Books and Habits | Page 2

we may divert our attention somewhat from the experience to the
theory, leaving the world as humdrum as it was before we explained it.
In that case we must seek the exotic in remote places and in exceptional
conditions, if we are to observe it at all. But Lafcadio Hearn cultivated
in himself and taught his students to cultivate a quick alertness to those
qualities of life to which we are usually dulled by habit. Education as
he conceived of it had for its purpose what Pater says is the end of
philosophy, to rouse the human spirit, to startle it into sharp and eager
observation. It is a sign that dulness is already spreading in us, if we
must go far afield for the stimulating, the wondrous, the miraculous.
The growing sensitiveness of a sound education would help us to
distinguish these qualities of romance in the very heart of our daily life.
To have so distinguished them is in my opinion the felicity of Hearn in
these chapters. When he was writing of Japan for European or
American readers, we caught easily enough the exotic atmosphere of
the island kingdom--easily enough, since it was the essence of a world
far removed from ours. The exotic note is quite as strong in these
chapters. We shall begin to appreciate Hearn's genius when we reflect
that here he finds for us the exotic in ourselves.
The first three chapters deal from different standpoints with the same
subject--the characteristic of Western civilization which to the East is
most puzzling, our attitude toward women. Hearn attempted in other
essays also to do full justice to this fascinating theme, but these
illustrations are typical of his method. To the Oriental it is strange to
discover a civilization in which the love of husband and wife altogether
supersedes the love of children for their parents, yet this is the
civilization he will meet in English and in most Western literatures. He

can understand the love of individual women, as we understand the
love of individual men, but he will not easily understand our worship of
women as a sex, our esteem of womankind, our chivalry, our way of
taking woman as a religion. How difficult, then, will he find such a
poem as Tennyson's "Princess," or most English novels. He will
wonder why the majority of all Western stories are love stories, and
why in English literature the love story takes place before marriage,
whereas in French and other Continental literatures it usually follows
marriage. In Japan marriages are the concern of the parents; with us
they are the concern of the lovers, who must choose their mates in
competition more or less open with other suitors. No wonder the
rivalries and the precarious technique of love-making are with us an
obsession quite exotic to the Eastern mind. But the Japanese reader, if
he would understand us, must also learn how it is that we have two
ways of reckoning with love--a realistic way, which occupies itself in
portraying sex, the roots of the tree, as Hearn says, and the idealistic
way, which tries to fix and reproduce the beautiful illusion of either
happy or unhappy passion. And if the Japanese reader has learned
enough of our world to understand all this, he must yet visualize our
social system more clearly perhaps than most of us see it, if he would
know why so many of our love poems are addressed to the woman we
have not yet met. When we begin to sympathize with him in his efforts
to grasp the meaning of our literature, we are at last awakened
ourselves to some notion of what our civilization means, and as Hearn
guides us through the discipline, we realize an exotic quality in things
which formerly we took for granted.
Lecturing before the days of Imagism, before the attention of many
American poets had been turned to Japanese art, Hearn recognized the
scarcity in our literature of those short forms of verse in which the
Greeks as well as the Japanese excel. The epigram with us is--or was
until recently--a classical tradition, based on the brief inscriptions of
the Greek anthology or on the sharp satires of Roman poetry; we had
no native turn for the form as an expression of our contemporary life.
Since Hearn gave his very significant lecture we have discovered for
ourselves an American kind of short poem, witty rather than poetic, and
few verse-forms are now practised more widely among us. Hearn spoke

as a prophet or as a shrewd observer--which is the same thing--when he
pointed out the possibility of development in this field of brevity. He
saw that Japan was closer to the Greek world in this practice than we
were, and that our indifference to the shorter