"THE 'lovers of the antique loveliness,'" wrote Hearn, "are proving to
me the future possibilities of a long-cherished dream--the English
realization of a Latin style, modelled upon foreign masters, and
rendered even more forcible by that element of _strength_ which is the
characteristic of the northern tongues." "I think that Genius must have
greater attributes than mere creative power to be called to the front
rank,--the thing created must be beautiful; it does not satisfy if the
material be rich. I cannot content myself with ores and rough jewels,
etc." "It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction
analogous to that warmth of colour and richness of imagery hitherto
peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a
Greek, I _feel_ rather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon;
and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something
different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of latter-day
English or American romance." "The volume, 'Chinese Ghosts,' is an
attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph some day, _poetical
prose_." "A man's style, when fully developed, is part of his
personality. Mine is being shaped to a particular end."
Hearn advised the use of the etymological dictionary in order to secure
"that subtle sense of words to which much that _startles_ in poetry and
prose is due." But although always remaining an artist in words, he, at
his best, came to know that artistic technique in ideas is a more
certain method of arousing and holding the readers' interest. He also
strongly urges a knowledge of Science as more necessary to the formation
of a strong style. In this, however, he never practised what he
commended, because he had no mind for Science, nor knowledge of
scientific things. He spoke with pride of writing the scientific
editorials for his paper, but they were few and may quickly be ignored.
Flaubert was Hearn's literary deity; the technique of the two men was
identical, and consisted of infinite pains with data, in
phrase-building, sentence-making, and word-choosing. With no writer was
the filing of the line ever carried to higher perfection than with both
master and pupil; fortunately the younger had to make his living by his
pen, and therefore he could not wreck himself upon the impossible task
as did Flaubert. For nothing is more certain to ruin style and content,
form as well as matter, than to make style and form the first
consideration of a writer. Flaubert, the fashion-maker and supreme
example of this school, came at last to recognize this truth, and wished
that he might buy up and destroy all copies of "Madame Bovary;" and he
summed up the unattainableness of the ideal, as well as the resultant
abysmal pessimism, when he said that "form is only an error of sense,
and substance a fancy of your thought." His ever-repeated "Art has no
morality," "The moment a thing is true it is good," "Style is an
absolute method of seeing things," "The idea exists only by virtue of
its form," etc., led Flaubert and his thousand imitators into the
quagmire which Zola, Wilde, Shaw, and decadent journalism generally so
admirably illustrate. That Hearn escaped from the bog is due to several
interesting reasons, the chief being his poverty, which compelled him to
write much, and his audience, which, being Anglo-Saxon (and therefore
properly and thoroughly cursed), would not buy the elegant pornography
of Flaubert and the gentlemen who succeeded, or did not succeed, in the
perfection of the worship and of the works of the master of them all.
And then Hearn was himself at least part Anglo-Saxon, so that he shrank
from perfection in the method.
There is a pathetic proof of the lesson doubly repeated in the lives of
both Flaubert and Hearn. "St. Anthony" was rewritten three times, and
each time the failures might be called, great, greater, greatest. There
lies before me Hearn's manuscript translation of the third revision of
the work, in two large volumes, with a printed pamphlet of directions to
the printer, an Introduction, etc.,--a great labour assuredly on Hearn's
part. No publisher could be found to give it to the world of English
readers![19] Moreover, there was never in his life any personal
happiness, romance, poetry, or satisfaction which could serve as the
material of Hearn's aesthetic faculty. Almost every hour of that life had
been lived in physical or mental anguish, denied desire, crushed
yearnings, and unguided waywardness. Born of a Greek mother, and a
roving English father, his childhood was passed in an absurd French
school where another might have become a dwarfed and potted Chinese
tree. Flung upon the alien world of the United States in youth, without
self-knowledge, experience, or self-guiding power, he drank for years
all the bitter poisons of poverty, banality, and the rest, which may not
shatter the moral and mental health of strong and coarse natures. By
nature and necessity shy beyond belief, none may imagine the poignant
sufferings he endured, and how from it all he writhed at last to manhood
and self-consciousness, preserved a weird yet real beauty of soul, a
morbid yet genuine artist-power, a child-like and childish, yet most
involuted and mysterious heart, a supple and subtle, yet illogical and
contentless intellect.
