Any interpretation of life which looks closely to the facts will probably increase our sense of mystery and of strangeness in common things.  If on the other hand it is a theory of experience which chiefly interests us, we may divert our attention somewhat from the experience to the theory, leaving the world as humdrum as it was before we explained it.  In that case we must seek the exotic in remote places and in exceptional conditions, if we are to observe it at all.  But Lafcadio Hearn cultivated in himself and taught his students to cultivate a quick alertness to those qualities of life to which we are usually dulled by habit.  Education as he conceived of it had for its purpose what Pater says is the end of philosophy, to rouse the human spirit, to startle it into sharp and eager observation.  It is a sign that dulness is already spreading in us, if we must go far afield for the stimulating, the wondrous, the miraculous.  The growing sensitiveness of a sound education would help us to distinguish these qualities of romance in the very heart of our daily life.  To have so distinguished them is in my opinion the felicity of Hearn in these chapters.  When he was writing of Japan for European or American readers, we caught easily enough the exotic atmosphere of the island kingdom—­easily enough, since it was the essence of a world far removed from ours.  The exotic note is quite as strong in these chapters.  We shall begin to appreciate Hearn’s genius when we reflect that here he finds for us the exotic in ourselves.

The first three chapters deal from different standpoints with the same subject—­the characteristic of Western civilization which to the East is most puzzling, our attitude toward women.  Hearn attempted in other essays also to do full justice to this fascinating theme, but these illustrations are typical of his method.  To the Oriental it is strange to discover a civilization in which the love of husband and wife altogether supersedes the love of children for their parents, yet this is the civilization he will meet in English and in most Western literatures.  He can understand the love of individual women, as we understand the love of individual men, but he will not easily understand our worship of women as a sex, our esteem of womankind, our chivalry, our way of taking woman as a religion.  How difficult, then, will he find such a poem as Tennyson’s “Princess,” or most English novels.  He will wonder why the majority of all Western stories are love stories, and why in English literature the love story takes place before marriage, whereas in French and other Continental literatures it usually follows marriage.  In Japan marriages are the concern of the parents; with us they are the concern of the lovers, who must choose their mates in competition more or less open with other suitors.  No wonder the rivalries and the precarious technique of love-making are with us an obsession quite exotic to the Eastern mind.  But the Japanese reader, if he would understand us,