author's tendency to "gush," and of the occasional tawdriness of his style.[1] But these faults are on the surface, and do not touch the genuine value of the book.
2. Lafcadio Hearn's[2] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," together with the succeeding volumes entitled "Out of the East" and "Kokoro."[3] Never perhaps was scientific accuracy of detail married to such tender and exquisite brilliancy of style. In reading these profoundly original essays, we feel the truth of Richard Wagner's saying, that "Alles Verständniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe." Lafcadio Hearn understands contemporary Japan better, and makes us understand it better, than any other writer, because he loves it better. Japanese life, manners, thoughts, aspirations, the student class, the singing-girls, the politicians, the delightful country-folk of secluded hamlets who still bow down before ancestral gods, Japan's attitude in time of war, Buddhist funeral services chanted by priestly choirs in vestments gold-embroidered, not men only but ghosts and folk-lore fancies, the scenery of remote islands which Hearn alone among Europeans has ever trod,—not a single thing Japanese, in short, except perhaps the humorous side of native life, but these wonderful books shed on it the blended light of poetry and truth. Our only quarrel is with some of Lafcadio Hearn's judgments:—in righting the Japanese, he seems to us continually to wrong his own race. The objectionable character in his stories is too apt to be a European. However, Europe is well-able to take care of herself; and if this be the price demanded for so great a gift to literature and ethnologic science, we at least will pay it uncomplainingly.
- ↑ Thus the nose is spoken of as the "nasal ornament;" a volcano in a state of eruption is said to "ulcer its crater jaws;" laughing is called an "explosion of risibilities," etc., etc.
- ↑ Mr. Hearn's nationality having been sometimes questioned, we may mention that in 1896 he became a Japanese, assuming the new name of Koizumi Yakumo. Up till that time he had been a British subject, having been born in Corfu. Before settling in Japan in 1890, he had resided for many years in the United States, where his works have always been published.
- ↑ There are six or seven later volumes from the same gifted hand, displaying much of the same charm of style, but increasingly subjective in treatment.