[19] Particulars concerning the manuscript translation of "St.
Anthony" are given in the Bibliography of Miss Stedman,
Hearn's "Argument" of the book being reprinted in full.
The most striking evidence of the pathetic and unmatched endowment and
experience is that, while circumstance dictated that he should be a
romancer, no facts in his own life could be used as his material. There
had been no romance, no love, no happiness, no interesting personal
data, upon which he could draw to give his imagination play, vividness,
actuality, or even the semblance of reality. So sombre and tragic,
moreover, had been his own living that the choice of his themes could
only be of unhealthy, almost unnatural, import and colouring. He
therefore chose to work over the imaginings of other writers, and
perforce of morbid ones.
A glance at his library confirms the opinion. When Hearn left for Japan,
he turned over to me several hundred volumes which he had collected and
did not wish to take with him. His most-prized books he had had
especially rebound in dainty morocco covers, and these, particularly,
point to the already established taste, the yearning for the strange,
the weird, and the ghost-like, the gathered and pressed exotic flowers
of folklore, the banalities and morbidities of writers with unleashed
imaginations, the love of antique religions and peoples, the mysteries
of mystics, the descriptions of savage life and rites--all mixed with
dictionaries, handbooks, systems of philosophy, etc.
Under the conditioning factor of his taste, it is true that his choice,
or his _flair_, was unique and inerrant. He tracked his game with fatal
accuracy to its lair. His literary sense was perfect, when he set it in
action, and this is his unique merit. There has never been a mind more
infallibly sure to find the best in all literatures, the best of the
kind he sought, and probably his translations of the stories from the
French are as perfect as can be.
His second published volume, the "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature,"
epitomizes and reillumines this first period of his literary
workmanship. The material, the basis, is not his own; it is drawn from
the fatal Orient, and tells of love, jealousy, hate, bitter and burning
vengeance, and death, sudden and awful. Over it is the wondrous mystical
glamour in which he, like his elder brother Coleridge, was so expert in
sunsetting these dead days and deathless themes. His next book, "Some
Chinese Ghosts," was a reillustration of the same searching, finding,
and illuminating.
Flaubert's choice of subjects, as regards his essential character, was
of the most extreme illogicality; his cadenced phrase and meticulous
technique were also not the product of his character or of his freedom.
In the Land of Nowhere, Hearn was likewise compelled to reside, and it
was necessarily a land of colour and echo, not one of form. The
suffering Frenchman emptied of inhabitants or deimpersonalized his alien
country, while the more healthy Anglo-Saxon peopled it with ghosts.
"Have you ever experienced the historic shudder?" asked Flaubert. "I
seek to give your ghost a ghostly shudder," said Hearn. Flaubert
wrote:--
"The artist should be in his work, like God in creation, invisible and
all-powerful; he should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere.
"Art should be raised above personal affections and nervous
susceptibilities. It is time to give it the perfection of the physical
sciences by means of pitiless method."
And Hearn's first and most beloved "Avatar," and his most serious "St.
Anthony"--works dealing with the mysteries and awesomeness of
disembodied souls and ideals--"could not get themselves printed."
Moreover, in all that he afterwards published there are the haunting
far-away, the soft concealing smile, and the unearthly memories of pain,
the detached spirits of muted and transmuted dead emotions, and denied
yearnings, the formless colourings of half-invisible and evanishing
dreams.
For with Hearn's lack of creative ability, married to his inexperience
of happiness, he could but choose the darksome, the tragical elements of
life, the [Greek: pathos] even of religion, as his themes. His intellect
being a reflecting, or at least a recombining and colouring faculty, his
datum must be sought without, and it must be brought to him; his
joyless and even his tragic experience compelled him to cull from the
mingled sad and bright only the pathetic or pessimistic subjects; his
physical and optical imprisonment forbade that objectivation and
distinctive embodiment which stamp an art work with the seal of reality,
and make it stand there wholly non-excusing, or else offering itself as
its own excuse for being. True art must have the warp of materiality,
interwoven with the woof of life, or else the coloration and designs of
the imagination cannot avail to dower it with immortality.
