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Updated: May 29, 2025
But he has that atmosphere of pictorial romance which would make him a valuable man for the retelling of the old Japanese legends of Kwannon and other tales that are rich, unused moving picture material, tales such as have been hinted at in the gleaming English of Lafcadio Hearn. The Japanese genius is eminently pictorial.
Its rhythms are choppy, the dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of architectonic and the fatal lack of variety, surprise, or grandeur in the harmonic sense, these disbar the prose of Lafcadio Hearn from the exalted position claimed for it by his admirers.
Moreover, he may decamp any morning without giving notice Lafcadio Hearn dwells upon the impermanency of the Japanese, and we can all bear him out. But on the other hand the Jap will keep your house cleaner than any other sort of servant, and he can be both amiable and alert when he chooses.
Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in "Ramona," and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized American readers with his "Chinese Ghosts" and "Chita."
I judge that the tales of the Taoist Sennin or Adepts, if told by some Chinese-enamored Lafcadio, would be about the best collection of fairy-stories in the world; they reveal a universe so deliciously nooked and crannied with bewildering possibilities: as indeed this our universe is; only not all its byways are profitable traveling.
Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any student of Japan: "It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."
Lafcadio Hearn remarks that the so-called adoption of Western civilisation within a term of comparatively few years cannot mean the addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously absent from her, nor any sudden change in the mental or moral character of the race. Changes of that kind cannot be made in a generation. The Europeanising of Japan, Mr.
Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard for German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. He would lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions.
Lafcadio Hearn, in A Conservative, has sketched for us, with a sympathy truly clairvoyant, the impression made by the cities of the West upon the consciousness of a young Japanese samurai educated under a feudalism not unlike that of the Middle Ages, wherein was worship, reverence, poetry, loyalty however strangely compounded with the more sinister products of the feudal state.
It was a troubled Nightmare, in Spots, but when I lecture in the Church Parlor I am going to burn Joss Sticks and pull every variety of Bunk made famous by Sir Edwin Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn." On the following Tuesday, Selena appeared at the Club with her Mandarin Coat and the long Hindoo Ear-Rings. She had them frozen in their Chairs.
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