CHAPTER X.—HEARN'S STYLE

[18]I have gathered, but must omit, a hundred illuminating quotations from Hearn's writings, illustrating the truth of the formlessness and non-objectivity of his world, and how colour dominated his poorly seen universe.

Intellect, one must repeat, is largely, almost entirely, the product of vision,—especially the æsthetic part of intellect. And intellect, it should not be forgotten, is "desiccated emotion"; which brings us up sharply before the question of the effect upon æsthetic and general feeling, upon the soft swirl and lift and flitting rush of the emotional nature, in a psyche so sensitive and aerial as that of Hearn. In this rare ether one loses the significance of words, and the limitations of logic, but it may not be doubted that in the large, the summarized effect of thirty years of two-dimensional seeing and living, of a flat, formless, coloured world, upon the immeasurably quick, sensitive plate of Hearn's mind, was—well, it was what it was!

And who can describe that mind! Clearly and patently, it was a mind without creative ability, spring, or the desire for it. It was a mind improcreant by inheritance and by education, by necessity and by training, by poverty internal and external. To enable its master to live, it must write, and, as was pitifully evident, if it could not write in obedience to a creative instinct, it must do the next best thing. This residual second was to describe the external world, or at least so much of the externals of all worlds, physical, biological, or social, as romance or common-sense demanded to make the writing vivid, accurate, and bodied. Any good literature, especially the poetic, must be based on reality, must at least incidentally have its running obligato of reality. For the poet, again emphasized, vision is the intermediary, the broad, bright highway to facts. Prosaically, local colour requires the local seer. Barred from this divine roadway to and through the actual universe, the foiled mindof Hearn could choose but one course: to regarment, transform, and colour the world, devised and transmitted by others, and reversing the old ο λογος σαρξ εγενετο rewrite the history of the soul as σαρξ ο λογος εγενετο , for in Hearn's alembic the solidest of flesh was "melted" and escaped in clouds of spirit; it was indeed often so disembodied and freed that one is lost in wonder at the mere vision of the cloudland so eerie, so silent, so void, so invisibly far, and fading ever still farther away. But, chained to thehereHearn could not march on the bright road. He could never even see the road, or its ending. If freed to go,therebecameherewith the intolerable limitation of his vision, the peculiarity of his unvision. The world, the world of thetheremust be brought to him, and in the bringing it became thehere. In the process, distant motion or action became dead, silent, and immobile being; distance was transformed to presence, and an intimacy of presence which at one blow destroyed scene, setting, and illumination. For, except to passionate love, nearness and touch are not poetical or transfiguring, and to Hearn love never could come; at least it never did come. Except in boyhood he never, with any accuracy of expression or life, saw a human face; at the best, he saw faces only in the frozen photographs, and these interested him little.

With creative instinct or ability denied, with the poet's craving for open-eyed knowing, and with the poet's necessity of realizing the world out there, Hearn, baldly stated, was forced to become the poet of myopia. His groping mind was compelled to rest satisfied with the world of distance and reality transported by the magic carpet to the door of his imagination and fancy. There in a flash it was melted to formless spirit, recombined to soul, and given the semblance of a thin reincarnation, fashioned, refashioned, coloured, recoloured. There, lo! that incomparablewonder of art, the haunting, magical essence of reality, the quivering, elusive protean ghost of the tragedy of dead pain, the smile of a lost universe murmuringnon doletwhile it dies struck by the hand of the beloved murderer.

"THE 'lovers of the antique loveliness,'" wrote Hearn, "are proving to me the future possibilities of a long-cherished dream—the English realization of a Latin style, modelled upon foreign masters, and rendered even more forcible by that element ofstrengthwhich is the characteristic of the northern tongues." "I think that Genius must have greater attributes than mere creative power to be called to the front rank,—the thing created must be beautiful; it does not satisfy if the material be rich. I cannot content myself with ores and rough jewels, etc." "It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction analogous to that warmth of colour and richness of imagery hitherto peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek, Ifeelrather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon; and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of latter-day English or American romance." "The volume, 'Chinese Ghosts,' is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph some day,poetical prose." "A man's style, when fully developed, is part of his personality. Mine is being shaped to a particular end."

Hearn advised the use of the etymological dictionary in order to secure "that subtle sense of words to which much thatstartlesin poetry and prose is due." But although always remaining an artist in words, he, at his best, came to know that artistic technique in ideas is a more certain method of arousing and holding the readers' interest. He also strongly urges a knowledge of Science as more necessary to the formation of a strong style. In this, however, he never practised what he commended, because he had no mind for Science, nor knowledge of scientific things. He spoke with pride of writing the scientific editorials for his paper, but they were few and may quickly be ignored.

Flaubert was Hearn's literary deity; the technique of the two men was identical, and consisted of infinite pains with data, in phrase-building, sentence-making, and word-choosing. With no writer was the filing of the line ever carried to higher perfection than with both master and pupil; fortunately the younger had to make his living by his pen, and therefore he could not wreck himself upon the impossible task as did Flaubert. For nothing is more certain to ruin style and content, form as well as matter, than to make style and form the first consideration of a writer. Flaubert, the fashion-maker and supreme example of this school, came at last to recognize this truth, and wished that he might buy up and destroy all copies of "Madame Bovary;" and he summed up the unattainableness of the ideal, as well as the resultant abysmal pessimism, when he said that "form is only an error of sense, and substance a fancy of your thought." His ever-repeated "Art has no morality," "The moment a thing is true it is good," "Style is an absolute method of seeing things," "The idea exists only by virtue of its form," etc., led Flaubert and his thousand imitators into the quagmire which Zola, Wilde, Shaw, and decadent journalism generally so admirably illustrate. That Hearn escaped from the bog is due to several interesting reasons, the chief being his poverty, which compelled him to write much, and his audience, which, being Anglo-Saxon (and therefore properly and thoroughly cursed), would not buy the elegant pornography of Flaubert and the gentlemen who succeeded, or did not succeed, in the perfection of the worship and of the works of the master of them all. And then Hearn was himself at least part Anglo-Saxon, so that he shrank from perfection in the method.

