What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere."
How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and interest--the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold undisputed sway in the Far East.
XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 111
LAFCADIO HEARN AND HIS WIFE. _Frontispiece_
MAJOR CHARLES BUSH HEARN (HEARN'S FATHER). 16
KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN). 228
KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN). 314
"Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more, indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates--imaging sky, and land, and life--filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings--and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it--sun, moon, and stars--earth, sky, and sea--and mind and man, and space and time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker shapes for ever."