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 it is little interested in theology or in the system of morals
publicly professed; it is, however, profoundly concerned with the ethical
principles upon which the artist actually proceeds, the directions in
which his impulses assert themselves, the verdicts of right and wrong
which his temperament pronounces unconsciously, it may be. Here is the
true revelation of character, Hearn thinks, even though our habitual and
instinctive ethics may differ widely from the ethics we quite sincerely
profess. Whether we know it or not, we are in such matters the children of
some educational or philosophical system, which, preached at our ancestors
long ago, has come at last to envelop us with the apparent naturalness of
the air we breathe. It is a spiritual liberation of the first order, to
envisage such an atmosphere as what it truly is, only a system of ethics
effectively inculcated, and to compare the principles we live by with
those we thought we lived by. Hearn was contriving illumination for the
Japanese when he made his great lecture on the "Havamal," identifying in
the ancient Northern poem those precepts which laid down later qualities
of English character; for the Oriental reader it would be easier to
identify the English traits in Thackeray or Dickens or Meredith if he
could first consider them in a dogmatic precept. But the lecture gives us,
I think, an extraordinary insight into ourselves, a power of
self-criticism almost disconcerting as we realize not only the persistence
of ethical ideals in the past, but also the possible career of new ethical
systems as they may permeate the books written to-day. To what standard
will the reader of our contemporary literature be unconsciously moulded?
What account will be given of literature a thousand years from now, when a