Under the conditioning factor of his taste, it is true that his choice, or his _flair_, was unique and inerrant. He tracked his game with fatal accuracy to its lair. His literary sense was perfect, when he set it in action, and this is his unique merit. There has never been a mind more infallibly sure to find the best in all literatures, the best of the kind he sought, and probably his translations of the stories from the French are as perfect as can be.

His second published volume, the "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature,"

epitomizes and reillumines this first period of his literary workmanship. The material, the basis, is not his own; it is drawn from the fatal Orient, and tells of love, jealousy, hate, bitter and burning vengeance, and death, sudden and awful. Over it is the wondrous mystical glamour in which he, like his elder brother Coleridge, was so expert in sunsetting these dead days and deathless themes. His next book, "Some Chinese Ghosts," was a reill.u.s.tration of the same searching, finding, and illuminating.

Flaubert's choice of subjects, as regards his essential character, was of the most extreme illogicality; his cadenced phrase and meticulous technique were also not the product of his character or of his freedom.

In the Land of Nowhere, Hearn was likewise compelled to reside, and it was necessarily a land of colour and echo, not one of form. The suffering Frenchman emptied of inhabitants or deimpersonalized his alien country, while the more healthy Anglo-Saxon peopled it with ghosts.

"Have you ever experienced the historic shudder?" asked Flaubert. "I seek to give your ghost a ghostly shudder," said Hearn. Flaubert wrote:--

"The artist should be in his work, like G.o.d in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere.

"Art should be raised above personal affections and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to give it the perfection of the physical sciences by means of pitiless method."

And Hearn's first and most beloved "Avatar," and his most serious "St.

Anthony"--works dealing with the mysteries and awesomeness of disembodied souls and ideals--"could not get themselves printed."

Moreover, in all that he afterwards published there are the haunting far-away, the soft concealing smile, and the unearthly memories of pain, the detached spirits of muted and trans.m.u.ted dead emotions, and denied yearnings, the formless colourings of half-invisible and evanishing dreams.

For with Hearn's lack of creative ability, married to his inexperience of happiness, he could but choose the darksome, the tragical elements of life, the [Greek: pathos] even of religion, as his themes. His intellect being a reflecting, or at least a recombining and colouring faculty, his datum must be sought without, and it must be brought to him; his joyless and even his tragic experience compelled him to cull from the mingled sad and bright only the pathetic or pessimistic subjects; his physical and optical imprisonment forbade that objectivation and distinctive embodiment which stamp an art work with the seal of reality, and make it stand there wholly non-excusing, or else offering itself as its own excuse for being. True art must have the warp of materiality, interwoven with the woof of life, or else the coloration and designs of the imagination cannot avail to dower it with immortality.

Working within the sad limits his Fates had set, Hearn performed wonders. None has made tragedy so soft and gentle, none has rendered suffering more beautiful, none has dissolved disappointment into such painless grief, none has blunted the hurt of mortality with such a delightful anaesthesia, and by none have death and hopelessness been more deftly figured in the guise of a desirable Nirvana. The doing of this was almost a unique doing, the manner of the [Greek: poiesis] was a.s.suredly so, and const.i.tutes Hearn's claim to an artist's "For ever."

He would have made no claim, it is true, to this, or to any other endless existence, but we who read would be too indiscriminating, would be losers, ingrates, if we did not cherish the lovely gift he brings to us so shyly. Restricted and confined as was his garden, he grew in it exotic flowers of unearthly but imperishable beauty. One will not find elsewhere an equal craftsmanship in bringing into words and vision the intangible, the far, fine, illusive fancy, the ghosts of vanished hearts and hopes. Under his magic touch unseen spirit almost reappears with the veiling of materiality, and behind the grim and grinning death's-head a supplanting smile of kindness invites pity, if not a friendly whisper.

