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, Maupassant, 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. Japan gave him her soul to rematerialize and recolour with literary life. Without his Japanese work Hearn would have died as littérateur 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 mediæval horror had been much outgrown, and it had no chance to be used in Japan. The Japanese 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 nonentity 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 wingéd 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 shore" 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 gratitude. 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 passionate 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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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, "Japan," 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 Shintōism and ancestor-worship and the truism that Japan 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 assumed ancestor-worship to be original in Japanese 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 Japanese works, we will forget the "Japan, 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 transmuted and preserved it for a long-after-coming time, for our warming, lighting, and delighting. This has a perfect analogy 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-Japanese 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 godlessness which are early manifest. But it was a product taken over from another, a hastily devoured meal without mastication, digestion, or assimilation. 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 sexual 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 Wanderlust. But two attributes are beyond all analysis:—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, circumstance, 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.