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