There is a pathetic proof of the lesson doubly repeated in the lives of both Flaubert and Hearn. "St. Anthony" was rewritten three times, and each time the failures might becalled, great, greater, greatest. There lies before me Hearn's manuscript translation of the third revision of the work, in two large volumes, with a printed pamphlet of directions to the printer, an Introduction, etc.,—a great labour assuredly on Hearn's part. No publisher could be found to give it to the world of English readers![19]Moreover, there was never in his life any personal happiness, romance, poetry, or satisfaction which could serve as the material of Hearn's æsthetic faculty. Almost every hour of that life had been lived in physical or mental anguish, denied desire, crushed yearnings, and unguided waywardness. Born of a Greek mother, and a roving English father, his childhood was passed in an absurd French school where another might have become a dwarfed and potted Chinese tree. Flung upon the alien world of the United States in youth, without self-knowledge, experience, or self-guiding power, he drank for years all the bitter poisons of poverty, banality, and the rest, which may not shatter the moral and mental health of strong and coarse natures. By nature and necessity shy beyond belief, none may imagine the poignant sufferings he endured, and how from it all he writhed at last to manhood and self-consciousness, preserved a weird yet real beauty of soul, a morbid yet genuine artist-power, a child-like and childish, yet most involuted and mysterious heart, a supple and subtle, yet illogical and contentless intellect.

[19]Particulars concerning the manuscript translation of "St. Anthony" are given in the Bibliography of Miss Stedman, Hearn's "Argument" of the book being reprinted in full.

The most striking evidence of the pathetic and unmatched endowment and experience is that, while circumstance dictated that he should be a romancer, no facts in his own life could be used as his material. There had been no romance, no love, no happiness, no interesting personal data, upon which he could draw to give his imaginationplay, vividness, actuality, or even the semblance of reality. So sombre and tragic, moreover, had been his own living that the choice of his themes could only be of unhealthy, almost unnatural, import and colouring. He therefore chose to work over the imaginings of other writers, and perforce of morbid ones.

A glance at his library confirms the opinion. When Hearn left for Japan, he turned over to me several hundred volumes which he had collected and did not wish to take with him. His most-prized books he had had especially rebound in dainty morocco covers, and these, particularly, point to the already established taste, the yearning for the strange, the weird, and the ghost-like, the gathered and pressed exotic flowers of folklore, the banalities and morbidities of writers with unleashed imaginations, the love of antique religions and peoples, the mysteries of mystics, the descriptions of savage life and rites—all mixed with dictionaries, handbooks, systems of philosophy, etc.

Under the conditioning factor of his taste, it is true that his choice, or hisflair, was unique and inerrant. He tracked his game with fatal accuracy to its lair. His literary sense was perfect, when he set it in action, and this is his unique merit. There has never been a mind more infallibly sure to find the best in all literatures, the best of the kind he sought, and probably his translations of the stories from the French are as perfect as can be.

His second published volume, the "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," epitomizes and reillumines this first period of his literary workmanship. The material, the basis, is not his own; it is drawn from the fatal Orient, and tells of love, jealousy, hate, bitter and burning vengeance, and death, sudden and awful. Over it is the wondrous mystical glamour in which he, like his elder brother Coleridge, was so expert in sunsetting these deaddays and deathless themes. His next book, "Some Chinese Ghosts," was a reillustration of the same searching, finding, and illuminating.

Flaubert's choice of subjects, as regards his essential character, was of the most extreme illogicality; his cadenced phrase and meticulous technique were also not the product of his character or of his freedom. In the Land of Nowhere, Hearn was likewise compelled to reside, and it was necessarily a land of colour and echo, not one of form. The suffering Frenchman emptied of inhabitants or deimpersonalized his alien country, while the more healthy Anglo-Saxon peopled it with ghosts. "Have you ever experienced the historic shudder?" asked Flaubert. "I seek to give your ghost a ghostly shudder," said Hearn. Flaubert wrote:—

"The artist should be in his work, like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere.

"Art should be raised above personal affections and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to give it the perfection of the physical sciences by means of pitiless method."

And Hearn's first and most beloved "Avatar," and his most serious "St. Anthony"—works dealing with the mysteries and awesomeness of disembodied souls and ideals—"could not get themselves printed." Moreover, in all that he afterwards published there are the haunting far-away, the soft concealing smile, and the unearthly memories of pain, the detached spirits of muted and transmuted dead emotions, and denied yearnings, the formless colourings of half-invisible and evanishing dreams.

For with Hearn's lack of creative ability, married to his inexperience of happiness, he could but choose the darksome, the tragical elements of life, the παθος even of religion, as his themes. His intellect being a reflecting, or at least a recombining and colouring faculty, his datummust be sought without, and it must be brought to him; his joyless and even his tragic experience compelled him to cull from the mingled sad and bright only the pathetic or pessimistic subjects; his physical and optical imprisonment forbade that objectivation and distinctive embodiment which stamp an art work with the seal of reality, and make it stand there wholly non-excusing, or else offering itself as its own excuse for being. True art must have the warp of materiality, interwoven with the woof of life, or else the coloration and designs of the imagination cannot avail to dower it with immortality.

Working within the sad limits his Fates had set, Hearn performed wonders. None has made tragedy so soft and gentle, none has rendered suffering more beautiful, none has dissolved disappointment into such painless grief, none has blunted the hurt of mortality with such a delightful anæsthesia, and by none have death and hopelessness been more deftly figured in the guise of a desirable Nirvâna. The doing of this was almost a unique doing, the manner of the ποιησις was assuredly so, and constitutes Hearn's claim to an artist's "For ever." He would have made no claim, it is true, to this, or to any other endless existence, but we who read would be too indiscriminating, would be losers, ingrates, if we did not cherish the lovely gift he brings to us so shyly. Restricted and confined as was his garden, he grew in it exotic flowers of unearthly but imperishable beauty. One will not find elsewhere an equal craftsmanship in bringing into words and vision the intangible, the far, fine, illusive fancy, the ghosts of vanished hearts and hopes. Under his magic touch unseen spirit almost reappears with the veiling of materiality, and behind the grim and grinning death's-head a supplanting smile of kindness invites pity, if not a friendly whisper.

As to literary aim, Hearn distinctly and repeatedly confessed to me that his ideal was, in his own words, to give hisreader "a ghostly shudder," a sense of the closeness of the unseen about us, as if eyes we saw not were watching us, as if long-dead spirits and weird powers were haunting the very air about our ears, were sitting hid in our heart of hearts. It was a pleasing task to him to make us hear the moans and croonings of disincarnate griefs and old pulseless pains, begging piteously, but always softly, gently, for our love and comforting. But it should not be unrecognized that no allurement of his art can hide from view the deeper pathos of a horrid and iron fatalism which to his mind moved the worlds of nature or of life, throttled freedom, steeled the heart, iced the emotions, and dictated the essential automatism of our own being and of these sad dead millions which crowd the dimly seen dreams of Hearn's mind.

