too pronounced to please the
matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in
the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes
impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without
finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic
phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his
picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic
episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a
country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing
the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and
visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality
and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie
in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the
enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal
mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure
of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands
would be needed to mould the figure--an unpractical and extravagant
sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than
merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul
of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it
feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion;
then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about
the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on
their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into
their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these
memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display
in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We
human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and
the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the
faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with
that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he
interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a
susceptible people.

As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by
some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was
drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to
Japanese social cond