He railed against the missionary 'beasts,' against officialdom in silk hat and frock-coat, and against many young Japanese men, of whom he wrote: "There will be no hearts after a time; Waterbury watches will be substituted instead. These will be cheap and cold, but will keep up a tolerably regular ticking.' He would have endorsed the following old Chinese law: 'Let him who says anything new, or him who shall invent anything new be put to death.' He would have striven against thy husband with harsh feaand he would have supported Kaibara's remark in The Greater Learning for Women: 'Never set thyself up against thy husband with harsh features and a boisterous voice.'

Can we account for Hearn's delicate, sensuous and almost ghostly style? I can suggest two possible, but by no means exhaustive, reasonsnamely, his birth, and the fact that he suffered from myopia. He had Greek and Romany blood. The Greek accounted for his unquenchable love of the beautiful, combined, curiously enough, with an almost equal love of the horrible. He was moved by the smile of Venus and also by the twisting snakes above Medusa's brow. His Romany blood may have acocunted for the fact that he was one of the world's wanderers.

I attach, in common with Dr. G. M. Gould,* even more importance to Hearn's defective vision. He saw everything in a microscopic way-and notice at this point the love of little things so characteristic of the Japanese. On the tsuba (sword-guard) and netsuke (toggle for medicine-box

*Dr. Gould wrote interesting articles this subject in the Fortnightly Review, October-November, 1906.

or tobacco-pouch)
or tobacco-pouch) will be found
stories from history and legend, while
a Japanese garden, replete with lantern
and bright red bridge, has been fash-
ioned in a space no bigger than a
soup plate. Hearn's limited vision
seemed to stimulate rather than check
his imagination. On one occasion, a
city editor persuaded Hearn to climb
the spire of St. Paul's Cathedral, Cin-
cinnati. He wrote an account of that
experience, and it 'went the round of
the newspaper world.' His feat re
calls the following lines of Andrew
Lang.

And with my feeble eyes and dim,
Where you see patchy fields and fences,
For me the mists of Turner swim-
My azure distance soon commences!

Hearn was more Stevensonian than R. L. S. in his reverence for words. He wrote: 'For me words have color, character; they have faces, pouts, manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humors, eccentricities; they have tints, tones, personalities.' He toyed in a whimsical manner with this idea, in a letter to Professor B. H. Chamberlain. He wrote:

Because people cannot see the color of words, the tint of words, the secret ghostly motions of words:

Because they cannot hear the whispering of words, the rustling of the procession of letters. the dream-flutes and dream-drums which are thinly and weirdly played by words :

Because they cannot perceive the pouting of words, the frowning and fuming of words, the weeping, the raging and racketing of words:

Because they are insensible to the pros phorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness or hardness, the drying or juiciness of words,the interchange of values in the gold, the silver and the copper of words:

Is that any reason why we should not try to make them hear, to make them see, to make them feel? .

Hearn had one answer ready himself: 'Because they won't buy your

books, and you won't make any money.' The closed pockets of the Philistines did not distress him. In the same letter he wrote:

Surely I have never yet made, and never expect to make any money. Neither do I expect to write ever for the multitude. I write for beloved friends who can see color in words, can smell the perfume of syllables in blossom, can be shocked with the fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by the people.

Mrs. Hearn used to tell her husband Japanese ghost stories. They were told on dreary evenings, and in a room that was dimly lighted. Mrs. Hearn

wrote:

When I tell him stories I always tell him at first the mere skeleton of the story. If it is interesting, he puts it down in his notebook and makes me repeat several times.

And when the story is interesting, he instantly becomes exceedingly serious; the color of his face changes; his eyes wear the look of fearful enthusiam.

As I went on, as usual, with the story of Okachinsan, his face gradually became pale; his eyes were fixed; I feel a sudden awe. When I finished the narrative he became a little relaxed and said it was very interesting. 'O blood!' he repeatedly said; and asked me several questions regarding the situations, actions, and so forth, involved in the story. 'In what manner was "O blood !" exclaimed? In what manner of voice? What do you think of the sound of "geta" at that time? How was the night? I think 80 and so. What do you think? and so forth.' Thus he consulted me about various, things besides the original story which I told from the book. If any one happened to see us thus talking from outside, he would surely think that we were mad.

