The Romance of the Milky Way | Page 2

architecture of language." In the realization of his ideal Hearn took
unremitting pains. He gave a minute and analytical study to the
writings of such masters of style as Flaubert and Gautier, and he chose
his miscellaneous reading with a peculiar care. He wrote again to the
same friend: "I never read a book which does not powerfully impress
the imagination; but whatever contains novel, curious, potent imagery I
always read, no matter what the subject. When the soil of fancy is
really well enriched with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of
language grow spontaneously." Finally, to the hard study of technique,
to vast but judicious reading, he added a long, creative brooding time.
To a Japanese friend, Nobushige Amenomori, he wrote in a passage
which contains by implication a deep theory not only of literary
composition, but of all art:--
"Now with regard to your own sketch or story. If you are quite
dissatisfied with it, I think this is probably due not to what you
suppose,--imperfection of expression,--but rather to the fact that some
latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself in your mind with
sufficient sharpness. You feel something and have not been able to
express the feeling--only because you do not yet quite know what it is.

We feel without understanding feeling; and our most powerful
emotions are the most undefinable. This must be so, because they are
inherited accumulations of feeling, and the multiplicity of
them--superimposed one over another--blurs them, and makes them
dim, even though enormously increasing their strength.... Unconscious
brain work is the best to develop such latent feeling or thought. By
quietly writing the thing over and over again, I find that the emotion or
idea often develops itself in the process,--unconsciously. Again, it is
often worth while to try to analyze the feeling that remains dim. The
effort of trying to understand exactly what it is that moves us
sometimes proves successful.... If you have any feeling--no matter
what--strongly latent in the mind (even only a haunting sadness or a
mysterious joy), you may be sure that it is expressible. Some feelings
are, of course, very difficult to develop. I shall show you one of these
days, when we see each other, a page that I worked at for months
before the idea came clearly.... When the best result comes, it ought to
surprise you, for our best work is out of the Unconscious."
Through this study, reading, and brooding Lafcadio Hearn's prose
ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In mere workmanship
the present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened
passages, like the final paragraph of "The Romance of the Milky Way,"
the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily
matched from any but the very greatest English prose.
In substance the volume is equally significant. In 1884 he wrote to one
of the closest of his friends that he had at last found his feet
intellectually through the reading of Herbert Spencer which had
dispelled all "isms" from his mind and left him "the vague but
omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt." And in "Ultimate
Questions," which strikes, so to say, the dominant chord of this volume,
we have an almost lyrical expression of the meaning for him of the
Spencerian philosophy and psychology. In it is his characteristic
mingling of Buddhist and Shinto thought with English and French
psychology, strains which in his work "do not simply mix well," as he
says in one of his letters, but "absolutely unite, like chemical
elements--rush together with a shock;"--and in it he strikes his deepest

note. In his steady envisagement of the horror that envelops the
stupendous universe of science, in his power to evoke and revive old
myths and superstitions, and by their glamour to cast a ghostly light of
vanished suns over the darkness of the abyss, he was the most
Lucretian of modern writers.
* * * * *
In outward appearance Hearn, the man, was in no way prepossessing.
In the sharply lined picture of him drawn by one of his Japanese
comrades in the "Atlantic" for October, 1905, he appears, "slightly
corpulent in later years, short in stature, hardly five feet high, of
somewhat stooping gait. A little brownish in complexion, and of rather
hairy skin. A thin, sharp, aquiline nose, large protruding eyes, of which
the left was blind and the right very near-sighted."
The same writer, Nobushige Amenomori, has set down a reminiscence,
not of Hearn the man, but of Hearn the genius, wherewith this
introduction to the last of his writings may fitly conclude: "I shall ever
retain the vivid remembrance of the sight I had when I stayed over
night at his house for the first time. Being used myself also to sit up