"Lafcadio Hearn describes with intelligence, with love all aspects of Japanese life: Nature and inhabitants; landscapes, animals and flowers; material life and life moral; classic Art and popular literature; philosophies, religions and superstitions. He awakens in us an exquisite feeling of old aristocratic and feudal Japan: he explains to us the prodigious revolution that modern Japan has created in thirty years....
"Hearn has consecrated to the study of Japanese art some of his most curious psychological analyses.
"Lafcadio Hearn takes a deep interest in the religious life of the Japanese. He studies with the minutest exactness the ancient customs of Shintōism, high moral precepts of Buddhism, and also the popular superstitions that hold on, for instance, to the worship of foxes, and to the idea of pre-existence." (393.)
"To a certain large class of his adopted countrymen, his hatred of Christianity, which was pronounced long before he went to Japan, and his fondness for Oriental cults of all kinds, was recommendation. But it is still an open question whether he did harm or good to the Japanese by his advocacy of their superstitions....
"Hearn's books are little known to the multitude. But they are familiar to an influential class the world over. In him Japan has lost a powerful and flattering advocate, and the English world one of its masters in style." (332.)
"Mr. Hearn was not a philosopher or a judicial student of life. He was a gifted, born impressionist, with a style resembling that of the French Pierre Loti. His stories and descriptions are delicate or gorgeous word pictures of the subtler and more elusive qualities of Oriental life." (293.)
"His art is the power of suggestion through perfect restraint.... He stands and proclaims his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To the religious instinct of India,—Buddhism in particular,—which history has engrafted on the æsthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound.... In these essays and tales, whose substance is so strangely mingled together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of Japan and the relentless science of Europe, I read vaguely of many things which hitherto were quite dark." (308.)
"He brings to the study of all aspects of Japanese life, intelligence, and love; he also sets sail in his descriptions and analyses towards a general theory on life; he is a Japanizing psychologist: he is also a philosopher....
"At all events, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of recalling powerfully to the Europeans of Europe the importance, often misunderstood, of Eastern civilization. No one better than this Japanizing enthusiast to make us feel what there is of narrowness in our habitual conception of the world, in our individualistic literature, misunderstanding too much the influence of the Past in our anthropocentric art, neglecting Nature too often, penetrated too 'singly' in our classic philosophy with Greco-Latin and Christian influences. 'Till now,' says Lafcadio Hearn very forcibly, 'having lived only in one hemisphere, we have thought but half thoughts.' We should enlarge our hearts and our minds by taking into our circle of culture, all the art and all the thought of the extreme East.
"From the philosophical view-point, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of calling attention to the high value of Shintōism, and above all of Buddhism. His work deserves to exercise an influence on the religious ideas of the West. If religion can no longer occupy any place in the intellectual life of humanity, more and more invaded by science, she can subsist a long time yet, perhaps always, in her sentimental life." (392.)