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One is conscious at Benares just now of a pervading effort to proselytise. There is this fakir on one side of the river with his troop, covering their nakedness with a little dust and ashes, and priests of all kinds and the populace painting themselves red on the other side; then there is Mrs Besant running some new sort of Hindooism or "damned charlatanism," as Lafcadio Hearn would have put it.
Sullivan, "stands for the most telling quality that a man can impart to his thoughts. Judged by this test your buildings are dreary, empty places." Artists in words, like Lafcadio Hearn and Henry James, are able to make articulate the sadness which our cities inspire, but it is a blight which lies heavy on us all.
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.
My own conviction, and that of many impartial and more experienced observers of Japanese life, is that Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose. The remainder forming the bulk of the work, are new. KUMAMOTO, KYUSHU, JAPAN. May, 1894. GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN by LAFCADIO HEARN
When M. Loti-Viaud, that most exquisite of French prose artists and sentimental sensualists, made his appearance, Lafcadio was ravished into the seventh heaven. You can't read a page of Loti aloud; hearing is never the final court of appeal for him. Nor is the ear regarded in Hearn's prose. He is not "auditive"; like Loti and the Goncourts, he writes for the eye. Fr.
It only bloomed once in five years, and only bore one rose. But what a rose! Its perfume was so exquisite that whoever smelt it forgot at once all his cares and sorrows." Lafcadio Hearn says: "Time weeds out the errors and stupidities of cheap success, and presents the Truth. It takes, like the aloe, a long time to flower, but the blossom is all the more precious when it appears."
Lafcadio Hearn was a poetic temperament, a stylist, but an incomplete artist. His biographer, Miss Bisland, speaks of him as a "stylist." Unfortunately this is not far from the truth; he was a "stylist," though not always with an individual style. The real Hearn had superimposed upon him the débris of many writers, usually Frenchmen.
And Lafcadio Hearn, that learned authority on everything Japanese, who has brought into all his writings a poetical feeling which breathes the very spirit of old Japan, has observed in regard to the same statue: "The gentleness, the dreamy passionlessness of those features the immense repose of the whole figure are full of beauty and charm.
Lafcadio Hearn has said that the average citizen of Japan detects tints and shades that are absolutely unseen by Western eyes. Livingston found tribes in Africa that had never seen pictures of any kind, and he had great difficulty in making them perceive that the figure of a man, drawn on a piece of paper a foot square, really was designed for a man.
In Lafcadio Hearn's books on Japan we find a glorification of the Japanese character that is unquestionably overdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wasteful display of fashion's fevered followers in America and the ideals of simple living that distinguished old Japan, there is a rebuke for us whose justice we cannot gainsay.
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