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FAR EASTERN SHADOWS
to the audience, but they were allowed to see nothing but the shadows. It is because the puppets themselves are part of the show that they are often so elaborately coloured. The torso, arms, and legs are gilded, the face, hair, and beard are painted black, while the patterned filigree work is coloured red, white, dark blue, black, and gold. The oriental scholar Carl Hagemann gives a vivid description of a show seen from behind the screen. So smoothly and quietly did the dalang work, that his presence was utterly forgotten and Hagemann was conscious of nothing but the puppets. 'They were intended to represent spirits', he writes, 'and they were spirits.' A Javanese member of the audience told him, 'When we watch the Wayang figures fighting we see the fire flashing from their eyes.' Hagemann stresses the religious aspect of the performance, less apparent now than at the time he was writing — the second decade of the present century. The dalang first got his shades into order and then made an offering of fruit, rice, flowers, little flags, and candles at an altar by the screen. Next, like Cellini's Sicilian priest, he lit a pile of sweet-smelling herbs which sent up clouds of fragrant smoke to excite the senses of the audience and prepare them for the marvels they were about to witness.
Though still very much alive, the Javanese shadow show has inevitably declined with the influence of the West and the attempts of a rapidly growing population to adapt itself to modern industrial life. But the cinema theatre, which now rivals the shadow play throughout the Far East as a popular entertainment, far from being antagonistic to the ancient tradition, must be regarded as another form of it. hi China, Japan, India, and Indonesia the legitimate theatre was a later development than the shadow play and the actors based their stylized movements and costumes on those of the shades. The image on the flat screen seemed more eloquent, more significant, than the three-dimensional, flesh-andblood actor. The symbolic power of the shadow, universally felt, but only rarely acknowledged in the West in seldom-read works — of which Chamisso's romantic story of Peter Schlehmil is a memorable example — is deeply woven into the fabric of Far Eastern culture. It is therefore not surprising that the most impressive and successful of Japanese films should have been based on legendary themes and that they should have an obvious affinity with the little shadow play described by Lafcadio Hearn. And anyone acquainted with the characters and material of Indian shadow shows would immediately recognize the chaotic, mythological, fantastically spectacular films made earlier in the
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