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Updated: May 29, 2025
Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood that wonderful ancestor-worship, says: "One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth beliefs still called barbarous, pagan, mediæval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit.
And in every human heart you find some sorrow, some frustration, some lurking pang. I often think of Lafcadio Hearn's story of his Japanese cook. Hearn was talking of the Japanese habit of not showing their emotions on their faces. His cook was a smiling, healthy, agreeable-looking young fellow whose face was always cheerful.
It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of a Lafcadio Hearn or that of the author of "The Web of Indian Life" enlivens the Oriental darkness with the torch of our own sentiments. Perhaps I betray my own ignorance of the Tea Cult by being so outspoken. Its very spirit of politeness exacts that you say what you are expected to say, and no more. But I am not to be a polite Teaist.
Some reflection will show that the origin of many church customs and symbols, and indeed of a great number of obscure customs and usages, may quite properly be traced to the religions and practices of primitive races. Lafcadio Hearn has insisted upon this in the interpretation of the art and customs of the Japanese.
For a picture of Japan as it appeared in the early years of the Meiji era, Lafcadio Hearn is of course invaluable; his book Japan, An Interpretation shows his dawning realization of the grim sides of the Japanese character, after the cherry-blossom business has lost its novelty. I shall not have much to say about cherry-blossom; it was not flowering when I was in Japan.
They were lacking both in interest and in point. There were no illustrations. The article was a failure. But Condy redeemed himself by a witty interview later in the week with an emotional actress, and by a solemn article compiled after an hour's reading in Lafcadio Hearn and the Encyclopedia on the "Industrial Renaissance in Japan."
I found this in one of Lafcadio Hearn's letters the other day I marked the passage for you Baudelaire has a touching poem about an albatross, which you would like describing the poet's soul superb in its own free azure but helpless, insulted, ugly, clumsy when striving to walk on common earth or rather, on a deck, where sailors torment it with tobacco pipes, etc.
A Lafcadio Hearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form of Japanese verse known as the hokku. Here is a hokku by Basho, one of the most skilled composers in that form. Waga tomo ni sen Neru kocho!" Wake up! "Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery At the first call of Spring the fair young bride, On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar, Climbs the Kingfisher's Tower.
Therefore, when I register my overwhelming admiration for Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt I do not bind myself to close my eyes to originality, personal charm, or character in the newer men. There is no such thing as schools of art; there are only artists. Lafcadio Hearn, shy, complex, sensuous, has in Elizabeth Bisland a sympathetic biographer.
It is the eye perfect or the eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of Cézanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major variations of his theme.
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