And if with us a long poem be a contradiction in terms, a full
picture is with them as self-condemnatory a production. From the

contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one is apt,
after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with an

unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the
feast.

Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our
would-be slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all,

fuller of meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished
affair, which is very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit?

Does not one's own imagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it
not forever flitting will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond

exact definition? For the soul of art lies in what art can suggest,
and nothing is half so suggestive as the half expressed, not even a

double entente. To hint a great deal by displaying a little is more
vital to effect than the cleverest representation of the whole.

The art of partially revealing is more telling, even, than the ars
celare artem. Who has not suspected through a veil a fairer face

than veil ever hid? Who has not been delightedly duped by the
semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle is just as true in any

one branch of art as it is of the attempted developments by one of
the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus felt its force?

Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on chancing upon an
illustrated edition of some book whose story he had lain to heart?

Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not know, and yet
which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to more than

one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is gone
when Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an

admiring house. It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using
her name for operatic title were a special intervention of the Muse,

that we might the less connect song with story,--two sensations
that, like two lights, destroy one another by mutual interference.

Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as

in the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when
expressed is but half that necessary to express it. Some

understanding must exist in the observer for any work to be
intelligible. It is only a question of degree. The greater the

art-sense in the person addressed, the more had better be left to it.
Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic. In fact, the

artisticappreciation of the masses there is something astonishing
to us, accustomed to our immenseintellectual differences between

man and man. Sketches are thus peculiarlyfitting to such a land.
Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself

taking. To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the
cosmos, like a picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical

one of proving a universalnegative. The possibilities of failure
are enormously increased, and failure is less forgiven" target="_blank" title="forgive的过去分词">forgiven for the

assumption. Art might perhaps not unwisely follow the example of
science in such matters where an exhaustive work, which takes the

better part of a lifetime to produce, is invariably entitled by its
erudite author an Elementary Treatise on the subject in hand.

To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the Far
Oriental's wonderful technique. His brush-strokes are very few in

number, but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which is
little short of marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its

skill. For in his method there is no emending, no super-position,
no change possible. What he does is done once and for all.

The force of it grows on you as you gaze. Each stroke expresses
surprisingly much, and suggests more. Even omissions are made

significant. In his painting it is visibly true that objects can be
rendered conspicuous by their very absence. You are quite sure you

see what on scrutiny you discover to be only the illusion of
inevitable inference. The Far Oriental artist understands the power

of suggestion well; for imagination always fills in the picture
better than the brush, however perfect be its skill.

Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider
vital to effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of

perspective, proves not to be of the importance we imagine.
We discover in these paintings how immaterial, artistically, was

Peter Schlimmel's sad loss, and how perfectly possible it is to
make bits of discontinuous distance take the place effectively" target="_blank" title="ad.有效地">effectively of

continuous space.
Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions.

They present a bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of
La Rochefoucault, and they delight as aphorisms do by their insight

and the happy conciseness of its expression. Few aphorisms are
absolutely true, but then boldness more than makes up for what they

lack in verity. So complex a subject is life that to state a truth
with all its accompanying limitations is to weaken it at once.

Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend to emphasize it.
And though the whole truth is essential to science, such

exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art.
Parallels are not wanting at home. What they do with space in their

paintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those
acted pictures of life? Should we not refuse to tolerate a play

that insisted on furnishing us with a full perspective of its
characters' past? And yet of the two, it is far perferable,

artistically, to be given too much in sequence than too much at once.
The Chinese, who put much less into a painting than what we deem

indispensable, delight in dramas that last six weeks.
To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like

generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which
I fell in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast

of Japan. A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a
bank of mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the

rising sun, while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three
cranes are slowly sailing north. And that is all you see. You do

not see the shore; you do not see the main; you are looking but at
the border-land of that great unknown, the heaving ocean still

slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid of mist, out of which come
the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.

So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the
lighter leads to the same conclusion.

Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of
humor,--two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying

together over the meadows of imagination. For, as it might be put,
"The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers

Is also the first to be touched by the fun."
The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun

is possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest
masters down to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest

conceits. It is of all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry
ambush, like the faint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious

face, so subtile that the observer is left wondering whether the
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 necessarilylimited 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