It may be added that, accepting the command of his destiny, Hearn consciously formed an ideal to which he worked, and even laboured at the technique of its realization. I have talked with him upon these and similar subjects for many long hours, or got him to talk to me. The conversations were usually at night, beneath trees, with the moonlight shimmering through and giving that dim, mystic light which is not light, so well suited to such a poet and to his favourite subjects.

As to technique, there was never an artist more patient and persistent than he to clothe his thought in its perfect garment of words. Sometimes he would be able to write with comparative ease a large number of sheets (ofyellowpaper—he could write on no other) in a day. At other times the words did not suit or fit, and he would rewrite a few pages scores of times. Once I knew him to labour over six lines an entire day, and then stop weary and unsatisfied. I had to supply a large waste-basket and have often wished I had kept for comparison and a lesson in practical æsthetics the half-bushel or more of wasted sheets thrown away nearly every day.

Just as those outfitted with good eyes must find Hearn's world too formless and too magnificently coloured, so normal civilized persons will find it altogether too sexually and sensually charged. Whenever able to do so he turns a description to the ghostly, but even thenc'est toujours femme!A mountain is like a curved hip, a slender tree takes the form of a young girl budding into womanhood, etc. Colour, too, is everywhere, even where it is not, seemingly, to our eyes, and even colour is often made sensual and sexual by some strange suggestion or allusion.

Viewing merit as the due of conscious, honourable, unselfish, and dutiful effort, Hearn's sole merit rises from his heroic pursuit of an ideal of workmanship. Like glorious bursts of illuminating sunshine through the fogs and clouds of a murky atmosphere shine such sentences as these:—

What you want, and what we all want, who possess devotion to any noble idea, who hide any artistic idol in a niche of our heart, is that independence which gives us at least the time to worship the holiness of beauty,—be it in harmonies of sound, of form, or of colour.What you say about the disinclination to work for years upon a theme for pure love's sake, without hope of reward, touches me,—because I have felt that despair so long and so often. And yet I believe that all the world's art-work—all that which is eternal—was thus wrought. And I also believe that no work made perfect for the pure love of art, can perish, save by strange and rare accident....Yet the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this sacrifice to art,—this trampling of self under foot! It is the supreme test for admittance into the ranks of the eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless sacrifice which the artist's soul is bound to make,—as in certain antique cities maidens were compelled to give their virginity to a god of stone! But without the sacrifice, can we hope for the grace of Heaven?What is the reward? The consciousness of inspiration only! I think art gives a new faith. I think—all jesting aside—that could I create something I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal purpose; and I should know the pride of the prophet that had seen God face to face.* * * * Never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocationfor any other occupation, however lucrative,—not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshippers. So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labours at aught that is not of art, he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.

What you say about the disinclination to work for years upon a theme for pure love's sake, without hope of reward, touches me,—because I have felt that despair so long and so often. And yet I believe that all the world's art-work—all that which is eternal—was thus wrought. And I also believe that no work made perfect for the pure love of art, can perish, save by strange and rare accident....

Yet the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this sacrifice to art,—this trampling of self under foot! It is the supreme test for admittance into the ranks of the eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless sacrifice which the artist's soul is bound to make,—as in certain antique cities maidens were compelled to give their virginity to a god of stone! But without the sacrifice, can we hope for the grace of Heaven?

What is the reward? The consciousness of inspiration only! I think art gives a new faith. I think—all jesting aside—that could I create something I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal purpose; and I should know the pride of the prophet that had seen God face to face.

* * * * Never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocationfor any other occupation, however lucrative,—not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshippers. So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labours at aught that is not of art, he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.

And the greatest of our satisfactions with Hearn's personality is that these were not mere words, but that he consistently, resolutely, and persistently practised his preaching. This was the only religion or ethics he had, and praise God, he had it! That alone binds us to him in any feeling of brotherhood, that only makes us grateful to him.

Style has been too frequently and too long confounded with content. There is the matter, the thing to be said, the story to be told; and quite apart from this there is the method of telling it, which, properly viewed, is style. So long as the teller of the tale has only borrowed his message or story from others, there cannot be raised much question of originality, or discussion of the datum, except in so far as pertains to thechoiceof material. And so long as the stylist fingers etymological dictionaries for "startling words," so long will his style remain of the lower kind and etymologically unstylish. When the technique becomes unconscious and perfect, there is style, or the art, merged into the content, and then,le style c'est l'homme, or, as Hearn translated it, style becomes the artist's personality. In the best Japanese works Hearn accomplished this, and with his consummate choice of material there was the consummate art-work. Subject, method, cunning handiwork, psychologic analysis, generous and loyal sympathy, colour (not form)—all were fused to a unity almost beyond disassociation, and challenging admiration. But it is not beyond our perfect enjoying.

It is true that Hearn has ignored, necessarily and wiselyignored, the objective and material side of Japanese existence. Mechanics, nationalism, economy, the materialism of his material, had obviously to be untouched in his interpretation, or in his "Interpretation." It would have been absurd for him to have attempted any presentation or valuable phasing of this important aspect. That for him was in a double senseultra vires. Such work will not want for experts. But what Hearn has done was almost wholly impossible to any other. His personal heredity, history, and physiology, highly exceptional, seem to have conspired to outfit him for this remarkable task.

