It is therefore no wonder that the world is prejudiced against the Jew.
MANDATES OF ART TO HER VOTARIES.
A Great Word-Artist Shows That Under
the Levity of Bohemian Life Is a Serious
and Lofty Philosophy.
The late Lafcadio Hearn was one of the great prose-poets of the time. The glimpse into his intimate mind which the Critic affords by printing a sheaf of his letters to H.E. Krehbiel, the music critic, will be appreciated by all who followed his literary wanderings up to the time of his settlement in Japan. The letters were written many years ago, when Hearn was still in his early prime. When he learned of the death of Mr. Krehbiel's child he wrote this exquisite expression of sympathy:
Your letter rises before me as I write like a tablet of white stone bearing a dead name. I see you standing beside me. I look into your eyes and press your hand and say nothing.
Hearn was ever an artist, and he ever knew what art meant. In advising his friend to break away from the exhausting routine of daily journalism, he gave a typical expression of his philosophy of life:
Under the levity of Henri Mürger's picturesque Bohemianism there is a serious philosophy apparent which elevates the characters of his romance to heroism. They followed one principle faithfully—so faithfully that only the strong survived the ordeal—never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocation for any other occupation, however lucrative; not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshipers.
The conditions pictured by Mürger have passed away in Paris as elsewhere; the old barriers to ambition have been broken down. But I think the moral remains.
So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labors at aught that is not of art he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.
Do you never reflect that within a few years you will no longer be the young man—and that, like Vesta's fires, the enthusiasm of youth for an art-idea must be well fed with the sacred branches to keep it from dying out?