The story of Okachinsan was published in Kotto,* and its weirdness. and dramatic force were undoubtedly due in some measure to those fearsome questions and answers Mrs. Hearn has described so vividly. The story is not original. Hearn never invented a story of his own. He bor

The Legend of Yurei-Daki. In Hearn's version Okachinsan reads O-Katsu-San.

rowed his material, but so far from leaving a debt we usually associate with plagiarism, he ransacked his store of words with so much diligence, and arranged and re-arranged them with so much artistry, that the material, fusty enough in the original, glows with the lustre of Chinese silk.

Lamb claimed that the value of a book lent to Coleridge was enhanced considerably when it was returned with the magic of his marginal notes. And so it was with Hearn. He borrowed a good deal of his literary material, but he had the art of jeweling dull phrases and of giving a ghostly perfume to the most acrid passages. He borrowed nothing that his genius. did not beautify a thousand fold.

Hearn wrote in one of his early letters from Japan:

Pretty to talk of my 'pen of fire.' I've lost it. Well, the fact is, it is no use here. There isn't any fire here. It is all soft, dreamy, quiet, pale, faint, gentle, hazy, vapory, visionary.... Don't please imagine there are any tropics here. Ah the tropics-they still pull at my heartstrings. Goodness! my real field the there in the Latin countries, in West Indies and Spanish America and my dream was to haunt the old crumbling Portuguese and Spanish cities, and steam up the Orinoco, and get romances nobody else could find. And I could have done it, and made books that would sell for twenty years.

was

It was fortunate for Hearn, and for us, that he did not spend the best years of his life in Latin countries. Japan stimulated his genius as no other country could have done. Israel Zangwill has said, in reference to Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysantheme, that 'instead of looking for the soul of a people, Pierre Loti was simply looking for a woman.' Hearn wrote a remarkable essay on The Eternal Feminine, but his quest did not end there. In Gleanings in Buddha Fields he shook off the rosy rapture of his first Japanese book. Miss Elizabeth Bisland wrote: "The visible beauty of woman, of nature, of art, grew to absorb him less as he sought for the essential principle of beauty.'

We cannot use the word 'popular' in reference to any of Hearn's work, but Kokoro is probably the most widely read book, and, both in story and essay, the volume is a fine achievement. He gradually abandoned the early richness of his style in favor of a 'pellucid simplicity.' His biographer wrote: "The transparent, shadowy, "weird stories" of Kwaidan were as unlike the splendid floridity of his West Indian studies as a Shinto shrine is unlike a Gothic cathedral. These ghostly sketches might have been made by the brush of a Japanese artist; a gray whirl of water about a phantom fish- -a shadow of a pine bough across the face of a spectral moon-an outline of mountains as filmy as dreams, brief, almost childishly simple, and yet suggesting things poignant, things ineffable.'

Whether Hearn wrote about dust or ants, stars or Nirvana, azure psychology or frisson, the power of glamour and emotion were never absent except in his Japan: An Interpreta

tion. In that posthumous book, by some critics regarded as his finest work, there is no trace of emotionalism. It is penetrating criticism: Hearn's final judgment on Japan and the Japanese. It occupies a place by itself, and is as distinct from his other work as is The Dynasts from the Wessex novels. In Japan: An Interpretation, he forgot his old worship—‘the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.'

Now that Hearn's lectures on literature to Japanese students have been published* and widely reviewed, something must be said in reference to his literary opinions and literary influences. Was Hearn a sound critic? That his remarks in regard to many writers were extremely apt cannot be denied; but on the other hand he was too emotional, too sensitive, too inconsistent, to be always a sound judge of literary matters. On one occasion he praised a worthless book on account of his liking for the sender, and confessed in one of his letters: 'I should certainly make a bad critic if I were acquainted with authors and their friends. One sees what does not exist whenever one loves or hates. As I am rather a creature of extremes, I should be an extremely crookedvisioned judge of work.' Hearn described Le Marriage de Loti as 'the weirdest and loveliest romance ever written,' and when ill, it was one of his regrets that he might never be able to read L'Inde sans Anglais. But his enthusiasm cooled, as it cooled in regard to De Quincey. We find Hearn rather bitterly complaining of Loti's formal typewritten letters to him, and his final comment is: "The poet became

* Interpretations of Literature, Appreciations of Poetry and Literature. Heinemann.

a little morbid, modern, affected Frenchman.'

