literary life as a worshipper and translator of Theophile
Gautier and died in the faith that Pierre Loti had said the last word
of modern prose. Gautier attracted him by his sumptuousness of
epithet, the perfectly realised material splendours of gold, of
marble, of colour. To the neurasthenic Hearn, his brain big with
glorious dreams, the Parisian pagan must have seemed godlike in his
half-smiling, half-contemptuous mastery of language, a mastery in its
ease not outrivalled even by Flaubert. Gautier was a gigantic
reflector of the visible world, but without genuine sympathy for
humanity, and he boasted that his periods, like cats, always fell on
their feet, no matter how high or carelessly he tossed them. And then
he was Greek in his temperament, Greek grafted upon a Parisian who
loved form and hue above all else, and this appealed to Hearn, whose
mother was Greek, whose tastes were exotic. It was only after he had
passed the half-century mark and when he was the father of three sons
that some apprehension of the gravity of Occidental ethical teaching
was realised by him.

When M. Loti-Viaud, that most exquisite of French prose artists and
sentimental sensualists, made his appearance, Lafcadio was ravished
into the seventh heaven. Here was what he had sought to do, what he
never would do--the perfection of impressionism, created by an
accumulation of delicate details, unerringly presented, with the
intention of attacking the visual (literary) sense, not the ear. You
can't read a page of Loti aloud; hearing is never the final court of
appeal for him. Nor is the ear regarded in Hearn's prose. He is not
"auditive"; like Loti and the Goncourts, he writes for the eye.
Fr. Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the predominance des
sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the
dash--he must have studied Poe not too wisely--infinitesimal strokes
of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose
has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the
dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of
the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of
architectonic and the fatal lack of variety, surprise, or grandeur in
the harmonic sense, these disbar the prose of Lafcadio Hearn from the
exalted position claimed for it by his admirers.

Yet it is a delicate prose; the haunted twilight of the soul has found
its notations in his work. With Amiel