rn literature usually to be found in our histories and
text-books, but much more to explain to the Oriental mind those
peculiarities of our civilization which might be hard to understand on the
further side of the Pacific Ocean. The lectures are therefore unique, in
that they are the first large attempt by a Western critic to interpret us
to the East. That we shall be deeply concerned in the near future to
continue this interpretation on an even larger scale, no one of us doubts.
We wish we might hope for another genius like Hearn to carry on the work.

The merit of the chapters printed or reprinted in the present volume seems
to me their power to teach us to imagine our familiar traditions as
foreign and exotic in the eyes of other peoples. We are accustomed, like
every one else, to think of our literature as the final product of other
literatures--as a terminal in itself, rather than as a channel through
which great potentialities might flow. Like other men, we are accustomed
to think of ourselves as native, under all circumstances, and of other
people at all times as foreign. While we were staying in their country,
did we not think of the French as foreigners? In these chapters, not
originally intended for us, we have the piquant and salutary experience of
seeing what we look like on at least one occasion when we are the
foreigners; we catch at least a glimpse of what to the Orient seems exotic
in us, and it does us no harm to observe that the peculiarly Western
aspects of our culture are not self-justifying nor always justifiable when
looked at through eyes not already disposed in their favour. Hearn was one
of the most loyal advocates the West could possibly have sent to the East,
but he was an honest artist, and he never tried to improve his case by
trimming a fact. His interpretation of us, therefore, touches our
sensitiveness in regions--and in a degree--which perhaps his Japanese
students were unconscious of; we too marvel as well as they at his skill
in explaining, but we are sensitive to what he found necessary to explain.
We read less for the explanation than for the inventory of ourselves.

Any interpretation of life which looks closely to the facts will probably
increase our sense of mystery and of strangeness in common things. If on
the other hand it is a theory of experience which chiefly interests us, we
may divert our attention somewhat from the experience to the theory,
leaving the world as humdrum as