When Hearn praised, he praised wholeheartedly. He has never excelled the following in warmth of eulogy: 'I have a book for you-an astounding book, a godlike book. . . . It is the finest book on the east ever written: and though very small contains more than all my library of Oriental books.' The volume was Percival

Lowell's The Soul of the Far East. He wrote of Kipling: 'He is to my fixed conviction the greatest of living English poets, and greater than all before him in the line he has taken.' He wrote with the same generous abandon: 'Never in this world will I be able to write one page to compare with a page of his. He makes me feel so small, that after reading him I wonder why I am such an ass as to write at all.'

Such enthusiasm is interesting rather than valuable. It is only when Hearn's opinions are analytical, are not emotional, that they become worthy of honest criticism. He has dealt as justly

with Zola and Ebers as he has written extravagantly of Gautier and Flaubert. The author of First Principles and other books devoted to synthetic philosophy, would have been amused had he read the following extravaganza: 'I find my only salvation in a return to the study of the Oceanic Majesty and Power and Greatness and Holiness and Omniscience of Herbert Spencer.' Edward Fitzgerald would not have used more capital letters! Hearn was so steeped in neurotic literature that only occasionally his criticisms have weight. His comments on English eighteenth century literature. are simply foolish, as if he were angry with Pope for not being a lotus-eater!

Now and again, made a little dizzy by Hearn's literary frenzies, we stumble upon a good thing such as the following remark on Carlyle:

Assuredly Carlyle is no sweet pill to swallow; and he never guides you anywhere. He is hard reading; one feels as if traveling over broken rocks, and boulders hidden by scrub. But there are lightning flashes in that apocalyptic style of his which reveal infinite things. I read only for the flashes. Even then, Did you only a little at a time every day. ever know the agony of trying to read Sartor Resartus for pleasure!

"The new poetry is simply rotten!' wrote Hearn, 'morbidly, and otherwise. . . . There is no joy in this new world-and scarcely any tenderness: the language is the language of art, but the spirit is of Holbein and Gothic ages of religious madness.' In spite of this observation, he finally preferred Dobson, and Watson, and Lang to Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley. Hearn quoted Watson's line on Wordsworth: 'It may be thought has broadened since he died!' and playfully added: 'Well, I should smile. His deepest truths have become platitudes.' Hearn

wrote of Swinburne: "There is nonsense in Swinburne, but he is merely a melodist and colorist. He enlarges the English tongue,-shows its richness, unsuspected flexibility, admirable sponge-power of beauty-absorption.

.' His criticism of Whitman was sound and neatly expressed. He wrote:

rad, observes: "There is a fable about him to the effect that when faced with the choice between writing in English and in French, he decided for English, because in France all were stylists, but in England there were none of this kidney.'

There is no similar fable concerning Hearn, but he was aware that English literature lacked the delicate subtleties, the artistry of style peculiar to the French, or rather to the Latin nations generally. He wrote: 'It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction analogous to that warmth of color and richness of imagery hitherto peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek, I feel rather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon; and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something different from the stonegray of latter-day English.'

Hearn claimed that mythology, history, romance, and especially poetry, enriched fancy. He went so far as to assert that astronomy, geology, and ethnology furnished him 'with a wonderful and startling variety of images, symbols, and illustrations.' Alive, on

the emotional side, to the work of others, he believed that 'when the soil of fancy is really well enriched with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow spontaneously.'

The wonder is that this sentitive writer, who rushed from one shrine of praise to another, from Gautier to Kipling, and from Kipling to Herbert Spencer, should have been able to form an individual style of his own that is either the man himself, or his dream. of the beautiful that came to him in the States, in the West Indies, and in Japan-that dream of poetic prose. He wrote: Then I stopped thinking. For I saw my home-and the lights of its household gods-and my boy stretching out his hands to me-and all the simple charm and love of Old Japan. And the fairy-world seized my soul again, very softly and sweetly-as a child might a butterfly.' That is our last impression of Lafcadio Hearn, for it was from such thoughts as these that he dreamed his dream, called up to a weary and cynical and hustling world the ghostly magic of the Land of the Gods.