still carry stories from Hindu epics, and tell tales of the final life of Buddha or of some earlier incarnation. But many of their plays are modern love stories--such yarns of maidens beloved by crocodiles and elephants as the later literature of India delights in. The masks that manage to insinuate themselves into this drama are made of papier-mache, painted white or green or red, and elaborately ornamented with gold. This tusked demon is also decorated with a headdress on which appear turreted heads and grinning faces. Animal gods, deified heroes, hermits, and wild people are similarly masked.

[Click to view picture.] THE story of the mask and its theatrical cousin, the marionette, is vastly complicated in southern Asia by the coming of Mohammedanism. The last of the great religions--bent on the worship of one sublime god, and the abolition of fetish--forbade its artists to create the form of man, animal, or vegetable. Religion progressed; art turned into a kind of geometry. The reaction of this upon the mask, image of god, and the marionette, image of god and man, was disastrous. The actor-image of another; image, even, of the mask and the marionette--seems to have fallen under the ban. Like the mask, he is seldom heard of in strictly Mohammedan countries. The result is a most confused story of the origins of actor, mask, and marionette in lands like Java, which are Brahminical or Buddhist at heart while nominally Mohammedan. This island has shadow puppets borrowed from China many centuries ago. It has marionettes which seem to be of more recent origin. And it has actors who appear both masked and unmasked. The unmasked actor was introduced by an emperor in the eighteenth century, but the masked player is as old as the shadow puppet. Only the deepest study of the land from which this grotesque mask comes could show how puppets, masks, and actors developed in an attempt to balk the law of Mohammed, and preserve ancient and fetishistic art.

[Click to view picture.] FAR back in the theatre of the shadow puppets Java began with a religious drama. There were stories out of sacred history, tales of demons and gods drawn from the Indian epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, moved to Javanese locales, and mixed with a few legends of native deities. Such stories are acted out today by the leathern figures which, painted in vivid colors and adorned with gold for honor's sake, are moved between a lamp and a sheet on which their shadows fall. Some tinge of religious feeling still attaches to these flattened masks of the gods, for before the performance of the Wayang Purwa can begin there must be an offering of food and a burning of incense. These stories of the puppets have been transferred to the stage, where actors appear in such disguises as this half-mask of a bird-demon. On the white, egg-like skull are markings in delicate vermilion.

[Click to view picture.] JAVA has shadow puppets which tell the story of its epic hero, Panji, as well as puppets which cast the shadows of a thousand Buddhas across the screen. Such adventures among the legends of Java are known as Wayang Gedog, and religion takes no heed of them, and burns no incense at their nightly sessions. The same epic stories, along with the saintly and demoniac tales of Buddha and Brahma, are the materials of the ordinary puppet stage of Java--the Wayang Golek. Those svelt and swarthy creatures with their almond eyes, long noses, and even longer arms move with a curious elegance as their master, the Dalang, hidden below, shouts their lines, and at the same time manages the sticks to which, like the shadow marionettes, they are attached instead of to strings. The faces, if not the figures, of these puppets are duplicated in the theatrical performances of actors with masks--the Topeng. Even the Dalang is present to speak the play. The masked stage might, in fact, be a copy from the puppet stage, as the puppets from the shadow-sheet, were it not that such masks as this are far older in Java than the batik-girt figures of the Wayang Golek. Or was the puppet as ancient as the mask or the shadow show, and is he only now escaping from the ban of Mohammed?

[Click to view picture.] JAVANESE puppets and Javanese actors, whether masked or unmasked, share a varied repertory. It includes not only the religious legends of Asia, and the native epic of Panji, but also a large array of Mohammedan and Malayan stories of a most romantic type. Clowns and buffoons break the monotony of love-adventures and heroic exploits. In the case of the puppets--so much more under the control of the Dalang who operates them--satiric improvisation and plenty of local color are vastly popular. With the acted versions of these tales no such liberties are possible. The action has to be settled on beforehand, and the Dalang can speak only such lines as will accord with the movements of his players. Like most love stories and melodramas of martial adventure, the plays of Java are full of stock figures--lovely and elegant heroines, handsome heroes, and most despicable villains. To capture such a matchless beauty as this lily princess, the amorous enemy of the hero is very likely to send demons and evil spirits as well as battling armies. Which, curiously enough, never seem to render his efforts any more successful.

[Click to view picture.] THE masks of the Javanese theatre are ordinarily held in the teeth by means of a strip of leather or rattan across the inside. Occasionally a player leaves his muted world to interrupt the Dalang, who is speaking the play unseen; and then he takes the mask in his hand, and holds it in front of his face while he says his line. Music and headdresses are even more essential to the success of a theatrical production in Java than are such masks. The heads of kings and princesses are piled high with goodly ornament. Rawhide and thin, beaten brass or copper, suitably painted, tower above the figures of the play. Even a dusky villain like this fellow is permitted a headdress of appealing and potent beauty.

