Lafcadio Hearn

“ The more beautiful Greek divinity smiles deliciously, but there is no tenderness, no compassion, no affection in that smile. It is not human; it is superhuman. Looking at the features of a Greek Aphrodite, an Eros, a Dionysius, you feel that they could smile with the same beautiful smile at the destruction of the world. What does the smile mean? You are charmed by it, yet it is mysterious, almost awful. It represents nothing but supreme content, supreme happiness—not happiness in the spiritual sense of rest, but happiness of perfect youth and innocence of pain. ”

“ Now all the purpose of Browning's work and life has been to show people what a very wonderful and complex and incomprehensible thing human character is—therefore to show that the most needful of all study is the study of human nature. He is especially the poet of character, the only one who has taught us, since Shakespeare's time, what real men and women are, how different each from every other, how unclassifiable according to any general rule, how differently noble at their best, how differently wicked at their worst, how altogether marvellous and infinitely interesting. ”

“ But Love will not leave him alone. He hears the tone of a musical instrument, and that music makes him suddenly very sad, for it seems like the voice of the dead for whom he mourns. It makes his tears fall into the water; and immediately, magically, the reflection of the eyes of Love in the water become like the eyes of the woman he loved. Then while he looks in wonder, the little god stirs the surface of the water with wings and feet, and the ripples become like the hair of the dead woman, and as the lover bends down, her lips rise up through the water to kiss him. ”

“ In editing these lectures of Hearn's, in this and the other volumes, I have had occasion to read every chapter many times, and I have read at least once the manuscripts which have not been printed. Simple as each lecture seems, the mass effect of them all, delivered day in and day out, on all the great themes of Western literature, is nothing short of titanic. In criticism as well as in creation, volume counts. To have a sound reasoned opinion of one book is beyond the power of the average reader. To be expert in all the writings of one author is to be a more than average critic. ”

“ It appears to you something so light that even a breath would blow it away forever, or the touch of pain break it so easily that the breaking could not even be felt. You think of wisdom crushing it as an elephant might crush a fly, without knowing that the fly was there. But when you come to put forth your strength against this error, this gossamer of illusion, you will find that you might as well try to move a mountain with your hand. You must have help: you must have friends to furnish you with the sword of Aklis. Even with that mighty sword the cutting of the hair will prove no easy job. ”

“ They are very brief pictures, like sudden glimpses caught during a flash of lightning: a glimpse into an arena where two men are about to fight to the death in presence of their king, according to the code of the day; a knight riding through a flooded country in order to take a castle by surprise; a woman driven to madness by the murder of her lover; a woman at the stake about to be burned alive, when the sound of the hoofs of the lover's horse is heard, as he gallops to her rescue; ladies in the upper chamber of a castle, weaving and singing ”

“ A little while, some thousands of years, perhaps, Christianity may be a triumphant religion, but all religions must die and pass away, one after another, and this new and detestable religion, with its ugly gods, must also pass away. For although the old Roman has studied too much philosophy to believe in all that his fathers believed, he believes in a power that is greater than man and gods and the universe itself, in the unknown power which gives life and death, and makes perpetual change, and sweeps away everything that man foolishly believes to be permanent. ”

“ First of all, he must contend with the very elements of nature, with the very same forces which brought him into being, or as the poet says "sprang him." And if he hesitates to fight with those forces, then quickly the vultures of death seize upon him. The condition of his existence is struggle. Even the first cry of the child, the cry of thirst for the mother's milk, signifies that man is born to desire and to toil and to contend. He must either meet the duty of struggle as gladly as he would meet a bride, or he must acknowledge himself unfit to live, and cursed by his own mother, Nature. ”

“ Is not Bagarag really the discoverer, the scientific man, the philosopher with a great desire to benefit other men, discovering that his kind wish arouses against him the laws of' the government, the anger of religions, and all the prejudice of public opinion? Bagarag is the reformer who is not allowed to reform anything,—threatened with death if he persists. Reformers must be men of courage, and Bagarag has courage. But courage is not enough to sustain the purpose of the philosopher, the reformer, the man with new ethical or other truth to tell mankind. Much more than courage is wanted—power. ”

“ In the last beautiful stanza we have a comparison as sublime as any ever made by any poet—of the human heart, the human life, re-echoing the murmur of the infinite Sea of Life. As the same sound of the sea is heard in every shell, so in every human heart is the same ghostly murmur of Universal Being. The sound of the sea, the sound of the forest, the sound of men in cities, not only are the same to the ear, but they tell the same story of pain. ”

“ By greatest of poets I mean the greatest master of verse. If you were to ask me whether Swinburne has as great a quality as Tennyson or as Rossetti or as Browning, either in the moral or philosophical sense, I should say no. Greatest of all in the knowledge and use of words, he is perhaps less than any of the three in the higher emotional, moral, sympathetic, and philosophical qualities that give poetry its charm for even those who know nothing about the art of words. And of all the Victorian poets, Swinburne will be the least useful to students of these literary classes. ”

“ We all of us in youth think chiefly about right and wrong in their immediate relations to ourselves and our friends. Only later in life, after we have seen a great deal of the red of human pain, do we begin to think of the consequences of an act in relation to the happiness or unhappiness of humanity.
Suddenly the morning comes as he is thinking thus. At once he ceases to be the philosopher, and becomes again the gentleman of the world. The girl's head is still upon his knees; he looks at the sleeping face, and wonders whether any painter could have painted a face more beautiful. ”

