y comes out with all the more prominence when we pass
from the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which actuates
that art, and especially when we compare their spirit with our own.
The mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be three: Nature,
Religion, and Humor. Incongruous collection that they are, all
three witness to the same trait. For the first typifies concrete
impersonality, the second abstract impersonality, while the province of
the last is to ridicule personality generally. Of the trio the first is
altogether the most important. Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamental
a part of himself is his love of Nature that before we view its mirrored
image it will be well to look the emotion itself in the face. The Far
Oriental lives in a long day-dream of beauty. He muses rather than
reasons, and all musing, so the word itself confesses, springs from
the inspiration of a Muse. But this Muse appears not to him, as to the
Greeks, after the fashion of a woman, nor even more prosaically after
the likeness of a man. Unnatural though it seem to us, his inspiration
seeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to mankind. She is too
impersonal for any personification, for she is Nature.

That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption of
infallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;" and
if material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the fitness
of a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly justified the
saying. Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the same
lesson, in showing us by its own fatal example that the improper
study of mankind is woman, and that they who but follow the fair will
inevitably degenerate.

The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less. The
delight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight of
losing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equally
foreign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one's
own characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to their
possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairer
sex, at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir his
curiosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more as
a material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, he
regards humanity as but a small part of the great natural world, instead
of considering it the crowning g