CONCERNING Hearn's outfitting of character by his parents little or
nothing is known. It is of comparative unimportance because only a
slight judicial familiarity with his works, especially those of the
pre-Japanese periods, demonstrates that so far as concerns substratum
and substance of character he had neither. There was an interior void,
an absence of psychic reality, which mocked his friends and which
likewise baulked at true creativeness. He never made a plot or blew the
breath of life into a character; his datum was always provided from
without and by another. He was a reflector only,--plus a colourist--but
a colourist of unrivalled excellence and power. Form he knew not, had
never seen, and that is also his second conditioning weakness as an
artist. Even much of his philosophy was to justify the sensualism,
sensualisticism, pessimism, and godlessness which are early manifest.
But it was a product taken over from another, a hastily devoured meal
without mastication, digestion, or assimilation. The interior emptiness
was pathetically emphasized by the fact of a contentless experience
which also worked to deprive his mind of spontaneous originality. He
never loved, except in one sorry way, never suffered much, never lived
much, for he was a hard worker, and he was always seeking the
ever-postponed, ever-unsatisfying Paradise, so vainly hunted for, and
which none ever finds except in himself. _Ihm fehlt die Liebe,_ was said
of Heine,--how much truer is it of Hearn! Conspiring with a native lack
of originality and want of normal experience, his enormous
near-sightedness made his choice of material and method of handling it
what we know. If anything was "inherited," it was a pseudo-Orientalism,
a love of the monstrous and gruesome, an astonishing indifference to
Occidental history and its conclusions as to sexual and social laws, a
spontaneous faith in faithlessness, a belief in irreligion, and an
almost hopeless trend toward fatalism and its inevitable consequent,
pessimism. Improvidence, financial as well as moral, and disloyalty, to
his friends as well as to his higher nature, were his life-long,
crippling, and condemning sins. Two mysteries seem almost inexplainable.
We know why others had to give him his themes, and whence and how he
became a mirror, or an echo; and we understand how the echoing became
also wondrously, even exaggeratedly, but beautifully, coloured. We can
almost see why he was foolishly and absurdly disloyal to personal
friends, often treating worst those who were the most kind to him; best,
those who were sometimes most cunningly selfish. We may explain his
ridiculous _Wanderlust_. But two attributes are beyond all
analysis:--one was a thing illogical with his character, his cleaving to
an ideal of literary workmanship at the cost of selfishness,
friendships, and temporary success; and the other was his marvellous
literary and psychologic sympathy with whatever mind, people,
circumstance, story, or tradition, accident or choice brought before the
echoing or mirroring mind. If it were faint, ghostly, and far away, he
was a true thaumaturgist in loving it into life, and living it into
love.
This beautiful sympathy and literary loyalty made it possible for Hearn
to use the words of faith and of religion, even of morality, as if they
were his own, while with them he had no personal sympathy whatever. For
instance, he could speak, as if from his heart out, of "a million astral
lamps lighted in the vast and violet dome of God's everlasting mosque."
He could praise as a sublime exhortation the command, "O ye that are
about to sleep, commend your souls to Him who never sleeps!" It is, of
course, true that in Hearn's mind, doubtless, the poorest heathen or
savage virtue was sublimely virtuous, and any barbaric vice had more of
virtue in it than of viciousness. Surely the most paltry Oriental
excellence was far lovelier to him than any Occidental heroism or
beauty, however splendid. We are thus helped to understand how his mind
could seem to flush with religious or ethical enthusiasm, while the
mosque of his real heart was only a chasm of gloomy negation or a chaos
of hideous death. This was due to the fact that he had no constructive
mind, and as only one kind of doing, writing, was possible to him,
because of his near-sightedness, he must needs hate Occidentalism, and
exalt with a somewhat ludicrous praise the vapid, and even pitiful
childishness of semi-barbaric Orientalism. The illogicality reaches its
acme when Hearn, atheistic, disloyal, and unethical, was compelled, as
in some of his Japanese pages, to put a morality and a religion behind
the acts and in the hearts of his characters, which with his and with
their atheism, was, dramatically, so out of place that the incongruity
would make us smile if it were not all done with such a sweet and
haunting grace. The culmination of the contradictory trends is in
"Karma." To put it bluntly, Hearn had no spark of practical sexual
virtue, and yet praise one shall, marvel at one must, the literary and
dramatic honour which could, as in "Karma," so sympathetically describe
the almost unscalable summits of virtue,--there where in holy silence,
Passion gazes with awe at her divine Master, Duty.
A negative condition of this sympathy was the interior voidness of his
character, the non-existence of reality within him, which thus allowed
the positive loyalty to his subject free play; yet that which gave it
leave to be, did not explain the genesis or quality of life of the
being. But have a care! Do not ask the interest in any one subject to
last for more than a fleeting moment! Early and always he possessed the
rare, the wonderful gift of the instant, the iridescent, the winged
word. At last was presented to him what he called a "soul," and that, in
conjunction with his growth in artistic technique, in his handling of
colours, and in procuring nobler data, helped to give the Japanese work
a content and an enduring substance which distinguishes it from that of
all others. This atones for all the hurt that precedes, and it is a
benefaction and a delight to the entire world. In reward Literature will
place upon his head one of her loveliest crowns.