Zangwill has acutely said, in speaking of Loti's famous story of Japan, "Instead of looking for the soul of a people, Pierre Loti was simply looking for a woman."
Hearn did not fail to tell us of many women, but his most particular search was for just that soul of a people which Loti ignored; and in the hunt for that soul, he became more and more impressed by that Buddhism which enabled him the better to comprehend the people. His whole religious life had been a wandering away from the Christianity to which he was born and a finding of a faith compounded of Buddhism modified by paganism, and a leaven of the scientific beliefs of agnostics such as Spencer and Huxley, whom he never wearied of reading and quoting. In all his writings this tendency is displayed. In one of the letters we see him an avowed agnostic, or perhaps "pantheist" would be the better word. In his little-known story of 1889, published in Lippincott's, with the Buddhist title of "Karma," there is a curious tribute to a fair, pure woman. It shows the hold the theory of heredity and evolution and the belief in reincarnation already had upon him:
"In her beauty is the resurrection of the fairest past;—in her youth, the perfection of the present;—in her girl dreams, the promise of the To-Be.... A million lives have been consumed that hers should be made admirable; countless minds have planned and toiled and agonized that thought might reach a higher and purer power in her delicate brain;—countless hearts have been burned out by suffering that hers might pulse for joy;—innumerable eyes have lost their light that hers might be filled with witchery;—innumerable lips have prayed that hers might be kissed." On his first day in the Orient he visited a temple and made an offering, recording the following conversation, which gives an admirable insight into his religious beliefs:[1]
"'Are you a Christian?'
"And I answered truthfully,'No.'
"'Are you a Buddhist?'
"'Not exactly.'
"'Why do you make offerings if you do not believe in Buddha?'
"'I revere the beauty of his teaching, and the faith of those who follow it.'"
From this by degrees he reached to a pure Buddhism, tempered, however, by a strange, romantic half belief, half love for the old pagan gods, feeling himself at heart a pagan, too: