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I will not leave without telling you how much I am your debtor for the fascinating copious record of your life in the Windward Islands, and for your 'Youma'--both of which I take with me to 'Kelp Rock'--and which we shall know by heart ere long. The 'Two Years' came when I was 'moving' in New York, etc.,--so that books and letters, unacknowledged, perforce have piled up on my table. I am grateful for your remembrance and your gifts. _No_ book could please me more than your 'Two Years.' Those Islands are my Hesperides--I had begun a series of poems and lyrics, cast in the Caribees, but your prose poems put mine to shame--and I am glad to listen to your music and leave my own unsung.
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GETTING A SOUL
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By this poetic paraphrase he meant that I had succeeded in bringing to his recognition the existence of Freedom in what he thought determinism;--that intelligence, purpose, and beneficence lie behind biology, and that human beings are not always, and may never be wholly, the slaves of the senses, and the dupes of desire. Beauty itself, which he so widely sought, I asked him to note, is a needless, harmful, and even impossible thing in a world of adamantine logic and necessity. Above all, I demonstrated the existence of Duty,
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Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, not only in the abstract, but in concrete lives, in social and historic exemplifications, and that only by means of men and women who obey conscience is social and historic progress brought about. They who have not seen that can have no
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they who do see it, have soul, durable or great according to the clearness of the seeing and the obedience to the implication. Fully and freely Hearn acknowledged the vision, and never afterward could he be wholly the same as he had been before. But the Providence of the Oriental and semi-barbarous is Improvidence, and their God is Fate. Hearn came to hate, or to pretend to hate, the truth which had now slipped through his spiritual eyes, but he could not undo or outroot it entirely;
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Thirdly, this new viewpoint, this new spirit or soul, I got incorporated in a little art-work, or ethical study--
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Karma, published in _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890, after Hearn had gone to Japan. To the world and without the knowledge of its making,
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Karma must have seemed an illogical and even impossible thing for Hearn to have written. It is apparently the sole work which he ever wrote, created _de novo_ and without the data having been found or brought to him from without. But it was only a seeming creation. It was only the telling, the colouring, that was his, as in his other tales before or after. In our long walks and talks in the Park at night, we wrought out the title, the datum, and the whole trend of the story. He rebelled, but I held him to the task, which he finally executed with frank and artistic loyalty. The pride or indifference, even the dislike, of its readers, the writer, or inspirer, is as nothing compared with the fact that by it and from it Hearn learned something of love and duty that had never before been a living reality to him. What an infinite distance it was removed from anything dreamed during the Cincinnati period, or to be derived from Flaubert, Gautier, or Beaudelaire! After that his future work could never be, and never was, what it was from the writing,