CHAPTER XI.--SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

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 inevitable consequent, 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 ridiculous _Wanderlust_. 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 winged 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, helped to 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.