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(Added especially for this PG e-book.)
It was at some period between 1875 and 1876 that Lafcadio Hearn—stilla "cub" reporter on a daily paper in Cincinnati—began his translationof Flaubert's "Temptation of St. Anthony." The definitive edition ofthe work, over which the author had laboured for thirty years, hadappeared in 1874.
Hearn was, in his early youth, singularly indifferent to the work ofthe Englishmen of the Victorian period. Though he knew the Englishmasterpieces of that epoch, their large, unacademic freedom of mannerawakened no echoes in his spirit. His instinctive taste was for theexquisite in style: for "that peculiar kneading, heightening, andrecasting" which Matthew Arnold thought necessary for perfection.Neither did the matter, more than the manner of the Victorians appealto him. The circumstances of his life had at so many points set himout of touch with his fellows that the affectionate[Pg ii] mockery ofThackeray's pictures of English society were alien to his interest.The laughing heartiness of Dickens' studies of the man in the streethardly touched him. Browning's poignant analyses of souls were toorudely robust of manner to move him. Before essaying journalism Hearnhad served for a while as an assistant in the Public Library, andthere he had found and fallen under the spell, of the great Frenchmanof the Romantic School of the '30's—that period of rich flowering ofthe Gallic genius. Gautier's tales of ancient weirdnesses fired hisimagination. The penetrating subtleties of his verse woke in the boythe felicitous emotions which the virtuoso knows in handling cameosand enamellings by hands which have long been dust. So, also, Hugo'srevivals of the passions and terrors of the mediæval world stirred theyoung librarian's eager interest. But most of all his spirit leaptto meet the tremendous drama of the "Temptation." He comprehended atonce its large significance, its great import, and in his enthusiasticrecognition of its value and meaning he set at once about giving it alanguage understood of the peopl