artist could have meant
what seems more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out
into the broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy
incongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might
be twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist's
work as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits
easily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese
temperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with
catching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in puns
which are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on
certain consecrated plays on words. From the very constitution of the
people there is of course nothing selfish in the national enjoyment. A
man is quite as ready to laugh at his own expense as at his neighbor's,
a courtesy which his neighbor cordially returns.

Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principle
of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name of
humor, is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it have
to do wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them,
whether it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is in
incongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected that
provokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys
a monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant is
pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. But
it is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her
errors of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for
instance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent
revenge. But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate,
which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital
fall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as with
fact. To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent irony
is unmeaning. Besides, it would be also untrue. For his May carries no
suggestion of unfulfilment in its name.

Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the
most part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. The
latter implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, for
the past has very little personality for the present. As for the former,
its attention is, if anything, de