Lafcadio Hearn: Guest Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

In a review of Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan in 1894, an anonymous critic in the New York Daily Tribune praised the collection’s ‘wealth of wondrously artistic prose’, noting that ‘the influence of the French decadents is apparent’ in the ‘vivid word-coloring’ of Gautier and the ‘impressionism of Verlaine’.[i] Hearn’s writing, he suggested, ‘seeks to make words minister to all the senses’, so that the ‘printed page must convey color, sound, odor, and glimpses of more ethereal things’.[ii] When the review reached Hearn – then 7,000 miles away in Kōbe, Japan – he was not impressed. In a letter to his friend Ellwood Hendrick, he complained that he was ‘vexed’ by the ‘curious’ suggestion that his style bore the traces of ‘the decadents’. ‘Never read a line of Verlaine in my life’, he insisted, ‘and only know enough of the decadent school to convince me that the principle is scientifically wrong, and that to study the stuff is mere waste of time’.[iii]

[i] ‘A Dreamer in Japan: Mr Hearn’s Arcadia in the Orient’, New York Daily Tribune (28 October 1894), p. 14.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Lafcadio Hearn, Letter to Ellwood Hendrick (December 1894), in The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. by Elizabeth Bisland, 2 vols (Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), II, pp. 187–88.