Working within the sad limits his Fates had set, Hearn performed
wonders. None has made tragedy so soft and gentle, none has rendered
suffering more beautiful, none has dissolved disappointment into such
painless grief, none has blunted the hurt of mortality with such a
delightful anaesthesia, and by none have death and hopelessness been more
deftly figured in the guise of a desirable Nirvana. The doing of this
was almost a unique doing, the manner of the [Greek: poiesis] was
assuredly so, and constitutes Hearn's claim to an artist's "For ever."
He would have made no claim, it is true, to this, or to any other
endless existence, but we who read would be too indiscriminating, would
be losers, ingrates, if we did not cherish the lovely gift he brings to
us so shyly. Restricted and confined as was his garden, he grew in it
exotic flowers of unearthly but imperishable beauty. One will not find
elsewhere an equal craftsmanship in bringing into words and vision the
intangible, the far, fine, illusive fancy, the ghosts of vanished hearts
and hopes. Under his magic touch unseen spirit almost reappears with the
veiling of materiality, and behind the grim and grinning death's-head a
supplanting smile of kindness invites pity, if not a friendly whisper.
As to literary aim, Hearn distinctly and repeatedly confessed to me that
his ideal was, in his own words, to give his reader "a ghostly
shudder," a sense of the closeness of the unseen about us, as if eyes we
saw not were watching us, as if long-dead spirits and weird powers were
haunting the very air about our ears, were sitting hid in our heart of
hearts. It was a pleasing task to him to make us hear the moans and
croonings of disincarnate griefs and old pulseless pains, begging
piteously, but always softly, gently, for our love and comforting. But
it should not be unrecognized that no allurement of his art can hide
from view the deeper pathos of a horrid and iron fatalism which to his
mind moved the worlds of nature or of life, throttled freedom, steeled
the heart, iced the emotions, and dictated the essential automatism of
our own being and of these sad dead millions which crowd the dimly seen
dreams of Hearn's mind.
It may be added that, accepting the command of his destiny, Hearn
consciously formed an ideal to which he worked, and even laboured at the
technique of its realization. I have talked with him upon these and
similar subjects for many long hours, or got him to talk to me. The
conversations were usually at night, beneath trees, with the moonlight
shimmering through and giving that dim, mystic light which is not light,
so well suited to such a poet and to his favourite subjects.
As to technique, there was never an artist more patient and persistent
than he to clothe his thought in its perfect garment of words. Sometimes
he would be able to write with comparative ease a large number of sheets
(of _yellow_ paper--he could write on no other) in a day. At other times
the words did not suit or fit, and he would rewrite a few pages scores
of times. Once I knew him to labour over six lines an entire day, and
then stop weary and unsatisfied. I had to supply a large waste-basket
and have often wished I had kept for comparison and a lesson in
practical aesthetics the half-bushel or more of wasted sheets thrown away
nearly every day.
Just as those outfitted with good eyes must find Hearn's world too
formless and too magnificently coloured, so normal civilized persons
will find it altogether too sexually and sensually charged. Whenever
able to do so he turns a description to the ghostly, but even then
_c'est toujours femme!_ A mountain is like a curved hip, a slender tree
takes the form of a young girl budding into womanhood, etc. Colour, too,
is everywhere, even where it is not, seemingly, to our eyes, and even
colour is often made sensual and sexual by some strange suggestion or
allusion.
Viewing merit as the due of conscious, honourable, unselfish, and
dutiful effort, Hearn's sole merit rises from his heroic pursuit of an
ideal of workmanship. Like glorious bursts of illuminating sunshine
through the fogs and clouds of a murky atmosphere shine such sentences
as these:--
What you want, and what we all want, who possess devotion
to any noble idea, who hide any artistic idol in a niche of
our heart, is that independence which gives us at least the
time to worship the holiness of beauty,--be it in harmonies
of sound, of form, or of colour.
What you say about the disinclination to work for years upon
a theme for pure love's sake, without hope of reward,
touches me,--because I have felt that despair so long and so
often. And yet I believe that all the world's art-work--all
that which is eternal--was thus wrought. And I also believe
that no work made perfect for the pure love of art, can
perish, save by strange and rare accident....
