... A bright long narrow street rising toward a far mass of glowing green—burning green of lianas: the front of a tropic wood. Not a street of this age, but of the seventeenth century: a street of yellow façades, with yellow garden-walls between the façades. In sharp bursts of blue light the sea appears at intervals,—blue light blazing up old, old nights of mossy steps descending to the bay. And through these openings ships are visible, far below, riding in azure.Walls are lemon-colour;—quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm-trees rise from courts and gardens into a warm blue sky—indescribably blue—that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things, within or without the yellow vista, are steeped in a sunshine electrically white,—in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavements of basalt the glitter of silver ore.Men wearing only white canvas trousers, and immense hats of bamboo-grass,—men naked to the waist, and muscled like sculptures,—pass noiselesslywith barefoot stride. Some are very black; others are of strange and beautiful colours: there are skins of gold, of brown bronze, and of ruddy bronze. And women pass in robes of brilliant hue,—women of the colour of fruit: orange-colour, banana-colour,—women wearing turbans banded with just such burning yellow as bars the belly of a wasp. The warm thick air is sweet with scents of sugar and of cinnamon,—with odours of mangoes and of custard-apples, of guava-jelly and of fresh cocoanut milk.—Into the amber shadow and cool moist breath of a great archway I plunge, to reach a court filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. There a little boy and a little girl run to meet me, with Creole cries of “Mi y!” Each takes one of my hands;—each holds up a beautiful brown cheek to kiss. In the same moment a voice, the father’s voice—deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell—calls from an inner doorway, “Entrez donc, mon ami!” And with the large caress of that voice there comes to me such joy of sympathy, such sense of perfect peace, as Souls long-tried by fire might feel when passing the Gateway of Pearl....But all this was and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city;—never again will its ways be trodden;—never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams.
... A bright long narrow street rising toward a far mass of glowing green—burning green of lianas: the front of a tropic wood. Not a street of this age, but of the seventeenth century: a street of yellow façades, with yellow garden-walls between the façades. In sharp bursts of blue light the sea appears at intervals,—blue light blazing up old, old nights of mossy steps descending to the bay. And through these openings ships are visible, far below, riding in azure.
Walls are lemon-colour;—quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm-trees rise from courts and gardens into a warm blue sky—indescribably blue—that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things, within or without the yellow vista, are steeped in a sunshine electrically white,—in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavements of basalt the glitter of silver ore.
Men wearing only white canvas trousers, and immense hats of bamboo-grass,—men naked to the waist, and muscled like sculptures,—pass noiselesslywith barefoot stride. Some are very black; others are of strange and beautiful colours: there are skins of gold, of brown bronze, and of ruddy bronze. And women pass in robes of brilliant hue,—women of the colour of fruit: orange-colour, banana-colour,—women wearing turbans banded with just such burning yellow as bars the belly of a wasp. The warm thick air is sweet with scents of sugar and of cinnamon,—with odours of mangoes and of custard-apples, of guava-jelly and of fresh cocoanut milk.
—Into the amber shadow and cool moist breath of a great archway I plunge, to reach a court filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. There a little boy and a little girl run to meet me, with Creole cries of “Mi y!” Each takes one of my hands;—each holds up a beautiful brown cheek to kiss. In the same moment a voice, the father’s voice—deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell—calls from an inner doorway, “Entrez donc, mon ami!” And with the large caress of that voice there comes to me such joy of sympathy, such sense of perfect peace, as Souls long-tried by fire might feel when passing the Gateway of Pearl....
But all this was and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city;—never again will its ways be trodden;—never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams.