As to literary aim, Hearn distinctly and repeatedly confessed to me that his ideal was, in his own words, to give his reader "a ghostly shudder," a sense of the closeness of the unseen about us, as if eyes we saw not were watching us, as if long-dead spirits and weird powers were haunting the very air about our ears, were sitting hid in our heart of hearts. It was a pleasing task to him to make us hear the moans and croonings of disincarnate griefs and old pulseless pains, begging piteously, but always softly, gently, for our love and comforting. But it should not be unrecognized that no allurement of his art can hide from view the deeper pathos of a horrid and iron fatalism which to his mind moved the worlds of nature or of life, throttled freedom, steeled the heart, iced the emotions, and dictated the essential automatism of our own being and of these sad dead millions which crowd the dimly seen dreams of Hearn's mind.

It may be added that, accepting the command of his destiny, Hearn consciously formed an ideal to which he worked, and even laboured at the technique of its realization. I have talked with him upon these and similar subjects for many long hours, or got him to talk to me. The conversations were usually at night, beneath trees, with the moonlight shimmering through and giving that dim, mystic light which is not light, so well suited to such a poet and to his favourite subjects.

As to technique, there was never an artist more patient and persistent than he to clothe his thought in its perfect garment of words. Sometimes he would be able to write with comparative ease a large number of sheets (of _yellow_ paper--he could write on no other) in a day. At other times the words did not suit or fit, and he would rewrite a few pages scores of times. Once I knew him to labour over six lines an entire day, and then stop weary and unsatisfied. I had to supply a large waste-basket and have often wished I had kept for comparison and a lesson in practical aesthetics the half-bushel or more of wasted sheets thrown away nearly every day.

Just as those outfitted with good eyes must find Hearn's world too formless and too magnificently coloured, so normal civilized persons will find it altogether too s.e.xually and sensually charged. Whenever able to do so he turns a description to the ghostly, but even then _c'est toujours femme!_ A mountain is like a curved hip, a slender tree takes the form of a young girl budding into womanhood, etc. Colour, too, is everywhere, even where it is not, seemingly, to our eyes, and even colour is often made sensual and s.e.xual by some strange suggestion or allusion.

Viewing merit as the due of conscious, honourable, unselfish, and dutiful effort, Hearn's sole merit rises from his heroic pursuit of an ideal of workmanship. Like glorious bursts of illuminating sunshine through the fogs and clouds of a murky atmosphere shine such sentences as these:--

What you want, and what we all want, who possess devotion to any n.o.ble idea, who hide any artistic idol in a niche of our heart, is that independence which gives us at least the time to worship the holiness of beauty,--be it in harmonies of sound, of form, or of colour.

What you say about the disinclination to work for years upon a theme for pure love's sake, without hope of reward, touches me,--because I have felt that despair so long and so often. And yet I believe that all the world's art-work--all that which is eternal--was thus wrought. And I also believe that no work made perfect for the pure love of art, can perish, save by strange and rare accident....

Yet the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this sacrifice to art,--this trampling of self under foot! It is the supreme test for admittance into the ranks of the eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless sacrifice which the artist's soul is bound to make,--as in certain antique cities maidens were compelled to give their virginity to a G.o.d of stone! But without the sacrifice, can we hope for the grace of Heaven?

What is the reward? The consciousness of inspiration only! I think art gives a new faith. I think--all jesting aside--that could I create something I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal purpose; and I should know the pride of the prophet that had seen G.o.d face to face.

* * * * Never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocation for any other occupation, however lucrative,--not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshippers. So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labours at aught that is not of art, he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.

And the greatest of our satisfactions with Hearn's personality is that these were not mere words, but that he consistently, resolutely, and persistently practised his preaching. This was the only religion or ethics he had, and praise G.o.d, he had it! That alone binds us to him in any feeling of brotherhood, that only makes us grateful to him.

Style has been too frequently and too long confounded with content.

There is the matter, the thing to be said, the story to be told; and quite apart from this there is the method of telling it, which, properly viewed, is style. So long as the teller of the tale has only borrowed his message or story from others, there cannot be raised much question of originality, or discussion of the datum, except in so far as pertains to the _choice_ of material. And so long as the stylist fingers etymological dictionaries for "startling words," so long will his style remain of the lower kind and etymologically unstylish. When the technique becomes unconscious and perfect, there is style, or the art, merged into the content, and then, _le style c'est l'homme_, or, as Hearn translated it, style becomes the artist's personality. In the best j.a.panese works Hearn accomplished this, and with his consummate choice of material there was the consummate art-work. Subject, method, cunning handiwork, psychologic a.n.a.lysis, generous and loyal sympathy, colour (not form)--all were fused to a unity almost beyond disa.s.sociation, and challenging admiration. But it is not beyond our perfect enjoying.

