he could say of a landscape that
it was a state of soul. His very defects became his strength. With
normal eyesight we should not have had the man of ghostly reveries,
the patient, charming etcher on a miniature block of evanescent prose,
the forger of tiny chords, modulating into Chopin-like mist. His mania
for the word caused him to neglect the sentence; his devotion to the
sentence closed for him any comprehensive handling of the paragraph;
he seldom wrote a perfect page; never an entire chapter or book. At
his best he equals Loti in his evocation of the mystery that
encompasses us, a mystery that has been sounded in music, seldom in
language. His cast of mind was essentially romantic. Hearn does not
mention the name of Goncourt in his letters, and yet it is a certain
side of the brothers, the impressionistic side, that his writings
resemble. But he had not their artistry. Nor could he, like
Maupassant, summon tangible spirits from the vasty deep, as did the
Norman master in Le Horla. When Rodin was told by Arthur Symons that
William Blake saw visions, the sculptor, after looking at the
drawings, replied: "Yes, he saw them once; he should have seen them
three or four times." Hearn seldom pinned down to the paper his
dreams, though he had a gift of suggestion, of spiritual overtones, in
a key of transcendentalism, that, in certain pages, far outshines Loti
or Maupassant. Disciple of Herbert Spencer--he was forced because of
his feminine fluidity to lean on a strong, positive brain--hater of
social conventions, despiser of Christianity, a proselyte to a dozen
creeds, from the black magic of Voodooism to Japanese Shintoism, he
never quite rid himself of the spiritual deposits inherited from his
Christian ancestry. This strain, this contradiction, to be found in
his later letters, explains much of his psychology, all of his art. A
man after nearly two thousand years of Christianity may say to
himself: "Lo! I am a pagan." But all the horses from Dan to Beersheba
cannot drag him back to paganism, cannot make him resist the "pull" of
his hereditary faith. The very quality Hearn most deplored in himself
gives his work an exotic savour; he is a Christian of Greek and Roman
Catholic training, a half Greek, half Celt, whole gipsy, masquerading
as an Oriental. The mask is an agreeable one, the voice of the speaker
sweet, almost enticing, but one more mask it is, and therefore not the
real Hearn. He was Goth, not Greek; he suffere