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 reillustration 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 God 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 transmuted 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 παθος 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 anæsthesia, and by none have death and hopelessness been more deftly figured in the guise of a desirable Nirvâna. The doing of this was almost a unique doing, the manner of the ποιησις was assuredly so, and constitutes 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 æsthetics the half-bushel or more of wasted sheets thrown away nearly every day.