etition more or less open with other
suitors. No wonder the rivalries and the precarious technique of
love-making are with us an obsession quite exotic to the Eastern mind. But
the Japanese reader, if he would understand us, must also learn how it is
that we have two ways of reckoning with love--a realistic way, which
occupies itself in portraying sex, the roots of the tree, as Hearn says,
and the idealistic way, which tries to fix and reproduce the beautiful
illusion of either happy or unhappy passion. And if the Japanese reader
has learned enough of our world to understand all this, he must yet
visualize our social system more clearly perhaps than most of us see it,
if he would know why so many of our love poems are addressed to the woman
we have not yet met. When we begin to sympathize with him in his efforts
to grasp the meaning of our literature, we are at last awakened ourselves
to some notion of what our civilization means, and as Hearn guides us
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