It is true that Hearn has ignored, necessarily and wisely ignored, the objective and material side of j.a.panese existence. Mechanics, nationalism, economy, the materialism of his material, had obviously to be untouched in his interpretation, or in his "Interpretation." It would have been absurd for him to have attempted any presentation or valuable phasing of this important aspect. That for him was in a double sense _ultra vires_. Such work will not want for experts. But what Hearn has done was almost wholly impossible to any other. His personal heredity, history, and physiology, highly exceptional, seem to have conspired to outfit him for this remarkable task.

There is still another reason, at first sight a contradicting one, for both Hearn's fitness and his success in giving us a literary incarnation of the spirit or soul of j.a.pan in the subjective sense: To his readers it must have appeared an insoluble enigma why this superlatively subjective and psychical "sensitive" should have been such an unrecking, _outre_, and enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, or that part of it given in the "First Principles." It is told of an English wit that when asked if he was willing to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, he promptly replied, "Oh, yes, forty of them if you wish." Hearn was similarly minded--minus the fun,--and most unphilosophically he went into utter captivity, seemingly, to the unphilosophic philosopher. And yet the spirit of Spencer's "First Principles" was in reality as different from that of Hearn as was the spirit of St. Francis from that, for instance, of Cecil Rhodes. The contradiction and ludicrousness of this mismating is so easy of explanation that the incongruity is missed. The forest is not seen because of the trees. Hearn did not have true scientific instinct, animus, or ability. Neither had Herbert Spencer--so far as his "First Principles" is concerned, and as regards an improved inductive method as shown in the "Psychology," "Biology," etc., Hearn, according to a letter, found he could not interest himself enough to read one of these later works. The clear and well-drilled scientific intellect admits that if Spencer had not published his "First Principles," but had gathered the facts of his later works before publishing an epitomizing Last Principles, the matter would have been as differently phased as night and day. Spencer cared infinitely more for the systematization than he did for the facts systematized. Reduced to its last a.n.a.lysis, the "First Principles" was the reverse of a close induction from the facts of nature and life. It presented the glitter of generalization without the logic. The reverberating echoes of its illogic, sweeping sonorously over the universe with an indiscriminate ignoring of the world-wide difference between matter and life, caught the fancy of the imprisoned poet soul; he thoughtlessly yielded a homage which, from his standpoint, was unjustified, and which objectively was an unscrutinizing lip-service. Subjectively Spencerism gave Hearn warrant for an inborn atheism and materialism which had been heightened immoderately by the bitter teachings of experience into a pessimism so horrid that one shuddered when looking into the man's soul depths. _Morne_ was a favourite word with Hearn, and Spencer's was a fateful philosophy for one whose birth and education were desolation, and whose sight of the world was more than _morne_, was the abomination of desolation, was in truth the sheer awfulness of despair. Blindness were vastly preferable to Hearn's affliction, but if that splendid poet St. Francis had been so cursed, his face and his soul would have been ecstatic with smiles, with joy, with faith, with hope, and with love. So strange is the unaccountable allotment of Fate in her endowments, gifts, and orderings.

There is and there can be no blame--only a pity wholly beyond expression.

The aloofness, far-awayness, the inapproachable distance and detachment of Hearn's spirit is one of the characteristics felt in reading his best pages. Everything is infinitely beyond our senses. To him everything was distant: the near was far, the far was at infinity. He thus truly became the poet of the _au dela_. His voice, itself an echo, comes to us as from the hush of an eerie height above the beat and wreck of the waves of our noisy sh.o.r.e. His personality as revealed in his writings is an echo, a memory, almost the memory of a memory, the thrill of the day-dream of a soul retreating from sense.

Each day the quiet grew more still Within his soul, more shrank the will Beyond the jar of sense, serene, Behind the hurt of world or ill, Where sleep hushed silences unseen.

He ever insists on a haunting glimpse of the pain and the renunciation of others, of wasted and long-dead faces and loves, always shrinking from our gaze, pallid in the darkling light of the setting moon, of vanishing loves, grievous story, forgotten myth, and ruined religion.

And yet, and yet, all that works to make Hearn immortal in literature is, at last, not art _per se_. One might quote freely showing that his "filing of the line," like that of Flaubert, led to nothing, if the thought and feeling to be put into the lines were not there. They were not there with his masters, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupa.s.sant, and others, and so these men will not inherit literary immortality. They had no soul, and only the soul, the spirit, can be immortalized. Hearn's good fortune is that unconsciously, even almost against his will, he was more than they, more than an artist as such. He had something else to do. If it had not been for his poverty, the necessity to sell what he wrote, he would surely have gone the same road to Avernus as his masters. Then, too, he had no original message to write, because he had no real soul, only a borrowed one. j.a.pan gave him her soul to rematerialize and recolour with literary life. Without his j.a.panese work Hearn would have died as _litterateur_ in the year he died as a physical body. To tell her "ghostly" stories was his great office and function. When these were told his work was done. His old gloating over the clotted villainies of mediaeval horror had been much outgrown, and it had no chance to be used in j.a.pan. The j.a.panese character would not tolerate such things. The ghastly was transformed into the ghostly, and his Oriental fancy was luckily turned to better duties and pleasures. This more than Flaubert was something not to be got from modern atheistic French "Art for Art's sake," nor from modern Levantine nonent.i.ty of character. How marvellous is his sympathy with his subject, loyalty to his literary duty, and to his literary ideal! His despised Irish father perhaps had slipped into the otherwise invisible and limp threads of his Fates a little mesh of spiritual reality, which, dormant, unrecognized, and even scorned by him, came finally to give him all his valour and worth. He could dower the insubstantial sigh of a long dead soul or people with the winged word. It was a word of colour, only,--and colour has no objective existence,--the rainbow is not out there. And because it is spiritual, not objective, the most beautiful, if the most evanescent of all earthly things, is colour. The hearers of soundless music, and the lovers of "the light that never was on sea or sh.o.r.e" will understand what is meant. For them Hearn really wrote: they are few, and scattered far, but Hearn will magnificently multiply the number. His amazing merit is that while without the great qualities which make the greatest writers, he wrought such miracles of winning grace and persuading beauty.

That he wrought against his will, and by the overcoming of a seemingly cruel Fate, puts him almost outside of our personal grat.i.tude. We take the gift from a divinity he did not recognize, one that used the rebellious hand and the almost blind eye as a writing instrument. The lover of the gruesome, the Spencerian scientist, the man himself, must have wondered at the message when he came out from under the influence of the pitiless inspiration.

One of Hearn's dangers was discursiveness, or want of conciseness and intensity. "Chita" showed it, and the West Indian work lost in value because of it. It is the danger of all those writers who lack creative ability, and who depend upon "local colour," and "style" for their effect. The story's the thing, after all! In Hearn's translations, and especially in "Stray Leaves," he for the moment caught the view of the value of the content, saw how the fact, dramatic, intense, and pa.s.sionate is the all-desirable; the art of its presentation is the art of letting it flash forth upon the reader with few, apt, and flamelike words, which reveal and not conceal the life and soul of the act and of the actor. He tended to forget this. In "Karma," besides, or rather by reason of, the moral,--his newly got psyche,--he returned to a reliance upon essentials, upon the datum of the spirit, and not upon its reflections, refractions, and chromatics. The beautiful spectrum was there refocused into white light, and the senses disappeared to reveal behind them the divinity of soul. That art-lesson was never forgotten by Hearn, and his j.a.panese work had a purity and a reality, a white heat, which make his previous stories and sketches seem pale and weak.