Yet the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this
sacrifice to art,--this trampling of self under foot! It is
the supreme test for admittance into the ranks of the
eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless sacrifice
which the artist's soul is bound to make,--as in certain
antique cities maidens were compelled to give their
virginity to a god of stone! But without the sacrifice, can
we hope for the grace of Heaven?
What is the reward? The consciousness of inspiration only! I
think art gives a new faith. I think--all jesting
aside--that could I create something I felt to be sublime, I
should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a
mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling
of its eternal purpose; and I should know the pride of the
prophet that had seen God face to face.
* * * * 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
worshippers. 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 labours at aught that is not of art,
he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.
And the greatest of our satisfactions with Hearn's personality is that
these were not mere words, but that he consistently, resolutely, and
persistently practised his preaching. This was the only religion or
ethics he had, and praise God, he had it! That alone binds us to him in
any feeling of brotherhood, that only makes us grateful to him.
Style has been too frequently and too long confounded with content.
There is the matter, the thing to be said, the story to be told; and
quite apart from this there is the method of telling it, which, properly
viewed, is style. So long as the teller of the tale has only borrowed
his message or story from others, there cannot be raised much question
of originality, or discussion of the datum, except in so far as pertains
to the _choice_ of material. And so long as the stylist fingers
etymological dictionaries for "startling words," so long will his style
remain of the lower kind and etymologically unstylish. When the
technique becomes unconscious and perfect, there is style, or the art,
merged into the content, and then, _le style c'est l'homme_, or, as
Hearn translated it, style becomes the artist's personality. In the best
Japanese works Hearn accomplished this, and with his consummate choice
of material there was the consummate art-work. Subject, method, cunning
handiwork, psychologic analysis, generous and loyal sympathy, colour
(not form)--all were fused to a unity almost beyond disassociation, and
challenging admiration. But it is not beyond our perfect enjoying.
It is true that Hearn has ignored, necessarily and wisely ignored, the
objective and material side of Japanese existence. Mechanics,
nationalism, economy, the materialism of his material, had obviously to
be untouched in his interpretation, or in his "Interpretation." It would
have been absurd for him to have attempted any presentation or valuable
phasing of this important aspect. That for him was in a double sense
_ultra vires_. Such work will not want for experts. But what Hearn has
done was almost wholly impossible to any other. His personal heredity,
history, and physiology, highly exceptional, seem to have conspired to
outfit him for this remarkable task.
There is still another reason, at first sight a contradicting one, for
both Hearn's fitness and his success in giving us a literary incarnation
of the spirit or soul of Japan in the subjective sense: To his readers
it must have appeared an insoluble enigma why this superlatively
subjective and psychical "sensitive" should have been such an unrecking,
_outre_, and enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, or
that part of it given in the "First Principles." It is told of an
English wit that when asked if he was willing to subscribe to the
Thirty-nine Articles, he promptly replied, "Oh, yes, forty of them if
you wish." Hearn was similarly minded--minus the fun,--and most
unphilosophically he went into utter captivity, seemingly, to the
unphilosophic philosopher. And yet the spirit of Spencer's "First
Principles" was in reality as different from that of Hearn as was the
spirit of St. Francis from that, for instance, of Cecil Rhodes. The
contradiction and ludicrousness of this mismating is so easy of
explanation that the incongruity is missed. The forest is not seen
because of the trees. Hearn did not have true scientific instinct,
animus, or ability. Neither had Herbert Spencer--so far as his "First
Principles" is concerned, and as regards an improved inductive method as
shown in the "Psychology," "Biology," etc., Hearn, according to a
letter, found he could not interest himself enough to read one of these
later works. The clear and well-drilled scientific intellect admits that
if Spencer had not published his "First Principles," but had gathered
the facts of his later works before publishing an epitomizing Last
Principles, the matter would have been as differently phased as night
and day. Spencer cared infinitely more for the systematization than he
did for the facts systematized. Reduced to its last analysis, the "First
Principles" was the reverse of a close induction from the facts of
nature and life. It presented the glitter of generalization without the
logic. The reverberating echoes of its illogic, sweeping sonorously over
the universe with an indiscriminate ignoring of the world-wide
difference between matter and life, caught the fancy of the imprisoned
poet soul; he thoughtlessly yielded a homage which, from his standpoint,
was unjustified, and which objectively was an unscrutinizing
lip-service. Subjectively Spencerism gave Hearn warrant for an inborn
atheism and materialism which had been heightened immoderately by the
bitter teachings of experience into a pessimism so horrid that one
shuddered when looking into the man's soul depths. _Morne_ was a
favourite word with Hearn, and Spencer's was a fateful philosophy for
one whose birth and education were desolation, and whose sight of the
world was more than _morne_, was the abomination of desolation, was in
truth the sheer awfulness of despair. Blindness were vastly preferable
to Hearn's affliction, but if that splendid poet St. Francis had been so
cursed, his face and his soul would have been ecstatic with smiles, with
joy, with faith, with hope, and with love. So strange is the
unaccountable allotment of Fate in her endowments, gifts, and orderings.