There is still another reason, at first sight a contradicting one, for both Hearn's fitness and his success in giving us a literary incarnation of the spirit or soul of Japan in the subjective sense: To his readers it must have appeared an insoluble enigma why this superlatively subjective and psychical "sensitive" should have been such an unrecking,outré, and enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, or that part of it given in the "First Principles." It is told of an English wit that when asked if he was willing to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, he promptly replied, "Oh, yes, forty of them if you wish." Hearn was similarly minded—minus the fun,—and most unphilosophically he went into utter captivity, seemingly, to the unphilosophic philosopher. And yet the spirit of Spencer's "First Principles" was in reality as different from that of Hearn as was the spirit of St. Francis from that, for instance, of Cecil Rhodes. The contradiction and ludicrousness of this mismating is so easy of explanation that the incongruity is missed. The forest is not seen because of the trees. Hearn did not have true scientific instinct, animus, or ability. Neither had Herbert Spencer—so far as his "First Principles" is concerned, and as regards an improved inductive method as shown in the "Psychology," "Biology," etc., Hearn, according to a letter, found he couldnot interest himself enough to read one of these later works. The clear and well-drilled scientific intellect admits that if Spencer had not published his "First Principles," but had gathered the facts of his later works before publishing an epitomizing Last Principles, the matter would have been as differently phased as night and day. Spencer cared infinitely more for the systematization than he did for the facts systematized. Reduced to its last analysis, the "First Principles" was the reverse of a close induction from the facts of nature and life. It presented the glitter of generalization without the logic. The reverberating echoes of its illogic, sweeping sonorously over the universe with an indiscriminate ignoring of the world-wide difference between matter and life, caught the fancy of the imprisoned poet soul; he thoughtlessly yielded a homage which, from his standpoint, was unjustified, and which objectively was an unscrutinizing lip-service. Subjectively Spencerism gave Hearn warrant for an inborn atheism and materialism which had been heightened immoderately by the bitter teachings of experience into a pessimism so horrid that one shuddered when looking into the man's soul depths.Mornewas a favourite word with Hearn, and Spencer's was a fateful philosophy for one whose birth and education were desolation, and whose sight of the world was more thanmorne, was the abomination of desolation, was in truth the sheer awfulness of despair. Blindness were vastly preferable to Hearn's affliction, but if that splendid poet St. Francis had been so cursed, his face and his soul would have been ecstatic with smiles, with joy, with faith, with hope, and with love. So strange is the unaccountable allotment of Fate in her endowments, gifts, and orderings. There is and there can be no blame—only a pity wholly beyond expression.

The aloofness, far-awayness, the inapproachable distance and detachment of Hearn's spirit is one of the characteristicsfelt in reading his best pages. Everything is infinitely beyond our senses. To him everything was distant: the near was far, the far was at infinity. He thus truly became the poet of theau delà. His voice, itself an echo, comes to us as from the hush of an eerie height above the beat and wreck of the waves of our noisy shore. His personality as revealed in his writings is an echo, a memory, almost the memory of a memory, the thrill of the day-dream of a soul retreating from sense.

Each day the quiet grew more stillWithin his soul, more shrank the willBeyond the jar of sense, serene,Behind the hurt of world or ill,Where sleep hushed silences unseen.

He ever insists on a haunting glimpse of the pain and the renunciation of others, of wasted and long-dead faces and loves, always shrinking from our gaze, pallid in the darkling light of the setting moon, of vanishing loves, grievous story, forgotten myth, and ruined religion.

And yet, and yet, all that works to make Hearn immortal in literature is, at last, not artper se. One might quote freely showing that his "filing of the line," like that of Flaubert, led to nothing, if the thought and feeling to be put into the lines were not there. They were not there with his masters, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, and others, and so these men will not inherit literary immortality. They had no soul, and only the soul, the spirit, can be immortalized. Hearn's good fortune is that unconsciously, even almost against his will, he was more than they, more than an artist as such. He had something else to do. If it had not been for his poverty, the necessity to sell what he wrote, he would surely have gone the same road to Avernus as his masters. Then, too, he had no original message to write, because he had no real soul, only a borrowed one. Japan gave him her soul to rematerializeand recolour with literary life. Without his Japanese work Hearn would have died aslittérateurin the year he died as a physical body. To tell her "ghostly" stories was his great office and function. When these were told his work was done. His old gloating over the clotted villainies of mediæval horror had been much outgrown, and it had no chance to be used in Japan. The Japanese character would not tolerate such things. The ghastly was transformed into the ghostly, and his Oriental fancy was luckily turned to better duties and pleasures. This more than Flaubert was something not to be got from modern atheistic French "Art for Art's sake," nor from modern Levantine nonentity of character. How marvellous is his sympathy with his subject, loyalty to his literary duty, and to his literary ideal! His despised Irish father perhaps had slipped into the otherwise invisible and limp threads of his Fates a little mesh of spiritual reality, which, dormant, unrecognized, and even scorned by him, came finally to give him all his valour and worth. He could dower the insubstantial sigh of a long dead soul or people with the wingéd word. It was a word of colour, only,—and colour has no objective existence,—the rainbow is not out there. And because it is spiritual, not objective, the most beautiful, if the most evanescent of all earthly things, is colour. The hearers of soundless music, and the lovers of "the light that never was on sea or shore" will understand what is meant. For them Hearn really wrote: they are few, and scattered far, but Hearn will magnificently multiply the number. His amazing merit is that while without the great qualities which make the greatest writers, he wrought such miracles of winning grace and persuading beauty.

That he wrought against his will, and by the overcoming of a seemingly cruel Fate, puts him almost outside of our personal gratitude. We take the gift from a divinity he did not recognize, one that used the rebellious hand andthe almost blind eye as a writing instrument. The lover of the gruesome, the Spencerian scientist, the man himself, must have wondered at the message when he came out from under the influence of the pitiless inspiration.

One of Hearn's dangers was discursiveness, or want of conciseness and intensity. "Chita" showed it, and the West Indian work lost in value because of it. It is the danger of all those writers who lack creative ability, and who depend upon "local colour," and "style" for their effect. The story's the thing, after all! In Hearn's translations, and especially in "Stray Leaves," he for the moment caught the view of the value of the content, saw how the fact, dramatic, intense, and passionate is the all-desirable; the art of its presentation is the art of letting it flash forth upon the reader with few, apt, and flamelike words, which reveal and not conceal the life and soul of the act and of the actor. He tended to forget this. In "Karma," besides, or rather by reason of, the moral,—his newly got psyche,—he returned to a reliance upon essentials, upon the datum of the spirit, and not upon its reflections, refractions, and chromatics. The beautiful spectrum was there refocused into white light, and the senses disappeared to reveal behind them the divinity of soul. That art-lesson was never forgotten by Hearn, and his Japanese work had a purity and a reality, a white heat, which make his previous stories and sketches seem pale and weak.