[Click to view picture.] AT first blush the commercial theatre of the mask seems confined to Asia. It is only there that you find pay-as-you-enter theatres where the mask is worn. Yet the principle of buying a dramatic pig in a poke is very far from the mark of the playhouse run for gain. Even in the Orient the commoner way of managing popular commercial drama is to pay for the entertainment after it is sampled; sometimes the strollers take up a collection, sometimes the richest land owner pays the bill. Is there much difference between this system of contribution and the gifts presented to medicine men and kings who dance in masks? This mahogany-colored face with its white and turban-like headdress may very well be the mask in which some ruler of a Negro tribe on the Slave Coast danced before his people. There is something theatrical, as well as beautiful, in the sweep of the headdress, and there is something theatrical, as well as regal, in such a dance. The Negro has never reached pure drama, masked or unmasked. But he has played the false face game with an energy and a brilliance surpassing almost all other races. For him--naive and uninquiring, intense yet limited--medicine-dance and drama, like mask and justice, can be one.

[Click to view picture.] ALL through the islands of the east the mask is falling away from high sacramental uses into mummery. There is no mind of Greek or Japanese to raise it into religious drama. And even the Papuans do not seem low enough in the mental scale to keep the mask pure fetish and resist the temptations of the theatre. The white man--especially the white doctor--breaks down the power of the fetish a little. And, as the terrible spirit of the demon goes out of the mask, the spirit of play which has always been in it increases. Soon the same false face that once housed a god or a devil, a dead hero-spirit or a moral rectifier hides the head of a dancer. Perhaps by being very amusing he manages to keep the perquisites that belonged to the owner of the mask when it was a spirit or a god, and levied a kind of holy blackmail. Then--like the Duk-Duks who were once stern disciplinarians--he has become a public entertainer. The mask is commercialized. This false face from New Guinea is two and a half feet high. It is made of bark cloth painted red, white, and black. It has nothing more sacred about it than memories of other and older, fiercer dances.

[Click to view picture.] THE curing of fever by the application of masks is a thriving business on the island that sends us the bulk of our quinine. But the masked actor who sells pleasure in verdant and pearl-girt Ceylon is an inconspicuous stroller carrying pantomimes and comedies from village to village. Many towns depend for their drama upon the efforts of just such amateurs as leave their work at the end of the day to give America its "little theatres." These Singhalese appear in a public square which has been made into a theatre surprisingly like an Elizabethan playhouse. There is a fore-stage thrusting out a half circle into the midst of the audience. At the back is a curtained inner stage. An orchestra maintains a steady accompaniment to the chanting of the players. Since labor keeps these actors occupied through the day, they are apt to be none too conversant with their lines. Hence a prompter walks in and out of the action, supplying dialog whenever it is needed, reminding the actors where to "cross" and occasionally taking over a part, and reading it from the book. These people's theatres present, night after night, week in and week out, those interminable epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which delight the play-goers of Java. They wear masks of wood painted in bright reds and blues against the brown of the eastern skin.

[Click to view picture.] THE masks of the Singhalese actors are as strictly conventionalized as those of the devil-dancers. The patterns are often ancient, and these are seldom varied by the craftsmen who reproduce them. Many of them have high merit as sculpture, though the crude color detracts not a little from their beauty. The carving of this lovely mask, gaining a classic quality from the absence of color, recalls the sculptures of Greece as we know them, cleansed by the centuries from the bright paints of Phidias. Here there is still something of the spiritual richness of the religious mask, conveyed, perhaps, by the details of Hindu temple art. The theatre gains thereby. With us the mask must come upon the stage shorn of the power of the religious spirit. There is still a mystery behind it, but the towering terrors of superstition no longer hang over it. The mask may be amusingly novel to us. It may bring a grotesque comedy into our revues, or an aphrodisiac charm. But as a serious factor it suffers because mystical religion has gone out of our life taking its symbols with it. The task of the artist of the theatre may be to seek out new symbols--the symbols, perhaps, of beauty and pain, of exaltation and pathosand to make us feel them in one of the greatest of symbols, the ancient and mysterious mask.

THE mask is not to be put aside carelessly. There is a ceremony for taking it off as well as one for putting it on. If a savage ignores the ritual he knows that disaster will follow. His spirit will be caught in the heart of the carved wood. The god who came into him when he wore the fetish will remain in his flesh, tortured and torturing . . . . We discarded the mask of the Greeks without ceremony. Perhaps that accounts for the state of our theatre today . . . . Yes, there is a way of taking off every mask, the mask of knowledge, too. But you must find it for yourself.

THE END

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