"For these quaint Gods of Roads and Gods of Earth are really living still, though so worn and mossed and feebly worshipped. In this brief moment, at least, I am really in the Elder World,—perhaps just at that epoch of it when the primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned, crumbling slowly before the corrosive influence of a new philosophy; and I know myself a pagan still, loving these simple old gods, these gods of a people's childhood. And they need some love, these naïf, innocent, ugly gods. The beautiful divinities will live forever by that sweetness of womanhood idealized in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and Benten; they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great temples shall all have become voiceless and priestless as this shrine of Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers,—how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the so-called 'laws of progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of evolution."
It is the combination of the various beliefs here shadowed that explains the unique note he brought into our literature. The man who was at once a follower of Spencer and of Buddha, with a large sympathy for the old folk-religion, brought forth an embodied thought entirely new to the world. Nothing like it had ever been produced before. Its like may never be produced again. He endeavored to reconcile the evolutional theory of inherited tendencies with the Buddhist belief in reincarnation,—one lengthening chain of lives,—and with the worship of the dead as seen in pure Shinto, for "is not every action indeed the work of the Dead who dwell within us?"
It was this queer combination that gave a strange charm, a moving magic, to various passages in his books. For the rest, his work and method of labor, may best be described in his own words when speaking of Japanese artists. He writes:
"The foreign artist will give you realistic reflections of what he sees; but he will give you nothing more. The Japanese artist gives you that which he feels,—the mood of a season, the precise sensation of an hour and place; his work is qualified by a power of suggestiveness rarely found in the art of the West. The Occidental painter renders minute detail; he satisfies the imagination he evokes. But his Oriental brother either suppresses or idealizes detail,—steeps his distances in mist, bands his landscapes with cloud, makes of his experience a memory in which only the strange and the beautiful survive, with their sensations. He surpasses imagination, excites it, leaves it hungry with the hunger of charm perceived in glimpses only. Nevertheless in such glimpses he is able to convey the feeling of a time, the character of a place, after a fashion that seems magical. He is a painter of recollections and sensations rather than of clear-cut realities; and in this lies the secret of his amazing power."
It has often been asked, "These books are beautiful as prose, but do they give us Japan?" Some have said he saw Japan with the eyes of a lover and was thus deceived. Captain F. Brinkley, an authority on Oriental matters and for years editor of the most important English paper in the Orient, has expressed, to the present writer, his skepticism concerning the entire verity of some of Hearn's pictures. On the other hand, here is what two Japanese writers say: Mr. Yone Noguchi, himself a poet of no mean abilities, writes of Hearn: "I like to vindicate Hearn from the criticism that his writing is about one third Japanese and two thirds Hearn. Fortunately his two thirds Hearn is also Japanese."
This is heartily seconded by Mr. Adachi Kinnosuke: "So truly did he write of us and of our land, that the West, which is always delighted to fall in love with counterfeits in preference to the genuine, did not believe him; made merry at his expense, told him that he was a dreamer, that his accounts were too rose-colored. We of the soil only marvelled. Of him we have said that he is more of Nippon than ourselves."
No fitter close to this introduction may be given than Noguchi's prose elegy sent to America from Tokio several days after Hearn's interment:
"Truly he was a delicate, easily broken Japanese vase, old as the world, beautiful as a cherry blossom. Alas! that wonderful vase was broken. He is no more with us. Surely we could better lose two or three battle-ships at Port Arthur than Lafcadio Hearn."
[1] This and several other extracts are from that delightful book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.