Questions of style and form sometimes run inevitably into those of content and of logic. Essentially wanting the rigorous training of form, without the content and method of the scientific intellect, all Hearn's work shows a lack of system, order, and subordination of parts. In any single one of the Japanese volumes the absence of logic is lamentably evident. He constantly repeats himself, and the warp of some of his themes is worn threadbare. His most ambitious work, "Japan," is, in truth, aregathering and a restatement in more objective style, of his previous imaginative studies. Almost the only added thought concerns the difference between Shintōism and ancestor-worship and the truism that Japan is to-day ruthlessly sacrificing the life of the individual to that of the nation. The lack of scholarship and of the scientific animus (even in a field, folk-lore, more nearly his own than any other) comes to view in his mistake of supposing Spencer an authority on the subject of the origin of religion, and in the blunder that assumed ancestor-worship to be original in Japanese history and religion. Ancestor-worship, according to Griffis, Knox, and other distinguished authorities, was unknown to the ancient writers of Nippon and was imported from China. How threadbare—and yet how deftly, even charmingly concealed!—was the wearing of his favourite themes, is shown by Hearn's fateful return to the gruesome, especially in the later books, "Kott" and "Kwaidan." These stories of the dead and of morbid necrophilism are witnesses of Hearn's primitive interest in the ghastly, impossible to be renounced or sloughed, not to be replaced by desire for the supersensual, or by resolve to transform the loathsome into the ghostly. Hearn should never have been seduced into the delusion that he could become the spokesman of any scientific animus, methods or results. Erudition, logic, systematization, were to him impossible. His function was another and of a different nature, and his peculiar ability was for other tasks. If we are adequately to appreciate the exquisiteness of the earlier Japanese works, we will forget the "Japan, an Interpretation."

If we look upon Hearn as a painter, almost the sole colour of his palette was mummy brown, the powdered flesh of the ancient dead holding in solution their griefs, their hopes, their loves, their yearnings, which he found to sink always to pulselessness, and to end in eternal defeat! Butthe pallor and sadness for the brief moment of their resuscitation was divinely softened and atoningly beautified. Then they disappeared again in the waste and gloom from which love and poesy had evoked them.

Felled in the struggle and defeat of the eternal battle with death, the vegetation of untold ages long ago drifted to an amorphous stratum of indistinguishable millionfold corpses. Compression, deferred combustion and over-shrouding transmuted and preserved it for a long-after-coming time, for our warming, lighting, and delighting. This has a perfect analogy in the history and use of tradition, myth, folk-lore, custom, and religion, those symbolic and concrete epitomes of man's long ancestral growths and strivings, those true black diamonds of humanity's experiences, its successes and failures, of its ideals and disappointments. Hearn's artistry consisted in catching up these gems, these extinguished souls washed from a world of graves to the threshold of his miracle-working imagination, and in making them flush for an instant with the semblance of life. With what exquisite skill and grace he was able to concentrate upon them the soft light-rays of a fancy as subtle and beautifying as ever has been given to mortal!

CONCERNING Hearn's outfitting of character by his parents little or nothing is known. It is of comparative unimportance because only a slight judicial familiarity with his works, especially those of the pre-Japanese periods, demonstrates that so far as concerns substratum and substance of character he had neither. There was an interior void, an absence of psychic reality, which mocked his friends and which likewise baulked at true creativeness. He never made a plot or blew the breath of life into a character; his datum was always provided from without and by another. He was a reflector only,—plus a colourist—but a colourist of unrivalled excellence and power. Form he knew not, had never seen, and that is also his second conditioning weakness as an artist. Even much of his philosophy was to justify the sensualism, sensualisticism, pessimism, and godlessness which are early manifest. But it was a product taken over from another, a hastily devoured meal without mastication, digestion, or assimilation. The interior emptiness was pathetically emphasized by the fact of a contentless experience which also worked to deprive his mind of spontaneous originality. He never loved, except in one sorry way, never suffered much, never lived much, for he was a hard worker, and he was always seeking the ever-postponed, ever-unsatisfying Paradise, so vainly hunted for, and which none ever finds except in himself.Ihm fehlt die Liebe,was said of Heine,—how much truer is it of Hearn! Conspiring with a native lack of originality and want of normal experience, his enormous near-sightedness made his choice of material and method of handling it what we know. If anything was "inherited," it was a pseudo-Orientalism, a love of the monstrous and gruesome, an astonishing indifference to Occidental history and its conclusions as to sexual and social laws, a spontaneous faith in faithlessness, a belief in irreligion, and an almost hopeless trend toward fatalism and its inevitableconsequent, pessimism. Improvidence, financial as well as moral, and disloyalty, to his friends as well as to his higher nature, were his life-long, crippling, and condemning sins. Two mysteries seem almost inexplainable. We know why others had to give him his themes, and whence and how he became a mirror, or an echo; and we understand how the echoing became also wondrously, even exaggeratedly, but beautifully, coloured. We can almost see why he was foolishly and absurdly disloyal to personal friends, often treating worst those who were the most kind to him; best, those who were sometimes most cunningly selfish. We may explain his ridiculousWanderlust. But two attributes are beyond all analysis:—one was a thing illogical with his character, his cleaving to an ideal of literary workmanship at the cost of selfishness, friendships, and temporary success; and the other was his marvellous literary and psychologic sympathy with whatever mind, people, circumstance, story, or tradition, accident or choice brought before the echoing or mirroring mind. If it were faint, ghostly, and far away, he was a true thaumaturgist in loving it into life, and living it into love.

This beautiful sympathy and literary loyalty made it possible for Hearn to use the words of faith and of religion, even of morality, as if they were his own, while with them he had no personal sympathy whatever. For instance, he could speak, as if from his heart out, of "a million astral lamps lighted in the vast and violet dome of God's everlasting mosque." He could praise as a sublime exhortation the command, "O ye that are about to sleep, commend your souls to Him who never sleeps!" It is, of course, true that in Hearn's mind, doubtless, the poorest heathen or savage virtue was sublimely virtuous, and any barbaric vice had more of virtue in it than of viciousness. Surely the most paltry Oriental excellence was far lovelier to him than any Occidental heroism or beauty, however splendid.We are thus helped to understand how his mind could seem to flush with religious or ethical enthusiasm, while the mosque of his real heart was only a chasm of gloomy negation or a chaos of hideous death. This was due to the fact that he had no constructive mind, and as only one kind of doing, writing, was possible to him, because of his near-sightedness, he must needs hate Occidentalism, and exalt with a somewhat ludicrous praise the vapid, and even pitiful childishness of semi-barbaric Orientalism. The illogicality reaches its acme when Hearn, atheistic, disloyal, and unethical, was compelled, as in some of his Japanese pages, to put a morality and a religion behind the acts and in the hearts of his characters, which with his and with their atheism, was, dramatically, so out of place that the incongruity would make us smile if it were not all done with such a sweet and haunting grace. The culmination of the contradictory trends is in "Karma." To put it bluntly, Hearn had no spark of practical sexual virtue, and yet praise one shall, marvel at one must, the literary and dramatic honour which could, as in "Karma," so sympathetically describe the almost unscalable summits of virtue,—there where in holy silence, Passion gazes with awe at her divine Master, Duty.