Questions of style and form sometimes run inevitably into those of content and of logic. Essentially wanting the rigorous training of form, without the content and method of the scientific intellect, all Hearn's work shows a lack of system, order, and subordination of parts. In any single one of the j.a.panese volumes the absence of logic is lamentably evident. He constantly repeats himself, and the warp of some of his themes is worn threadbare. His most ambitious work, "j.a.pan," is, in truth, a regathering and a restatement in more objective style, of his previous imaginative studies. Almost the only added thought concerns the difference between Shintoism and ancestor-worship and the truism that j.a.pan is to-day ruthlessly sacrificing the life of the individual to that of the nation. The lack of scholarship and of the scientific animus (even in a field, folk-lore, more nearly his own than any other) comes to view in his mistake of supposing Spencer an authority on the subject of the origin of religion, and in the blunder that a.s.sumed ancestor-worship to be original in j.a.panese history and religion.

Ancestor-worship, according to Griffis, Knox, and other distinguished authorities, was unknown to the ancient writers of Nippon and was imported from China. How threadbare--and yet how deftly, even charmingly concealed!--was the wearing of his favourite themes, is shown by Hearn's fateful return to the gruesome, especially in the later books, "Kott"

and "Kwaidan." These stories of the dead and of morbid necrophilism are witnesses of Hearn's primitive interest in the ghastly, impossible to be renounced or sloughed, not to be replaced by desire for the supersensual, or by resolve to transform the loathsome into the ghostly.

Hearn should never have been seduced into the delusion that he could become the spokesman of any scientific animus, methods or results.

Erudition, logic, systematization, were to him impossible. His function was another and of a different nature, and his peculiar ability was for other tasks. If we are adequately to appreciate the exquisiteness of the earlier j.a.panese works, we will forget the "j.a.pan, an Interpretation."

If we look upon Hearn as a painter, almost the sole colour of his palette was mummy brown, the powdered flesh of the ancient dead holding in solution their griefs, their hopes, their loves, their yearnings, which he found to sink always to pulselessness, and to end in eternal defeat! But the pallor and sadness for the brief moment of their resuscitation was divinely softened and atoningly beautified. Then they disappeared again in the waste and gloom from which love and poesy had evoked them.

Felled in the struggle and defeat of the eternal battle with death, the vegetation of untold ages long ago drifted to an amorphous stratum of indistinguishable millionfold corpses. Compression, deferred combustion and over-shrouding trans.m.u.ted and preserved it for a long-after-coming time, for our warming, lighting, and delighting. This has a perfect a.n.a.logy in the history and use of tradition, myth, folk-lore, custom, and religion, those symbolic and concrete epitomes of man's long ancestral growths and strivings, those true black diamonds of humanity's experiences, its successes and failures, of its ideals and disappointments. Hearn's artistry consisted in catching up these gems, these extinguished souls washed from a world of graves to the threshold of his miracle-working imagination, and in making them flush for an instant with the semblance of life. With what exquisite skill and grace he was able to concentrate upon them the soft light-rays of a fancy as subtle and beautifying as ever has been given to mortal!

CHAPTER XI.--SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

CONCERNING Hearn's outfitting of character by his parents little or nothing is known. It is of comparative unimportance because only a slight judicial familiarity with his works, especially those of the pre-j.a.panese periods, demonstrates that so far as concerns substratum and substance of character he had neither. There was an interior void, an absence of psychic reality, which mocked his friends and which likewise baulked at true creativeness. He never made a plot or blew the breath of life into a character; his datum was always provided from without and by another. He was a reflector only,--plus a colourist--but a colourist of unrivalled excellence and power. Form he knew not, had never seen, and that is also his second conditioning weakness as an artist. Even much of his philosophy was to justify the sensualism, sensualisticism, pessimism, and G.o.dlessness which are early manifest.

But it was a product taken over from another, a hastily devoured meal without mastication, digestion, or a.s.similation. The interior emptiness was pathetically emphasized by the fact of a contentless experience which also worked to deprive his mind of spontaneous originality. He never loved, except in one sorry way, never suffered much, never lived much, for he was a hard worker, and he was always seeking the ever-postponed, ever-unsatisfying Paradise, so vainly hunted for, and which none ever finds except in himself. _Ihm fehlt die Liebe,_ was said of Heine,--how much truer is it of Hearn! Conspiring with a native lack of originality and want of normal experience, his enormous near-sightedness made his choice of material and method of handling it what we know. If anything was "inherited," it was a pseudo-Orientalism, a love of the monstrous and gruesome, an astonishing indifference to Occidental history and its conclusions as to s.e.xual and social laws, a spontaneous faith in faithlessness, a belief in irreligion, and an almost hopeless trend toward fatalism and its inevitable consequent, pessimism. Improvidence, financial as well as moral, and disloyalty, to his friends as well as to his higher nature, were his life-long, crippling, and condemning sins. Two mysteries seem almost inexplainable.

