f the
banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He
dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the
Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than
Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous
interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison
between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque
whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the
dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when
he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty,
the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes
hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones
bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for
a shadow and lost it."

Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to
the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower
stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness
found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of
such experience--from a literary point of view--is proved by the force
of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are
remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with
its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness,
breathes the very essence of Romanticism.

Literary brother to Loti and Renan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their
sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic
longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with
longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on
the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to
return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the
slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had
quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to
long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he
regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and
towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the
sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his
acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the
appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the
memory of his Japanese home--the simpl