Indeed, the Japanese have recourse to risibility whenever the frailties of human nature are put to severest test. I think we possess a better reason than Democritus himself for our Abderian tendency; for laughter with us oftenest veils an effort to regain balance of temper, when disturbed by any untoward circumstance. It is a counterpoise of sorrow or rage.
The suppression of feelings being thus steadily insisted upon, they find their safety-valve in poetical aphorism. A poet of the tenth century writes, “In Japan and China as well, humanity, when moved by sorrow, tells its bitter grief in verse.”A mother who tries to console her broken heart by fancying her departed child absent on his wonted chase after the dragon-fly, hums,
“How far to-day in chase, I wonder,
Has gone my hunter of the dragon-fly!”
I refrain from quoting other examples, for I know I could do only scant justice to the pearly gems of our literature, were I to render into a foreign tongue the thoughts which were wrung drop by drop from bleeding hearts and threaded into beads of rarest value. I hope I have in a measure shown that inner working of our minds which often presents an appearance of callousness or of an hysterical mixture of laughter and dejection, and whose sanity is sometimes called in question.
It has also been suggested that our endurance of pain and indifference to death ar