“Here comes in the consideration of a very terrible possibility. Suppose we use integers instead of quintillions or centillions, and say that an individual represents by inheritance a total of 10-5 of impulses favourable to social life, 5 of the reverse. (Such a balance would really occur in many cases.) The child inherits, under favourable conditions, the father’s balance plus the maternal balance of 9,—four of the number being favourable. We have then a total which becomes odd, and the single odd number gives preponderance to an accumulation of ancestral impulse incalculable for evil. It would be like a pair of scales, each holding a mass as large as Fuji. If the balance were absolutely perfect the weight of one hair would be enough to move a mass of millions of tons. Here is your antique Nemesis awfully magnified. Let the individual descend below a certain level and countless dead suddenly seize and destroy him,—like the Furies.”
One begins to miss the beautiful landscapes against which he had set his enchantingly realistic pictures of beautiful things and people, but in the place of the sensuous charm, the honeyed felicities of phrase, he offered such essays as the “Japanese Civilization” in “Kokoro,” with its astounding picture of New York City, and its sublimated insight into the imponderable soul of the Eastern world—such intolerable imaginings as “Dust” in the “Gleanings from Buddha-Fields,” and the delicate poignancies of “The Nun of the Temple of Amida” or of “A Street Singer.”
I think it was at Kōbe he reached his fullest intellectual stature. None of the work that followed in the next eight years surpassed the results he there achieved, and much was of lesser value, despite its beauty. He had attained to complete mastery of his medium, and had moreover learned completely to master his thought before clothing it in words—a far more difficult and more important matter.
Yet the clothing in words was no small task, as witness the accompanying examples of how he laboured for the perfection of his vehicle. These are not the first struggles of a young and clumsy artist, but the efforts at the age of fifty-three of one of the greatest masters of English.
It was done, too, by a man who earned with his pen in a year less than the week’s income of one of the facile authors of the “six best sellers.”
As has been said of De Quincey, whom Hearn in many ways resembled, “I can grasp a little of his morbid suffering in the eternal struggle for perfection of utterance; I can share a part of his æsthetic torment over cacophony, redundance, obscurity, and all the thousand minute delicacies and subtleties of resonance and dissonance, accent and cæsura, that only a De Quincey’s ear appreciates and seeks to achieve or evade. How many care for these fine things to-day? How many are concerned if De Quincey uses a word with the long ‘a’ sound, or spends a sleepless night in his endeavour to find another with the short ‘a,’ that shall at once answer his purpose and crown his sentence with harmony? Who lovingly examine the great artist’s methods now, dip into the secret of his mystery, and weigh verb against adjective, vowel against consonant, that they may a little understand the unique splendour of this prose? And who, when an artist is the matter, attempt to measure his hopes as well as his attainments or praise a noble ambition perhaps shining through faulty attempt? How many, even among those who write, have fathomed the toil and suffering, the continence and self-denial of our great artists in words?”
Specimen of Hearn’s MS., first draft.