There is and there can be no blame--only a pity wholly beyond
expression.
The aloofness, far-awayness, the inapproachable distance and detachment
of Hearn's spirit is one of the characteristics felt in reading his
best pages. Everything is infinitely beyond our senses. To him
everything was distant: the near was far, the far was at infinity. He
thus truly became the poet of the _au dela_. His voice, itself an echo,
comes to us as from the hush of an eerie height above the beat and wreck
of the waves of our noisy shore. His personality as revealed in his
writings is an echo, a memory, almost the memory of a memory, the thrill
of the day-dream of a soul retreating from sense.
Each day the quiet grew more still
Within his soul, more shrank the will
Beyond the jar of sense, serene,
Behind the hurt of world or ill,
Where sleep hushed silences unseen.
He ever insists on a haunting glimpse of the pain and the renunciation
of others, of wasted and long-dead faces and loves, always shrinking
from our gaze, pallid in the darkling light of the setting moon, of
vanishing loves, grievous story, forgotten myth, and ruined religion.
And yet, and yet, all that works to make Hearn immortal in literature
is, at last, not art _per se_. One might quote freely showing that his
"filing of the line," like that of Flaubert, led to nothing, if the
thought and feeling to be put into the lines were not there. They were
not there with his masters, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, and others,
and so these men will not inherit literary immortality. They had no
soul, and only the soul, the spirit, can be immortalized. Hearn's good
fortune is that unconsciously, even almost against his will, he was more
than they, more than an artist as such. He had something else to do. If
it had not been for his poverty, the necessity to sell what he wrote, he
would surely have gone the same road to Avernus as his masters. Then,
too, he had no original message to write, because he had no real soul,
only a borrowed one. Japan gave him her soul to rematerialize and
recolour with literary life. Without his Japanese work Hearn would have
died as _litterateur_ in the year he died as a physical body. To tell
her "ghostly" stories was his great office and function. When these were
told his work was done. His old gloating over the clotted villainies of
mediaeval horror had been much outgrown, and it had no chance to be used
in Japan. The Japanese character would not tolerate such things. The
ghastly was transformed into the ghostly, and his Oriental fancy was
luckily turned to better duties and pleasures. This more than Flaubert
was something not to be got from modern atheistic French "Art for Art's
sake," nor from modern Levantine nonentity of character. How marvellous
is his sympathy with his subject, loyalty to his literary duty, and to
his literary ideal! His despised Irish father perhaps had slipped into
the otherwise invisible and limp threads of his Fates a little mesh of
spiritual reality, which, dormant, unrecognized, and even scorned by
him, came finally to give him all his valour and worth. He could dower
the insubstantial sigh of a long dead soul or people with the winged
word. It was a word of colour, only,--and colour has no objective
existence,--the rainbow is not out there. And because it is spiritual,
not objective, the most beautiful, if the most evanescent of all earthly
things, is colour. The hearers of soundless music, and the lovers of
"the light that never was on sea or shore" will understand what is
meant. For them Hearn really wrote: they are few, and scattered far, but
Hearn will magnificently multiply the number. His amazing merit is that
while without the great qualities which make the greatest writers, he
wrought such miracles of winning grace and persuading beauty.
That he wrought against his will, and by the overcoming of a seemingly
cruel Fate, puts him almost outside of our personal gratitude. We take
the gift from a divinity he did not recognize, one that used the
rebellious hand and the almost blind eye as a writing instrument. The
lover of the gruesome, the Spencerian scientist, the man himself, must
have wondered at the message when he came out from under the influence
of the pitiless inspiration.
