Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/505

Rh The most characteristic quality in Kwang's writings is his peculiar sense of humour. This humour is something quite unique in literature; and more than unique to our Western minds!

No doubt other Chinese classics approximate to its penetrating flavour; but I doubt whether they attain it. It is certainly unmistakably Chinese in its quips and turns; but it is also—surely one cannot be mistaken here—redolent of a certain saltish, turpentine-like pungency which is native to Kwang alone.

Everything that it approaches is given a little twist, a little turn, a perceptibly new taste in the mouth. It is the body and pressure of Kwang's whole mental vision. It is at once his rebellion against what is intolerable in life and his way of escaping into a freer world.

The closeness of the connexion between Kwang's humour and Kwang's thought can be seen in his mania for the heterogeneous and the casual, as contrasted with the homogeneous and the inevitable. His philosophy is nothing more nor less than a worship of chaos, tempered by a sly and crafty salutation to whatever "Unutterable"—beyond all Monism and all Pluralism—may lie behind chaos!

His humour therefore delights to concentrate itself upon the most disconnected and inconsequential details; isolating such details arbitrarily and at random; and yet managing to squeeze out of them a pungent metaphysical sap.

One might indeed compare the humour of Kwang to the fantastic hoppings of a whimsical long-necked bird, who every now and then stands gravely upon some object or another, one thin leg curled up under its tail, with its head and beak twisted grotesquely to one side, and makes its comment on the motley world! The Confucian superiorities of Benevolence and Righteousness, with the rather meticulous moral system which they imply, prove a most provocative source of merriment to this "queer son of chaos."

He is never weary of girding at the "Know-Alls" of life:

"Men all honour that which lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but they do not know their dependence on what lies outside that sphere;—may we not call their case one of great perplexity? Ah! Ah! There is no escaping from this dilemma. So it is! So it is!"