[ [20] The numbers refer to the corresponding items in the Bibliography.
"In his later books the all-potent influence of Japanese restraint seems to have refined and subdued his wonderful style to more perfect harmonies....
"His chapters are long or short as are his moods. There is little organic unity in them; no scientific aim or philosophic grasp rounds them into form. Even his paragraphs have little cohesion. Speaking of the forming of his sentences, he himself has compared it to the focussing of an image, each added word being like the turn of a delicate screw." (306.)
"The secret of the charm that we feel to such a marked degree in Mr. Lafcadio Hearn's volumes is that, in contrast to other writers, he does take the Japanese very seriously indeed." (316.)
"To the details of life and thought in Japan Mr. Hearn's soul seems everywhere and at all times responsive. He catches in his eye and on his pen minute motes scarcely noticeable by the keen natives themselves." (367.)
"He has written nothing on Japan equal in length to his tales of West Indian life. But while we deplore this reserve of a writer who possesses every quality of style, except humour, we have reason to be grateful for whatever he gives us." (307.)
"The matchless prose and the sympathy of Mr. Hearn." (324.)
"Mr. Hearn has the sympathetic temperament, the minute mental vision, the subdued style peculiar to all that is good in Japanese art and literature, needed for the accomplishment of a labour which to him has been a labour of love indeed. Here we have no mawkish sentimentality, no excessive laudation, on the one hand; on the other, no Occidental harshness, no Occidental ignorance of the sweet mystery of Eastern ways of life and modes of thought. What this most charming of writers on Far Eastern subjects has seen all may see, but only those can understand who are endowed with a like faculty of perception of unobtrusive beauty, and a like power, it must be added, of patient and prolonged study of common appearances and everyday events." (295.)
"A man has just died, intelligent and generous, who had succeeded in reconciling in his heart, the clear, rational ideas of the West together with the obscure deep sense of Extreme—Asia: Lafcadio Hearn. In the hospitality of his recipient soul, high European civilization and high Japanese civilization found a meeting-place; harmonized; completed, one in the other....
"In English-speaking countries, especially in the United States, Lafcadio Hearn already enjoys a just reputation. The lovers of the exotic, esteem him as equal to Kipling or Stevenson. In France, the Revue de Paris has begun to make him known, by publishing some of his best articles, elegantly and faithfully translated. His budding fame is destined to increase, as Europe takes a greater interest in the arts and the thoughts of the Extreme-Orient. His prose, exact and harmonious, will be admired as one of the finest since Ruskin wrote: his very personal style, at the same time subtle and powerful, will be noted: he will be especially admired for his delicate and profound intelligence of that Japanese civilization which, to us, remains so mysterious. What characterizes the talent of Lafcadio Hearn, that which gives it its precious originality, is the rare mixture of scientific precision and idealistic enthusiasm: his work might justly be entitled Truth and Poesy: 'In reading these essays,' says one of our best existing Japanese scholars, Professor Chamberlain, 'one feels the truth of Richard Wagner's statement: "Alles verständniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe." (All understanding comes to us only through Love.) If Lafcadio Hearn understands Japan best, and makes it better understood than any other writer, it is because he loves it best.'