mainly remains in my mind is a series of visual
images, one more beautiful than another; figures seated motionless for
minutes, almost for half-hours, with a stillness of statues, not an
eyelash shaking; or passing very slowly across the stage, with that
movement of bringing one foot up to the other and pausing before the
next step which is so ridiculous in our opera, but was here so right and
so impressive; or turning slowly, or rising and sitting with immense
deliberation; each figure right in its relation to the stage and to the
others. All were clothed in stiff brocade, sumptuous but not gorgeous.
One or two were masked; and all of them, I felt, ought to have been. The
mask, in fact, the use of which in Greek drama I had always felt to be
so questionable, was here triumphantly justified. It completed the
repudiation of actuality which was the essence of the effect. It was a
musical sound, as it were, made visible. It symbolised humanity, but it
was not human, still less inhuman. I would rather call it divine. And
this whole art of movement and costume required that completion. Once I
had seen a mask I missed it in all the characters that were without it.

To me, then, this visual spectacle was the essence of the "No" dance.
The dancing itself, when it came, was but a slight intensification of
the slow and solemn posing I have described. There was no violence, no
leaping, no quick steps; rather a turning and bending, a slow sweep of
the arm, a walking a little more rhythmical, on the verge, at most, of
running. It was never exciting, but I could not say it was never
passionate. It seemed to express a kind of frozen or petrified passion;
rather, perhaps, a passion run into a mould of beauty and turned out a
statue. I have never seen an art of such reserve and such distinction.
"Or of such tediousness," I seem to hear an impatient reader exclaim.
Well, let me be frank. Like all Westerners, I am accustomed to life in
quick time, and to an art full of episode, of intellectual content, of
rapid change and rapid development. I have lost to a great extent that
power of prolonging an emotion which seems to be the secret of Eastern
art. I am bored--subconsciously, as it were--where an Oriental is lulled
into ecstasy. His case is the better. But also, in this matter of the No
dance he has me at a disadvantage. In the first place he can understand
the words. These, it is true, have far less importance than in a drama
of Shaksper