We know why others had to give him his themes, and whence and how he became a mirror, or an echo; and we understand how the echoing became also wondrously, even exaggeratedly, but beautifully, coloured. We can almost see why he was foolishly and absurdly disloyal to personal friends, often treating worst those who were the most kind to him; best, those who were sometimes most cunningly selfish. We may explain his ridiculous _Wanderl.u.s.t_. But two attributes are beyond all a.n.a.lysis:--one was a thing illogical with his character, his cleaving to an ideal of literary workmanship at the cost of selfishness, friendships, and temporary success; and the other was his marvellous literary and psychologic sympathy with whatever mind, people, circ.u.mstance, story, or tradition, accident or choice brought before the echoing or mirroring mind. If it were faint, ghostly, and far away, he was a true thaumaturgist in loving it into life, and living it into love.

This beautiful sympathy and literary loyalty made it possible for Hearn to use the words of faith and of religion, even of morality, as if they were his own, while with them he had no personal sympathy whatever. For instance, he could speak, as if from his heart out, of "a million astral lamps lighted in the vast and violet dome of G.o.d's everlasting mosque."

He could praise as a sublime exhortation the command, "O ye that are about to sleep, commend your souls to Him who never sleeps!" It is, of course, true that in Hearn's mind, doubtless, the poorest heathen or savage virtue was sublimely virtuous, and any barbaric vice had more of virtue in it than of viciousness. Surely the most paltry Oriental excellence was far lovelier to him than any Occidental heroism or beauty, however splendid. We are thus helped to understand how his mind could seem to flush with religious or ethical enthusiasm, while the mosque of his real heart was only a chasm of gloomy negation or a chaos of hideous death. This was due to the fact that he had no constructive mind, and as only one kind of doing, writing, was possible to him, because of his near-sightedness, he must needs hate Occidentalism, and exalt with a somewhat ludicrous praise the vapid, and even pitiful childishness of semi-barbaric Orientalism. The illogicality reaches its acme when Hearn, atheistic, disloyal, and unethical, was compelled, as in some of his j.a.panese pages, to put a morality and a religion behind the acts and in the hearts of his characters, which with his and with their atheism, was, dramatically, so out of place that the incongruity would make us smile if it were not all done with such a sweet and haunting grace. The culmination of the contradictory trends is in "Karma." To put it bluntly, Hearn had no spark of practical s.e.xual virtue, and yet praise one shall, marvel at one must, the literary and dramatic honour which could, as in "Karma," so sympathetically describe the almost unscalable summits of virtue,--there where in holy silence, Pa.s.sion gazes with awe at her divine Master, Duty.

A negative condition of this sympathy was the interior voidness of his character, the non-existence of reality within him, which thus allowed the positive loyalty to his subject free play; yet that which gave it leave to be, did not explain the genesis or quality of life of the being. But have a care! Do not ask the interest in any one subject to last for more than a fleeting moment! Early and always he possessed the rare, the wonderful gift of the instant, the iridescent, the winged word. At last was presented to him what he called a "soul," and that, in conjunction with his growth in artistic technique, in his handling of colours, and in procuring n.o.bler data, helped to give the j.a.panese work a content and an enduring substance which distinguishes it from that of all others. This atones for all the hurt that precedes, and it is a benefaction and a delight to the entire world. In reward Literature will place upon his head one of her loveliest crowns.

CHAPTER XII.--APPRECIATIONS AND EPITOMES

TAKEN as a whole, the criticisms upon Hearn's work are complimentary. He has his warm admirers, and some who are not so enthusiastic; but those who criticize adversely do so with a gentleness,--I may say, almost a reluctance that is perhaps the reflection of the spirit of his work. And whatever else these may offer, all agree that his writings have a unique charm.

Following are a few excerpts which should give an average of opinions:--