Books and Habits | Page 3

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 medi?val 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, with the magic of words. "Amis and Amile," which otherwise ought to seem more foreign to us, is strangely close in its glorification of friendship; for chivalry left