Lafcadio Hearn has been called a 'decadent'; the word does not signify, but if by it is meant, as sometimes seems to be, a humanist without physique, there is a considerable measure of truth in its application. If one symptom of decadence be the love of words for their own sake, it was, as we have seen, not lacking in his earlier work. There is, however, nothing more unjust to most human beings then the application to them of tags that have taken their color from trite literary usage and hasty popular association with a few notorious characters. This is especially true in Hearn's case. In 1885 he wrote to W. D. O'Connor: 'If my little scraggy hand tells you anything, you ought to recognize in it a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous disposition,--almost your antitype in everything except the love of the beautiful.' The _advocatus diaboli_ himself could scarcely have done better. Erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous, Hearn undoubtedly was; and these qualities, enhanced as they were by self-pity, so far from being what the psychologists call 'independent variables,' were of the very essence of his faculty. 'Unless,' he writes, 'somebody does or says something horribly mean to me I can't do certain kinds of work'; and again: 'I have found that the possessor of pure horse-health never seems to have an idea of the "half-lights." It is impossible to see the psychical undercurrents of human existence without that self-separation from the purely physical part of being that severe sickness gives like a revelation.' For all his fine Byronic swimming of straits and wide bays Hearn was never the possessor of 'pure horse-health,' and it is pretty clear that to his lack of it, to his trembling sense of the hard attrition of the world, we owe his marvelous mastery of the 'half-light.' Yet this was not so much 'morbidness' in our English sense, as _morbidezza_, the quality of mellow-tinted color and soft harmonies. Late in life he wrote, 'I like Kipling's morbidness, which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the truth of God and Hell and Nature,--but the other--no!' Of 'the other' there is little trace in his own latest work.