A negative condition of this sympathy was the interior voidness of his character, the non-existence of reality within him, which thus allowed the positive loyalty to his subject free play; yet that which gave it leave to be, did not explain the genesis or quality of life of the being. But have a care! Do not ask the interest in any one subject to last for more than a fleeting moment! Early and always he possessed the rare, the wonderful gift of the instant, the iridescent, the wingéd word. At last was presented to him what he called a "soul," and that, in conjunction with his growth in artistic technique, in his handling of colours, and in procuring nobler data, helpedto give the Japanese work a content and an enduring substance which distinguishes it from that of all others. This atones for all the hurt that precedes, and it is a benefaction and a delight to the entire world. In reward Literature will place upon his head one of her loveliest crowns.

TAKEN as a whole, the criticisms upon Hearn's work are complimentary. He has his warm admirers, and some who are not so enthusiastic; but those who criticize adversely do so with a gentleness,—I may say, almost a reluctance that is perhaps the reflection of the spirit of his work. And whatever else these may offer, all agree that his writings have a unique charm.

Following are a few excerpts which should give an average of opinions:—

"One great secret of his success in interpreting the Japanese mind and temperament lay in his patience in seeking out and studying minutely the little things of a people said to be great in such. As Amenomori says of Hearn's mind, it 'called forth life and poetry out of dust.'" (327.)[20]

"As an interpreter of the Japanese heart, mind, hand and soul, Mr. Hearn has no superior. But he will not convert those who in health of body and mind love the landmarks of the best faith of the race. It is very hard to make fog and miasmatic exhalations, even when made partly luminous with rhetoric, attractive to the intellect that loves headlands and mountain-tops. The product of despair can never compete in robust minds with the product of faith." (357.)

"Sympathy and exquisiteness of touch are the characteristics of Mr. Hearn's genius. He is a chameleon, glowing with the hue of outer objects or of inward moods, or altogether iridescent. He becomes translucent and veined like a moth on a twig, or mottled as if with the protective golden browns of fallen leaves. We may not look for architectonic or even plastic powers. His is not the mind which constructs of inner necessity, which weaves plots and schemes, or thinks of its frame as it paints. He attemptsno epic of history. The delver for sociologic or theologic spoil must seek deeper waters....

[20]The numbers refer to the corresponding items in the Bibliography.

"In his later books the all-potent influence of Japanese restraint seems to have refined and subdued his wonderful style to more perfect harmonies....

"His chapters are long or short as are his moods. There is little organic unity in them; no scientific aim or philosophic grasp rounds them into form. Even his paragraphs have little cohesion. Speaking of the forming of his sentences, he himself has compared it to the focussing of an image, each added word being like the turn of a delicate screw." (306.)

"The secret of the charm that we feel to such a marked degree in Mr. Lafcadio Hearn's volumes is that, in contrast to other writers, he does take the Japanese very seriously indeed." (316.)

"To the details of life and thought in Japan Mr. Hearn's soul seems everywhere and at all times responsive. He catches in his eye and on his pen minute motes scarcely noticeable by the keen natives themselves." (367.)

"He has written nothing on Japan equal in length to his tales of West Indian life. But while we deplore this reserve of a writer who possesses every quality of style, except humour, we have reason to be grateful for whatever he gives us." (307.)

"The matchless prose and the sympathy of Mr. Hearn." (324.)

"Mr. Hearn has the sympathetic temperament, the minute mental vision, the subdued style peculiar to all that is good in Japanese art and literature, needed for the accomplishment of a labour which to him has been a labour of love indeed. Here we have no mawkish sentimentality, no excessive laudation, on the one hand; on the other, no Occidental harshness, no Occidental ignorance of the sweet mystery of Eastern ways of life and modes of thought.What this most charming of writers on Far Eastern subjects has seen all may see, but only those can understand who are endowed with a like faculty of perception of unobtrusive beauty, and a like power, it must be added, of patient and prolonged study of common appearances and everyday events." (295.)

"A man has just died, intelligent and generous, who had succeeded in reconciling in his heart, the clear, rational ideas of the West together with the obscure deep sense of Extreme—Asia: Lafcadio Hearn. In the hospitality of his recipient soul, high European civilization and high Japanese civilization found a meeting-place; harmonized; completed, one in the other....

"In English-speaking countries, especially in the United States, Lafcadio Hearn already enjoys a just reputation. The lovers of the exotic, esteem him as equal to Kipling or Stevenson. In France, theRevue de Parishas begun to make him known, by publishing some of his best articles, elegantly and faithfully translated. His budding fame is destined to increase, as Europe takes a greater interest in the arts and the thoughts of the Extreme-Orient. His prose, exact and harmonious, will be admired as one of the finest since Ruskin wrote: his very personal style, at the same time subtle and powerful, will be noted: he will be especially admired for his delicate and profound intelligence of that Japanese civilization which, to us, remains so mysterious. What characterizes the talent of Lafcadio Hearn, that which gives it its precious originality, is the rare mixture of scientific precision and idealistic enthusiasm: his work might justly be entitled Truth and Poesy: 'In reading these essays,' says one of our best existing Japanese scholars, Professor Chamberlain, 'one feels the truth of Richard Wagner's statement: "Alles verständniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe." (All understanding comes to us only through Love.) If LafcadioHearn understands Japan best, and makes it better understood than any other writer, it is because he loves it best.'

"Lafcadio Hearn describes with intelligence, with love all aspects of Japanese life: Nature and inhabitants; landscapes, animals and flowers; material life and life moral; classic Art and popular literature; philosophies, religions and superstitions. He awakens in us an exquisite feeling of old aristocratic and feudal Japan: he explains to us the prodigious revolution that modern Japan has created in thirty years....

