Books and Habits

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Books and Habits

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Title: Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Release Date: December 13, 2004 [EBook #14338]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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AND HABITS ***

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BOOKS AND HABITS
from the lectures of LAFCADIO HEARN

Selected and Edited with an Introduction by JOHN ERSKINE
Professor of English Columbia University
1922
London: William Heinemann

[Transcriber's note: Contents moved to precede the Introduction.]
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION I THE INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTY II ON
LOVE IN ENGLISH POETRY III THE IDEAL WOMAN IN
ENGLISH POETRY IV NOTE UPON THE SHORTEST FORMS OF
ENGLISH POETRY V SOME FOREIGN POEMS ON JAPANESE
SUBJECTS VI THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE VII THE
"HAVAMAL" VIII BEYOND MAN IX THE NEW ETHICS X SOME
POEMS ABOUT INSECTS XI SOME FRENCH POEMS ABOUT
INSECTS XII NOTE ON THE INFLUENCE OF FINNISH POETRY
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE XIII THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES XIV "IONICA" XV OLD
GREEK FRAGMENTS INDEX

INTRODUCTION
These chapters, for the most part, are reprinted from Lafcadio Hearn's
"Interpretations of Literature," 1915, from his "Life and Literature,"
1916, and from his "Appreciations of Poetry," 1917. Three chapters
appear here for the first time. They are all taken from the student notes

of Hearn's lectures at the University of Tokyo, 1896-1902, sufficiently
described in the earlier volumes just mentioned. They are now
published in this regrouping in response to a demand for a further
selection of the lectures, in a less expensive volume and with emphasis
upon those papers which illustrate Hearn's extraordinary ability to
interpret the exotic in life and in books.
It should be remembered that these lectures were delivered to Japanese
students, and that Hearn's purpose was not only to impart the
information about Western literature usually to be found in our
histories and text-books, but much more to explain to the Oriental mind
those peculiarities of our civilization which might be hard to
understand on the further side of the Pacific Ocean. The lectures are
therefore unique, in that they are the first large attempt by a Western
critic to interpret us to the East. That we shall be deeply concerned in
the near future to continue this interpretation on an even larger scale, no
one of us doubts. We wish we might hope for another genius like Hearn
to carry on the work.
The merit of the chapters printed or reprinted in the present volume
seems to me their power to teach us to imagine our familiar traditions
as foreign and exotic in the eyes of other peoples. We are accustomed,
like every one else, to think of our literature as the final product of
other literatures--as a terminal in itself, rather than as a channel through
which great potentialities might flow. Like other men, we are
accustomed to think of ourselves as native, under all circumstances,
and of other people at all times as foreign. While we were staying in
their country, did we not think of the French as foreigners? In these
chapters, not originally intended for us, we have the piquant and
salutary experience of seeing what we look like on at least one occasion
when we are the foreigners; we catch at least a glimpse of what to the
Orient seems exotic in us, and it does us no harm to observe that the
peculiarly Western aspects of our culture are not self-justifying nor
always justifiable when looked at through eyes not already disposed in
their favour. Hearn was one of the most loyal advocates the West could
possibly have sent to the East, but he was an honest artist, and he never
tried to improve his case by trimming a fact. His interpretation of us,

therefore, touches our sensitiveness in regions--and in a degree--which
perhaps his Japanese students were unconscious of; we too marvel as
well as they at his skill in explaining, but we are sensitive to what he
found necessary to explain. We read less for the explanation than for
the inventory of ourselves.
Any interpretation of life which looks closely to the facts will probably
increase our sense of mystery and of strangeness in common things. If
on the other hand it is a theory of experience which chiefly interests us,