to know how it was done, and suggested that it might
have been accomplished by a clever make-up. "No, no!" he exclaimed. "It
is a rule of mine to use 'make-up' very rarely. For change of expression
we actors have to depend much on the muscles of our faces"; and Danjuro,
to illustrate this, quickly changed his face until it was totally
different, even to the face markings, and I should have defied Sherlock
Holmes himself to have known him to be the same man. Then I saw him act
the part of a drunken man. I have seen drunken men on the stage over and
over again, and there has always been a touch of vulgarity about them;
but this drunken man of Danjuro's was an exquisite triumph of art. I was
curious to know how he had perfected this role, and suggested that it
had perhaps been brought about through a careful study of the habits and
actions of a drunkard, using him as a model, as it were. But this
Danjuro firmly denied. "No, no, never!" he exclaimed. "I might just as
well take a drunken man and stick him on the stage, just as he is, as to
imitate any one man. That is not art: it is not a creation. I have seen
drunken men all my life, and the drunken man I represented was the
aggregate of all the drunkenness I have ever seen. Suppose by chance I
had come across a drunken man while I was developing the character, I
should perhaps have been tempted to follow that particular man too
closely, and the result would have been necessarily inartistic." And
Danjuro made it quite clear to me that when creating the character of
either a drunken man or a madman, he invariably keeps as far away from
Nature as possible. He would not proceed as some of our actors do, to
hunt about in the slums until he had found a man sufficiently drunk for
his purpose, and then copy him exactly; or, yet again, he would not have
attempted to imitate a death-bed scene by watching one particular person
die. Such a thing would appear to him as a great degradation.

Almost imperceptibly the conversation swerved round again to English
acting, and Danjuro gave me a rather humorous, though humiliating,
description of a play he had seen in Yokohama. The language was
gibberish to him, and all he could do was to study the poses of the
players, which struck him as being extremely awkward. "They suggested to
me badly modelled statues," he explained; "they never seemed to move
gracefully, and their actions were always violent and exaggerated."
This, from a Japanese, was