"Hearn has consecrated to the study of Japanese art some of his most curious psychological analyses.

"Lafcadio Hearn takes a deep interest in the religious life of the Japanese. He studies with the minutest exactness the ancient customs of Shintōism, high moral precepts of Buddhism, and also the popular superstitions that hold on, for instance, to the worship of foxes, and to the idea of pre-existence." (393.)

"To a certain large class of his adopted countrymen, his hatred of Christianity, which was pronounced long before he went to Japan, and his fondness for Oriental cults of all kinds, was recommendation. But it is still an open question whether he did harm or good to the Japanese by his advocacy of their superstitions....

"Hearn's books are little known to the multitude. But they are familiar to an influential class the world over. In him Japan has lost a powerful and flattering advocate, and the English world one of its masters in style." (332.)

"Mr. Hearn was not a philosopher or a judicial student of life. He was a gifted, born impressionist, with a style resembling that of the French Pierre Loti. His stories and descriptions are delicate or gorgeous word pictures of the subtler and more elusive qualities of Oriental life." (293.)

"His art is the power of suggestion through perfect restraint.... He stands and proclaims his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To the religious instinct of India,—Buddhism in particular,—which history has engrafted on the æsthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound.... In these essays and tales, whose substance is so strangely mingled together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of Japan and the relentless science of Europe, I read vaguely of many things which hitherto were quite dark." (308.)

"He brings to the study of all aspects of Japanese life, intelligence, and love; he also sets sail in his descriptions and analyses towards a general theory on life; he is a Japanizing psychologist: he is also a philosopher....

"At all events, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of recalling powerfully to the Europeans of Europe the importance, often misunderstood, of Eastern civilization. No one better than this Japanizing enthusiast to make us feel what there is of narrowness in our habitual conception of the world, in our individualistic literature, misunderstanding too much the influence of the Past in our anthropocentric art, neglecting Nature too often, penetrated too 'singly' in our classic philosophy with Greco-Latin and Christian influences. 'Till now,' says Lafcadio Hearn very forcibly, 'having lived only in one hemisphere, we have thought but half thoughts.' We should enlarge our hearts and our minds by taking into our circle of culture, all the art and all the thought of the extreme East.

"From the philosophical view-point, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of calling attention to the high value of Shintōism, and above all of Buddhism. His work deserves to exercise an influence on the religious ideas of the West. If religioncan no longer occupy any place in the intellectual life of humanity, more and more invaded by science, she can subsist a long time yet, perhaps always, in her sentimental life." (392.)

"For that rôle [as interpreter of Japan] he was eminently unfitted both by temperament and training. Indeed he was not slow to recognize his lack of the judicial faculty, and on one occasion acknowledged that he is a 'creature of extremes.' ... But Hearn often succeeds in reaching the heart of things by his faculty of sympathy, in virtue of which alone his books deserve perusal; when he fails it is because of a lack of the unimpassioned judicial faculty, a tendency to subordinate reason to feeling, an inclination to place sympathy in the position of judge rather than guide." (359.)

"Lafcadio Hearn not only buried himself in the Japanese world, but gave his ashes to the soil so often devastated by earthquake, typhoon, tidal wave and famine, but ever fertile in blooms of fancy which lies under the River of Heaven. The air of Nippon, poor in ozone, is overpopulated by goblins. No writer has ever excelled this child of Greece and Ireland in interpreting the weird fancies of peasant and poet in the land of bamboo and cherry flowers.... Hearn's life seemed crushed under 'the horror of infinite Possibility.' Hence perhaps the weird fascination of his work and style." (348.)

EPITOMES

Avatar(281).—It was during the Cincinnati period that Hearn made this—his first translation from the French. Writing of it in 1886, he says:—

I have a project on foot—to issue a series of translations of archæological and artistic French romance—Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint-Antoine"; De Nerval's "Voyage en Orient"; Gautier's "Avatar";Loti's most extraordinary African and Polynesian novels; and Beaudelaire's "Petits Poemes en Prose."

But three years later, he writes:—

The work of Gautier cited by you—"Avatar"—was my first translation from the French. I never could find a publisher for it, however, and threw the MS. away at last in disgust. It is certainly a wonderful story; but the self-styled Anglo-Saxon has so much—prudery that even this innocent phantasy seems to shock his sense of the "proper."

La Tentation de Saint-Antoine(282) was probably translated at about the same time. Hearn failed to find a publisher who would take it, but the manuscript is still in my possession. Hearn's own completescenario, together with a description of the manuscript, is given on another page. I quote from Hearn about this work:—

The original is certainly one of the most exotically strange pieces of writing in any language, and weird beyond description.

Of his own translation, he writes:—

The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed. That serpent-scene, the crucified lions, the breaking of the chair of gold, the hideous battles about Carthage,—these pages contain pictures that ought not to remain entombed in a foreign museum.

The winter of 1877, the year Hearn arrived in New Orleans, he corresponded with the CincinnatiCommercialunder the name of "Ozias Midwinter" (219). Excerpts from this series of letters are given in the chapter, "The New Orleans Period."

One of Cleopatra's Nights(20) was the first book to be published. The translations were made during the latter part of the Cincinnati period, but the volume did not appear until some years later, while Hearn was in New Orleans. It was prepared at the hour when his craving for the exotic and weird was at its height. From the opening word to the last the six stories are one long Dionysianrevel of an Arabian Night's Dream, and within their pages it is not difficult to feel that "one is truly dead only when one is no longer loved." What an exotic group of names it is:—Cleopatra, "she that made the whole world's bale and bliss;" Clarimonde,

"Who was famed in her lifetimeAs the fairest of women;"

Arria Marcella; the Princess Hermonthis; Omphale; and the one "fairer than all daughters of men, lovelier than all fantasies realized in stone"—Nyssia. It is a tapestry woven of the lights and jewels and passion of an antique world. "You will find in Gautier," Hearn writes, "a perfection of melody, a warmth of word colouring, a voluptuous delicacy;" "Gautier could create mosaics of word jewellery without equals." Hearn's "pet stories" are "Clarimonde" and "Arria Marcella." Is it strange that he should delight in these beautiful vampires?

In this work, and in the tales to follow, we already perceive that colour is to become a sort of a fetich to be worshipped. Here in the studio of another artist, he serves his first apprenticeship, and from the highly toned palette of Gautier he learns how to mix and lay on the colours that he himself is later to use so richly.

