Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets. Lafcadio Hearn

      INTRODUCTION

      This volume is issued in response to a demand from students of literature for the best lectures of Lafcadio Hearn in a more accessible form than the library editions in which they first appeared. It seemed advisable to bring together these chapters from "Interpretations of Literature," 1915, "Appreciations of Poetry," 1916, and "Life and Literature," 1917, in order to provide under one cover—and let us hope, in spite of the cost of printing, at a lower price—a fair example of Hearn's critical felicity in the field of modern poetry, where perhaps he was at his best. The choice of lectures has been governed largely by the manuscripts available; the studies of Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, Morris, and Meredith are among the longest and clearest of the texts; the lecture on Robert Bridges is one of those kindling analyses which Hearn gave only when he was most happy, and only of the writers he loved; the brief notes on Rossetti's prose and on the "Shaving of Shagpat" were added as naturally complementing the verse-writings of their respective authors; and the account of Buchanan's ballad not only helps to round out a portrait of the modern muse, but it also illustrates Hearn's keen recognition of a great note in minor poets, and his ability to make us feel the greatness.

      Those who have not read the prefaces to the library editions of Hearn's lectures should be reminded that he gave them before Japanese students at the University of Tokyo, in the years between 1896 and 1902. He lectured without manuscript, and since he died before he had the opportunity of formulating in writing for Western readers his judgments of European literature, it is entirely to the devotion of his students that we owe the present chapters. Out of consideration for his audience, whose English was but recently acquired, Hearn lectured slowly. Some dozen of his pupils were able, therefore, to write down practically every word he said. After his death they presented the manuscripts to Mrs. Hearn, who put them in the hands of her husband's friend and literary executor, Mitchell McDonald, Pay Director U. S. N., who in turn brought them to the present publishers.

      In editing these lectures for the volumes in which they first appeared, I tried to make as few alterations as possible. Only those manuscripts have been published which were fairly clear; all passages which were so mangled as to call for a reconstruction of the text, I omitted, and if the omission seemed to affect in any essential way what remained, I rejected the whole lecture. No additions whatever were made to the text; only the punctuation was made uniform, and the numerous quotations verified. Undaunted by many misprints and many oversights of my own in the citations of the four thick volumes, I have once more verified the quotations in this present book, and dare hope that few errors now survive.

      Allowing, therefore, for such mistakes as are incident to proofreading, the reader will find here a close record of Hearn's daily instruction to his Japanese class in English literature. The record is unique. I never read these chapters without marvelling at their simplicity, at the volume, if I may say so, of Hearn's critical faculty, and at the integrity of his character. The simplicity of the lectures is deceptive. The jaded book reviewer, coming, for example, on these transparent summaries or paraphrases of verse just quoted, feels that such repetitions may have aided the Japanese boys, but are only encumbrances for the reader born to the command of the English language. Against a judgment so shallow or so blind, I am somewhat put on my guard by my own experience with Hearn's lectures; for having been a student of the English language and a devoted lover of English poetry all my life, I am glad to acknowledge that Hearn's simple paraphrases of well-known poems have taught me truths about the poems which I never learned from the poems themselves, nor from critics of poetry to whom simplicity seems a fault. 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. To know all the writers in one period is to be an authority. But to have so mature a knowledge of life and of art, so wide an outlook on experience and so philosophic a control of it, as to find consistently the meaning of any book, classic or modern, is to be among the few great critics, the few in whom criticism is a function and not an event. Hearn is, I believe, among the greatest of critics. It should be remembered also that his many lectures, all illustrating this high discrimination, were delivered in a foreign land, before a group of young men who could understand only the general drift of them, and with no likelihood, as it seemed, that they would ever come under the review of Western readers. Yet day in and day out Hearn lectured at Tokyo before his boys with the same care and with the same elevation of spirit as though he had been addressing an audience at the Sorbonne or at Oxford—or better, as though he had been the official instead of the accidental spokesman for Western letters, and as though the whole East, and not only his limited classroom, were hanging on his words. This consecration to work done in obscurity is as rare in teaching as in other human activities. Observing it on every page of Hearn's lectures, I marvel at the integrity of his character.

      One is tempted to speak in detail of all the lectures in this book—of the special merit of each, and of the relation of one to the other. It will be sufficient, however, to say a word of the chapter on Rossetti, which exhibits Hearn's method and his success. Rossetti usually seems, even to his admirers, a poet of temperament and color, diffuse temperament and exotic color; in so much sensuousness it has not been easy for the casual critic to trace the intellectual fibre. But Hearn observes that the plots of Rossetti's ballads, stripped somewhat of their Rossetti decorations, are stirring plots, contrived by an energetic mind. With this clue he undertakes to show us that Rossetti's work is all of an intellectual architecture, however emotional the surface of it may be. To read what Hearn says of the "Staff and Scrip," and then to read the ballad, is to discover a new poem, with the conviction besides that the poem is what Hearn discovered it to be. If the reader of Rossetti thinks this praise of Hearn's chapter is excessive, let him run over at his leisure all the other criticism of Rossetti he can find. He will agree at last that here is criticism of the first order—the criticism which opens our eyes to things in books, and thereby to the things in life of which books are only the mirror.

      JOHN ERSKINE.

      PRE-RAPHAELITE

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER I

      STUDIES

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