It is not altogether perverseness of oriental minds that the instant our emotions are moved we try to guard our lips in order to hide them.  Speech is very often with us, as the Frenchman defined it, “the art of concealing thought.”

Call upon a Japanese friend in time of deepest affliction and he will invariably receive you laughing, with red eyes or moist cheeks.  At first you may think him hysterical.  Press him for explanation and you will get a few broken commonplaces—­“Human life has sorrow;” “They who meet must part;” “He that is born must die;” “It is foolish to count the years of a child that is gone, but a woman’s heart will indulge in follies;” and the like.  So the noble words of a noble Hohenzollern—­“Lerne zu leiden ohne Klagen”—­had found many responsive minds among us, long before they were uttered.

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 are due to less sensitive nerves.  This is plausible as far as it goes.  The next question is,—­Why are our nerves less tightly strung?  It may be our climate is not so stimulating as the American.  It may be our monarchical form of government does not excite us as much as the Republic does the Frenchman.  It may be that we do not read Sartor Resartus as zealously as the Englishman.  Personally, I believe it was our very excitability and sensitiveness which made it a necessity to recognize and enforce constant self-repression; but whatever may be the explanation, without taking into account long years of discipline in self-control, none can be correct.