e love and courtesy of Old Japan
and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might
catch a butterfly.

Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited,
without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes,
he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the
borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for
the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this
strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that
is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very
strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it
made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting
dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories.

His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a
literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that
awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"...
The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in
the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought
nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking
exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work
is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of
his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental
hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical
narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that
flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art
was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental
wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain
healthy habit of thought and life.

It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his
capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true,
he had forfeited his birthright to produce a _Pecheur d'Islande_; but on
most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed.
He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain
he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were
apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a
certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he
found it "difficult to establish the boun