must also learn how it is that we have two ways of reckoning with love—­a realistic way, which occupies itself in portraying sex, the roots of the tree, as Hearn says, and the idealistic way, which tries to fix and reproduce the beautiful illusion of either happy or unhappy passion.  And if the Japanese reader has learned enough of our world to understand all this, he must yet visualize our social system more clearly perhaps than most of us see it, if he would know why so many of our love poems are addressed to the woman we have not yet met.  When we begin to sympathize with him in his efforts to grasp the meaning of our literature, we are at last awakened ourselves to some notion of what our civilization means, and as Hearn guides us through the discipline, we realize an exotic quality in things which formerly we took for granted.

Lecturing before the days of Imagism, before the attention of many American poets had been turned to Japanese art, Hearn recognized the scarcity in our literature of those short forms of verse in which the Greeks as well as the Japanese excel.  The epigram with us is—­or was until recently—­a classical tradition, based on the brief inscriptions of the Greek anthology or on the sharp satires of Roman poetry; we had no native turn for the form as an expression of our contemporary life.  Since Hearn gave his very significant lecture we have discovered for ourselves an American kind of short poem, witty rather than poetic, and few verse-forms are now practised more widely among us.  Hearn spoke as a prophet or as a shrewd observer—­which is the same thing—­when he pointed out the possibility of development in this field of brevity.  He saw that Japan was closer to the Greek world in this practice than we were, and that our indifference to the shorter forms constituted a peculiarity which we could hardly defend.  He saw, also, in the work of Heredia, how great an influence Japanese painting might have on Western literature, even on those poets who had no other acquaintance with Japan.  In this point also his observation has proved prophetic; the new poets in America have adopted Japan, as they have adopted Greece, as a literary theme, and it is somewhat exclusively from the fine arts of either country that they draw their idea of its life.

The next chapters which are brought together here, consider the origin and the nature of English and European ethics.  Hearn was an artist to the core, and as a writer he pursued with undivided purpose that beauty which, as Keats reminded us, is truth.  In his creative moments he was a beauty-lover, not a moralist.  But when he turned critic he at once stressed the cardinal importance of ethics in the study of literature.  The art which strives to end in beauty will reveal even more clearly than more complex forms of expression the personality of the artist, and personality is a matter of character, and character both governs the choice of an ethical system and is modified by it.  Literary criticism as Hearn practised