the movements of this dance—how the dancers suddenly rise on tip-toe and spread their sleeves like wings—and with how delightful an effect voice after voice joins in the lively tune. But it has truly been said that such things are beyond the painter’s art; and still less, I suppose, can any depiction of them be expected of a mere story-teller.
The ladies of the household vied with one another in the decoration of their stalls. Gay scarfs and favours hung out on every side; while shimmering New Year dresses now dimly discovered behind drawn curtains-of-state, now flashing for a moment into the open as some lady-in-waiting reached forward to adjust a mat or rescue a fan, looked in the dawning light like a meadow of bright flowers ‘half-curtained by the trailing mists of Spring.’ Seldom can there have been seen so strange and lovely a sight. There was, too, a remote, barbaric beauty in the high turbans of the dancers, with their stiff festoons of artificial flowers; and when at last they entoned the final prayer, despite the fact that the words were nonsense and the tune apparently a mere jangle of discordant sounds, there was in the whole setting of the performance something so tense, so stirring that these savage cries seemed at the moment more moving than the deliberate harmonies by which the skilled musician coldly seeks to charm our ear.
After the usual distribution of presents, the mummers at last withdrew. It was now broad daylight, and all the guests retired to get a little belated sleep. Genji rose again towards mid-day. ‘I believe that Yūgiri is going to make every bit as good a musician as Kōbai,’[1] he said, while discussing the scenes of the night before. ‘I am astonished by the talent of the generation which is now
- ↑ Tō no Chūjō’s son, famous for the beauty of his voice. See vol. ii, p. 87.
