The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III . A MASTER-WORKMAN It was characteristic of the oddity of Hearn's whole life that his way to the Farthest East should have led through the Farthest West, and that his way to a land where one's first impressions are of having strayed into a child's world of faery ? so elfishly frail and fantastically small that one almost fears to move lest a rude gesture might destroy a baby's dear make-believe ?should have led through plains as gigantic as empires, and mountain gorges vast as dreams. Something of the contrast and amazement are recorded in My First Day ? the introductory paper in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: The first charm is intangible and volatile as a perfume. .. . Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small and queer and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes. ... Hokusai's own figures walking about in straw rain-coats and straw sandals ? bare-limbed peasants; and patient-faced mothers, with smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their geta.... And suddenly a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before a weirdly sculptured portal ? a sensation of dream and doubt. It seems to me that the steps, and the dragon- swarming gate, and the blue sky arching over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and the shadowof myself there stretching upon the grey masonry, must all'vanish presently ... because the forms before me ? the curved roofs, the coiling dragons, the Chinese gro- tesqueries of carving ? do not really appear to me as things new, but as things dreamed.... A moment and the delusion vanishes; the romance of reality returns, with freshened consciousness of all that which is truly ...