tic tang. Sir Edwin Arnold he rated above Matthew Arnold for the
same reason.

In Japan, delicious, malodorous Japan, we leave him to the reader, who
will find in these letters to Henry Edward Krehbiel, Ball, W. D.
O'Connor, Gould, Elizabeth Bisland, Page M. Butler, Basil Hall
Chamberlain, Ellwood Hendrick, and Mitchell McDonald the most
entertaining, self-revealing literary correspondence published since
the death of Robert Louis Stevenson. He interpreted the soul of old
Japan at the critical moment when a new Western one was being assumed
like a formidable carapace. He also warned us of Japan, the new
Japan--though not in a friendly way; he would have been glad to see
Western civilisation submerged by the yellow races.

Shy, complex, sensuous, Hearn is the real Lafcadio Hearn in these
letters. Therein we discover the tenderness, the passion, the capacity
for friendship, the genuine humanity absent in his books. His life,
his art, were sadly misfitted with masks--though Nietzsche says: "All
that is profound loves the mask"; and the symbolism of the Orient
completed the disintegration of his baffling personality.

XIV

THE MELANCHOLY OF MASTERPIECES

I

Possibly it is a purely subjective impression, but I seldom face a
masterpiece in art without suffering a slight melancholy, and this
feeling is never influenced by the subject. The pastoral peace that
hovers like a golden benison about Giorgione's Concert at the Louvre,
the slow, widowed smile of the Mona Lisa, the cross-rhythms of Las
Lanzas, most magnificent of battle-pieces, in the Velasquez Sala at
the Prado, even the processional poplars of Hobbema at the National
Gallery, or the clear cool daylight which filters through the window
of the Dresden Vermeer--these and others do not always give me the
buoyant sense of self-liberation which great art should. It is not
because I have seen too often the bride Saskia and her young husband
Rembrandt, in Dresden, that in their presence a tinge of sadness
colours my thoughts. I have endeavoured to analyse this feeling. Why
melancholy? Is great art always slightly morbid? Is it because of
their isolation in the stone jails we call museums? Or that their
immortality yields inch by inch to the treacherous and resistless
pressure of the years? Or else because their hopeless perfection
induces a species of exalted envy? And isn't