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 sexually 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 sexual 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 noble 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 god 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 God 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 God, 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 Japanese works Hearn accomplished this, and with his consummate choice of material there was the consummate art-work. Subject, method, cunning handiwork, psychologic analysis, generous and loyal sympathy, colour (not form)—all were fused to a unity almost beyond disassociation, 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 Japanese 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 Japan 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, outré, 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 analysis, 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 delà. 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 shore. 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.