human
His chapters are long or short as are his moods. There is little organic unity in them; no scientific aim or philosophic grasp rounds them into form. Even his paragraphs have little cohesion. Speaking of the forming of his sentences, he himself has compared it to the focussing of an image, each added word being like the turn of a delicate screw.
gpt
The secret of the charm that we feel to such a marked degree in Mr. Lafcadio Hearn's volumes is that, in contrast to other writers, he does take the Japanese very seriously indeed.
human
To the details of life and thought in Japan Mr. Hearn's soul seems everywhere and at all times responsive. He catches in his eye and on his pen minute motes scarcely noticeable by the keen natives themselves.
gpt
He has written nothing on Japan equal in length to his tales of West Indian life. But while we deplore this reserve of a writer who possesses every quality of style, except humour, we have reason to be grateful for whatever he gives us.
human
The matchless prose and the sympathy of Mr. Hearn.
gpt
Mr. Hearn has the sympathetic temperament, the minute mental vision, the subdued style peculiar to all that is good in Japanese art and literature, needed for the accomplishment of a labour which to him has been a labour of love indeed. Here we have no mawkish sentimentality, no excessive laudation, on the one hand; on the other, no Occidental harshness, no Occidental ignorance of the sweet mystery of Eastern ways of life and modes of thought. What this most charming of writers on Far Eastern subjects has seen all may see, but only those can understand who are endowed with a like faculty of perception of unobtrusive beauty, and a like power, it must be added, of patient and prolonged study of common appearances and everyday events.