In speaking of this book, a critic says:—

"His learning and his inspiration were wholly French in these productions, as also in what was his first and in some ways his best book, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and other tales translated from Théophile Gautier. While Hearn was faithful to his original, he also improved upon it, and many a scholar who knows both French and English has confessed under the rose that Gautier is outdone." (332.)

Of his work, Hearn writes:—

You asked me about Gautier. I have read and possess nearly all his works; and before I was really mature enough for such an undertaking I translated his six most remarkable short stories. The workcontains, I regret to say, several shocking errors, and the publishers refused me the right to correct the plates. The book remains one of the sins of my literary youth, but I am sure my judgment of the value of the stories was correct.

While preparing his next book, Hearn published in theCentury, "The Scenes of Cable's Romances" (220). In this article he vivifies the quarters and dwellings that Mr. Cable in his delightful stories had already made famous.

The First Muezzin, Bilâl(405), was written in the fall of 1883, during the New Orleans period. It is a beautiful, serious piece of work, and is written with the fine, sonorous quality that such a theme should inspire. That it was a labour of love is shown in Hearn's letters written at its inception to Mr. Krehbiel, who was an invaluable aid to him in compiling its musical part. "Bilâl" was probably published finally in theTimes-Democrat, after being refused byHarper's, theCentury, and some others.

The traveller slumbering for the first time within the walls of an Oriental city, and in the vicinity of a minaret, can scarcely fail to be impressed by the solemn beauty of the Mohammedan Call to Prayer. If he have worthily prepared himself, by the study of book and of languages, for the experiences of Eastern travel, he will probably have learned by heart the words of the sacred summons, and will recognize their syllables in the sonorous chant of the Muezzin,—while the rose-coloured light of an Egyptian or Syrian dawn expands its flush to the stars. Four times more will he hear that voice ere morning again illuminates the east:—under the white blaze of noon; at the sunset hour, when the west is fervid with incandescent gold and vermilion; in the long after-glow of orange and emerald fires; and, still later, when a million astral lamps have been lighted in the vast and violet dome of God's everlasting mosque.

In four parts Hearn tells the history of Bilâl, who

was an African black, an Abyssinian,—famed for his fortitude as a confessor, for his zeal in the faith of the Prophet, and for the marvellous melody of his voice, whose echoes have been caught up and prolonged and multiplied by all the muezzins of Islam, through the passing ofmore than twelve hundred years.... And the words chanted by all the muezzins of the Moslem world,—whether from the barbaric brick structures which rise above "The Tunis of the Desert," or from the fairy minarets of the exquisite mosque at Agra,—are the words first sung by the mighty voice of Bilâl.

Bilâl was the son of an Abyssinian slave-girl, and himself began life as a slave. The first preaching of Mahomet had deep effect upon the slaves of Mecca, and Bilâl was perhaps the earliest of these to become a convert. Even under the tortures of the persecutors, he could not be made to apostatize—always he would answer, "Ahad! Ahad:" "One, one only God!" Abu Bekr, the bosom friend of the great Prophet, observing Bilâl, bought him, and set him free. Then Bilâl became the devoted servant of Mahomet; and, in fulfilment of a dream, he was made the First Muezzin to sound theAdzân, the Call to Prayer.

God is Great!God is Great!I bear witness there is no other God but God!I bear witness that Mahomet is the Prophet of God!Come unto Prayer!Come unto Salvation!God is Great!There is no other God but God!After the death of Mahomet, Bilâl ceased to sing theAdzân:—the voice that had summoned the Prophet of God to the house of prayer ought not, he piously fancied, to be heard after the departure of his master. Yet, in his Syrian home, how often must he have prayed to chant the words as he first chanted them from the starlit housetop in the Holy City, and how often compelled to deny the petitions of those who revered him as a saint and would perhaps have sacrificed all their goods to have heard him but once lift up his voice in musical prayer!... But when Omar visited Damascus the chiefs of the people besought him that, as Commander of the Faithful, he should ask Bilâl to sing the Call in honour of the event; and the old man consented to do so for the last time....To hear Bilâl must have seemed to many as sacred a privilege as to have heard the voice of the Prophet himself,—the proudest episode of a lifetime,—the one incident of all others to be related in long afteryears to children and to grandchildren. Some there may have been whom the occasion inspired with feelings no loftier than curiosity; but the large majority of those who thronged to listen in silent expectancy for theAllah-hu-akbar!must have experienced emotions too deep to be ever forgotten. The records of the event, at least, fully justify this belief;—for when, after moments of tremulous waiting, the grand voice of the aged African rolled out amid the hush,—with the old beloved words,—the old familiar tones, still deep and clean,—Omar and all those about him wept aloud, and tears streamed down every warrior-face, and the last long notes of the chant were lost in a tempest of sobbing.

After the death of Mahomet, Bilâl ceased to sing theAdzân:—the voice that had summoned the Prophet of God to the house of prayer ought not, he piously fancied, to be heard after the departure of his master. Yet, in his Syrian home, how often must he have prayed to chant the words as he first chanted them from the starlit housetop in the Holy City, and how often compelled to deny the petitions of those who revered him as a saint and would perhaps have sacrificed all their goods to have heard him but once lift up his voice in musical prayer!... But when Omar visited Damascus the chiefs of the people besought him that, as Commander of the Faithful, he should ask Bilâl to sing the Call in honour of the event; and the old man consented to do so for the last time....

To hear Bilâl must have seemed to many as sacred a privilege as to have heard the voice of the Prophet himself,—the proudest episode of a lifetime,—the one incident of all others to be related in long afteryears to children and to grandchildren. Some there may have been whom the occasion inspired with feelings no loftier than curiosity; but the large majority of those who thronged to listen in silent expectancy for theAllah-hu-akbar!must have experienced emotions too deep to be ever forgotten. The records of the event, at least, fully justify this belief;—for when, after moments of tremulous waiting, the grand voice of the aged African rolled out amid the hush,—with the old beloved words,—the old familiar tones, still deep and clean,—Omar and all those about him wept aloud, and tears streamed down every warrior-face, and the last long notes of the chant were lost in a tempest of sobbing.

Stray Leaves From Strange Literature[21](I) is the second book. It was written also during the period in New Orleans, many of the stories first appearing in theTimes-Democrat, and the little volume is dedicated to its editor—Mr. Page M. Baker.

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