“ And the result is a civil war; for the party of Count Louis tries to avenge him. There is war also in the heart of the sovereign. How unutterably she hates her faithful old general; yet she must trust to him, for the kingdom is in danger. Pain and sorrow make Anne look already like an old woman. When the war is over she treats her general so ill that he is obliged to leave the country. By one fault, how much unhappiness and destruction comes to pass—revolution, civil war, and the ruin of many lives! ”

“ Why is there no expression in that divinely beautiful face of thine, O fair god, who art forever worshipped by the race of men, forever ruling the hearts of its youth without pity, without compassion! Thou who art the perfect image of the loveliness of youth, and the symbol of some eternal and universal law, so [Pg 413] fair, so lovely that only the great Greek sculptor Pheidias could represent thee in pure marble, thou white as that marble itself, before time had faded the fresh colour with which thy statue had been painted! ”

“ And he asks, "Why should a child be made so beautiful, only to lose that beauty at a later day, through sickness and grief and pain of a thousand kinds? Why should a child come into the world so charmingly innocent and joyful, only to lose that innocence and happiness later on through the encountering of passion and temptation? Why should a child believe so deeply in the gods and in human nature? ”

“ Here we suffer with her, so plainly does the figure of the girl appear before us, silent and white with little shadows of pain coming and going upon her young forehead, while all about her shakes the ground under the hoofs of the battle-horses, under the thunder roar of the songs and the clashing of steel on steel. These roaring horsemen are singing of other things than the past and the present; they are clamouring for the future, for more war, more slaughter, more destruction; [Pg 339] they are shouting that even their horses are hungry for war. ”

“ And a woman who to-day proves unfaithful to her marriage duty is sinning, not simply against modern society, but against the whole experience, the whole modern experience, of the human race. This would make the fault a great one, of course, but would not the fault of the man be as great? By what right, except the right of force, can he punish her, if he himself be guilty of unfaithfulness? I am not sure what answer religion would give to these questions. But Meredith answers immediately and clearly. The fault of the woman is incomparably worse than the fault of the man. ”

“ The poet is speaking of a universal, or almost universal, experience of misplaced love. A man becomes passionately attached to a woman, who treats him with, cold indifference. Finally the lover finds out his mistake; the woman that he loved proves not to be what he imagined; she is not worthy of his love. Then what was he in love with? With a shadow out of his brain, with an imagination or ideal very pure and noble, but only an imagination. Supposing that he was worshipping good qualities in a noble woman, he deceived himself; the woman had no such qualities; they existed only in his fancy. ”

“ Like this magical writing is the mystery of Nature, of the Universe; so that poet represents Nature as wearing a mask upon which such ever-changing characters appear in letters of fire. No matter how much we learn or theorise, the infinite riddle cannot be read. And one factor of this terrible riddle is Death. Death of all things most puzzles and terrifies man. He sometimes suspects that Nature herself is Death, and purely evil. ”

“ It is not through the man that the moral progress of society is directly effected; it is through the woman and the teaching of the young, it is through the tenderness and love of the home—the only place where a man can rest from his constant battle with the world. It is only in his own home that he can be as good as he may wish to be. Every good home is a little nursing place of [Pg 333] morality, a little garden in which the plants of honour and truth and courage and gentleness can be cultivated until they are strong enough to bear the frosts and the cold winds of the great outside world. ”

“ Why, by what power, for what reason, should the old gods have passed away? Even if one could not believe in them all, they were too beautiful to pass away and be broken, as their statues were broken by the early Christians in the rage of their ignorant and brutal zeal. The triumph of Christianity meant much more than the introduction of a new religion; it meant the destruction of priceless art and priceless literature, it signified the victory of barbarism over culture and refinement. ”

“ In these beautiful lines we are reminded of the special duty of angels, from which they take their name, "messenger"—the duty of communicating between earth and heaven and bringing the souls of the dead to paradise. The Damozel, waiting and watching for her lover, imagines, whenever she sees the angels coming from the direction of the human world, that her lover may be coming with them. At last she sees a band of angels flying straight toward her through the luminous ether, which shivers and flashes before their coming. ”

“ Birth itself is an agony, the greatest agony that humanity has to bear. We come into the world through pains of the most deadly kind, and leave the world later on in pain; and what all this means, we do not know. We are only certain that the Greeks were not wrong in representing love as the brother of death. The Oriental philosophers went further; they identified love with death, making them one and the same. One cannot help thinking of the Indian statue representing the creative power, holding in his hand the symbol of life, but wearing around his neck a necklace of human skulls. ”

“ It is an expression of passion—but not passion merely human; rather superhuman and evil. For she who speaks in this poem is not a woman like "Sister Helen"; she is a demon.
Not a drop of her blood was human,
But she was made like a soft sweet woman.
Perhaps the poet desired to show us here the extremest imaginative force of hate and cruelty—not in a mortal being, because that would repel us, but in an immortal being, in whom such emotion can only inspire fear. Emotionally, the poet's conception is of the Middle Ages, but the tradition is incomparably older ”