One of Hearn's dangers was discursiveness, or want of conciseness and
intensity. "Chita" showed it, and the West Indian work lost in value
because of it. It is the danger of all those writers who lack creative
ability, and who depend upon "local colour," and "style" for their
effect. The story's the thing, after all! In Hearn's translations, and
especially in "Stray Leaves," he for the moment caught the view of the
value of the content, saw how the fact, dramatic, intense, and
passionate is the all-desirable; the art of its presentation is the art
of letting it flash forth upon the reader with few, apt, and flamelike
words, which reveal and not conceal the life and soul of the act and of
the actor. He tended to forget this. In "Karma," besides, or rather by
reason of, the moral,--his newly got psyche,--he returned to a reliance
upon essentials, upon the datum of the spirit, and not upon its
reflections, refractions, and chromatics. The beautiful spectrum was
there refocused into white light, and the senses disappeared to reveal
behind them the divinity of soul. That art-lesson was never forgotten by
Hearn, and his Japanese work had a purity and a reality, a white heat,
which make his previous stories and sketches seem pale and weak.
Questions of style and form sometimes run inevitably into those of
content and of logic. Essentially wanting the rigorous training of form,
without the content and method of the scientific intellect, all Hearn's
work shows a lack of system, order, and subordination of parts. In any
single one of the Japanese volumes the absence of logic is lamentably
evident. He constantly repeats himself, and the warp of some of his
themes is worn threadbare. His most ambitious work, "Japan," is, in
truth, a regathering and a restatement in more objective style, of his
previous imaginative studies. Almost the only added thought concerns the
difference between Shintoism and ancestor-worship and the truism that
Japan is to-day ruthlessly sacrificing the life of the individual to
that of the nation. The lack of scholarship and of the scientific animus
(even in a field, folk-lore, more nearly his own than any other) comes
to view in his mistake of supposing Spencer an authority on the subject
of the origin of religion, and in the blunder that assumed
ancestor-worship to be original in Japanese history and religion.
Ancestor-worship, according to Griffis, Knox, and other distinguished
authorities, was unknown to the ancient writers of Nippon and was
imported from China. How threadbare--and yet how deftly, even charmingly
concealed!--was the wearing of his favourite themes, is shown by Hearn's
fateful return to the gruesome, especially in the later books, "Kott"
and "Kwaidan." These stories of the dead and of morbid necrophilism are
witnesses of Hearn's primitive interest in the ghastly, impossible to be
renounced or sloughed, not to be replaced by desire for the
supersensual, or by resolve to transform the loathsome into the ghostly.
Hearn should never have been seduced into the delusion that he could
become the spokesman of any scientific animus, methods or results.
Erudition, logic, systematization, were to him impossible. His function
was another and of a different nature, and his peculiar ability was for
other tasks. If we are adequately to appreciate the exquisiteness of the
earlier Japanese works, we will forget the "Japan, an Interpretation."
If we look upon Hearn as a painter, almost the sole colour of his
palette was mummy brown, the powdered flesh of the ancient dead holding
in solution their griefs, their hopes, their loves, their yearnings,
which he found to sink always to pulselessness, and to end in eternal
defeat! But the pallor and sadness for the brief moment of their
resuscitation was divinely softened and atoningly beautified. Then they
disappeared again in the waste and gloom from which love and poesy had
evoked them.
Felled in the struggle and defeat of the eternal battle with death, the
vegetation of untold ages long ago drifted to an amorphous stratum of
indistinguishable millionfold corpses. Compression, deferred combustion
and over-shrouding transmuted and preserved it for a long-after-coming
time, for our warming, lighting, and delighting. This has a perfect
analogy in the history and use of tradition, myth, folk-lore, custom,
and religion, those symbolic and concrete epitomes of man's long
ancestral growths and strivings, those true black diamonds of humanity's
experiences, its successes and failures, of its ideals and
disappointments. Hearn's artistry consisted in catching up these gems,
these extinguished souls washed from a world of graves to the threshold
of his miracle-working imagination, and in making them flush for an
instant with the semblance of life. With what exquisite skill and grace
he was able to concentrate upon them the soft light-rays of a fancy as
subtle and beautifying as ever has been given to mortal!