sight 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