Books and Habits | Page 3

forms constituted a
peculiarity which we could hardly defend. He saw, also, in the work of
Heredia, how great an influence Japanese painting might have on
Western literature, even on those poets who had no other acquaintance
with Japan. In this point also his observation has proved prophetic; the
new poets in America have adopted Japan, as they have adopted Greece,
as a literary theme, and it is somewhat exclusively from the fine arts of
either country that they draw their idea of its life.
The next chapters which are brought together here, consider the origin
and the nature of English and European ethics. Hearn was an artist to
the core, and as a writer he pursued with undivided purpose that beauty
which, as Keats reminded us, is truth. In his creative moments he was a
beauty-lover, not a moralist. But when he turned critic he at once
stressed the cardinal importance of ethics in the study of literature. The
art which strives to end in beauty will reveal even more clearly than
more complex forms of expression the personality of the artist, and
personality is a matter of character, and character both governs the
choice of an ethical system and is modified by it. Literary criticism as
Hearn practised it is little interested in theology or in the system of
morals publicly professed; it is, however, profoundly concerned with
the ethical principles upon which the artist actually proceeds, the
directions in which his impulses assert themselves, the verdicts of right
and wrong which his temperament pronounces unconsciously, it may
be. Here is the true revelation of character, Hearn thinks, even though
our habitual and instinctive ethics may differ widely from the ethics we
quite sincerely profess. Whether we know it or not, we are in such
matters the children of some educational or philosophical system,
which, preached at our ancestors long ago, has come at last to envelop
us with the apparent naturalness of the air we breathe. It is a spiritual
liberation of the first order, to envisage such an atmosphere as what it
truly is, only a system of ethics effectively inculcated, and to compare
the principles we live by with those we thought we lived by. Hearn was
contriving illumination for the Japanese when he made his great lecture

on the "Havamal," identifying in the ancient Northern poem those
precepts which laid down later qualities of English character; for the
Oriental reader it would be easier to identify the English traits in
Thackeray or Dickens or Meredith if he could first consider them in a
dogmatic precept. But the lecture gives us, I think, an extraordinary
insight into ourselves, a power of self-criticism almost disconcerting as
we realize not only the persistence of ethical ideals in the past, but also
the possible career of new ethical systems as they may permeate the
books written to-day. To what standard will the reader of our
contemporary literature be unconsciously moulded? What account will
be given of literature a thousand years from now, when a later critic
informs himself of our ethics in order to understand more vitally the
pages in which he has been brought up?
Partly to inform his Japanese students still further as to our ethical
tendencies in literature, and partly I think to indulge his own
speculation as to the morality that will be found in the literature of the
future, Hearn gave his remarkable lectures on the ant-world, following
Fabre and other European investigators, and his lecture on "The New
Ethics." When he spoke, over twenty years ago, the socialistic ideal had
not gripped us so effectually as it has done in the last decade, but he
had no difficulty in observing the tendency. Civilization in some later
cycle may wonder at our ambition to abandon individual liberty and
responsibility and to subside into the social instincts of the ant; and
even as it wonders, that far-off civilization may detect in itself ant-like
reactions which we cultivated for it. With this description of the
ant-world it is illuminating to read the two brilliant chapters on English
and French poems about insects. Against this whole background of
ethical theory, I have ventured to set Hearn's singularly objective
account of the Bible.
In the remaining four chapters Hearn speaks of the "Kalevala," of the
mediæval romance "Amis and Amile," of William Cory's "Ionica," and
of Theocritus. These chapters deal obviously with literary influences
which have become part and parcel of English poetry, yet which remain
exotic to it, if we keep in mind the Northern stock which still gives
character, ethical and otherwise, to the English tradition. The

"Kalevala," which otherwise should seem nearest to the basic qualities
of our poetry, is almost unique, as Hearn points out, in the extent of its
preoccupation with enchantments and charms,