INTRODUCTION This volume contains a third selection from the lectures which Lafcadio Hearn delivered at the University of Tokyo between 1896 and 1902. An account of these lectures and of the remarkable student notes in which they were preserved, is given in the Introductions to the first selection, "Interpretations of Literature," 1915, and to the second selection, "Appreciations of Poetry," 1916. It should be said again, for the information of those who may read this present volume without acquaintance with the others, that Lafcadio Hearn lectured very slowly, choosing simple words and constructions, in order to make the foreign language as easy as possible to his Japanese students; and some of his students managed to take down many of his lectures word for word. From their notes-the only record we have of Lafcadio Hearn the teacher-the present volume, like its predecessors, is selected. It is unnecessary to speak again of the service Lafcadio Hearn rendered to the West by his interpretations of Japan, nor of the service he rendered to the East in these lectures on Western literature. The editor would call attention once more, however, to the extraordinary quality of these lectures simply as literary criticism. Had they been addressed to an American audience, they would not have suggested, as they now do, the lonely and romantic adventure of Western culture in the Japanese classroom; but they would still have deserved our attention as one of the finest illustrations-certainly the illustration on the largest scale in English-of that kind of criticism which tries to interpret rather than to pass sentence. To be sure, a sympathetic explanation, in art as in life, may imply a verdict, but with Hearn the implication remained secondary to the sympathy and the understanding. His attitude is the usual one among creative artists; it is in grateful contrast with both the academic and the journalistic schools of criticism today, which light up their verdicts with artificial emphasis, and leave sympathy and understanding-shall we say, imagination?—in subdued shadow. The present editor, therefore, does not expect all readers to agree with him now that these volumes of Lafcadio Hearn's are among the best examples of the soundest kind of criticism; but he hopes for a day when such praise will seem not extreme. The pigeon-holing type of criticism, having its central roots in mediocrity, is likely to survive the assaults of common sense, but its prestige is waning, and it may be forced to surrender the high place it has long usurped. Certainly the appreciation of literature has not prospered under the tradition which, having fixed a label on a book, would dispose of it like a jar of jam-all of one kind on the same shelf. When this tendency is benevolent, it enables a trained scholar to call each new novel by a generic name for him it is a Henry James novel, or a Howells novel, or an Arnold Bennett novel; and similarly the habit of labelling books enables the journalistic critic at his best to recognize an O. Henry story or a Don Marquis poem. But the particular qualities of the work thus pigeonholed, neither the trained labeller nor the journalistic recognizer seems to be interested in. Moreover, the trained scholar and the journalistic critic are not always at their best; and at their worst-as in their clash over the new poetry in America today-their sentence-pronouncing habit degenerates into an orgy of scorn, in which the older readers pour disdain upon the wreckers and the experimenters, and the younger generation gesticulate contempt at the old fogies, and neither side furnishes a good reason for its prejudice. Is it rash to hope that common sense will at last persuade us to understand books-or at least to try to understand them before we judge them? And if we once un |