He was again in New York in 1889, occupied with the final proofs of “Chita” before its appearance inbook form, preparing the West Indian book for the press, but in sore distress for money, and making a translation of Anatole France’s “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard” in a few weeks by Herculean labour, in order to exist until he could earn something by his original work. The half-yearly payment of royalties imposed by publishers bears hardly on the author who must pay daily for the means to live. For a time he visited Dr. Gould in Philadelphia, but after his return to New York an arrangement was entered into with Harper and Brothers to go to Japan for the purpose of writing articles from there, after the manner of the West Indian articles, later to be made into a book. An artist was to accompany him to prepare the illustrations, and their route was by way of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
His last evening in New York was spent in the company of his dear friend Mr. Ellwood Hendrick, to whom many of the most valuable letters contained in the second volume were written, and on May 8, 1890, he left for the East—never again to return.
It was characteristic of the oddity of Hearn’s whole life that his way to the Farthest East should have led through the Farthest West, and that his way to a land where one’s first impressions are of having strayed into a child’s world of faëry,—so elfishly frail and fantastically small that one almost fears to move lest a rude gesture might destroy a baby’s dear “make believe,”—should have led through plains as gigantic as empires, and mountain gorges vast as dreams.
Something of the contrast and amazement are recorded in “My First Day”—the introductory paper in “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan”:—
“The first charm is intangible and volatile as a perfume.... Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small and queer and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes.... Hokusai’s own figures walking about in straw rain-coats and straw sandals—bare-limbed peasants; and patient-faced mothers, with smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon theirgeta.... And suddenly a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand beforea weirdly sculptured portal,—a sensation of dream and doubt. It seems to me that the steps, and the dragon-swarming gate, and the blue sky arching over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and the shadow of myself there stretching upon the grey masonry, must all vanish presently ... because the forms before me—the curved roofs, the coiling dragons, the Chinese grotesqueries of carving—do not really appear to me as things new, but as things dreamed.... A moment and the delusion vanishes; the romance of reality returns, with freshened consciousness of all that which is truly and deliciously new; the magical transparencies of distance, the wondrous delicacy of tones, the enormous height of the summer blue, and the white soft witchery of the Japanese sun.”
That first witchery of Japan never altogether failed to hold him during the fourteen years in which he wrought out the great work of his life, though he exclaims in one of his letters of a later time, “The oscillation of one’s thoughts concerning Japan! It is the hardest country to learn—except China—in the world.” He grew aware too in time that even he, with his so amazing capacity for entering into the spirit of other races, must forever remain alien to the Oriental. After some years he writes:—
“The different ways of thinking and the difficulties of the language render it impossible for an educated Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. Here is an astounding fact. The Japanese child is as close to you as a European child—perhaps closer and sweeter because infinitely more natural and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the farther you push him from you. Why?—Because here the race antipodalism shows itself. As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more he will think in the opposite direction from you.”
Though he arrived at a happy moment, his artisticWanderjahredone, and the tools of his art, after long and bitter apprenticeship, at last obedient to his will and thought in the hand of a master-workman; the material with which he was to labour new and beautiful; yet he never ceased to believe that his true medium was denied to him. In one of his letters he cries:—
“Pretty to talk of my ‘pen of fire.’ I’ve lost it. Well, the fact is, it is of no use here. There isn’t any fire here. It is all soft, dreamy, quiet, pale, faint, gentle, hazy, vapoury, visionary,—a land where lotus is a common article of diet,—and where there is scarcely any real summer. Even the seasons are feeble ghostly things. Don’t please imagine there are any tropics here. Ah! the tropics—they still pull at my heart-strings. Goodness! my real field was there—in the Latin countries, in the West Indies and Spanish America; and my dream was to haunt the old crumbling Portuguese and Spanish cities, and steam up the Amazon and the Orinoco, and get romances nobody else could find. And I could have done it, and made books that would sell for twenty years.”
Perhaps he never himself quite realized how much greater in importance was the work chance had set him to do. In place of gathering up in the outlying parts of the new world the dim tattered fragments of old-world romance—as a collector might seek in Spanish-American cities faded bits of what were once the gold-threaded, glowing tapestries brought to adorn the exile of Conquistadores—he had the good fortune to be chosen to assist at one of the great births of history. Out of “a race as primitive as the Etruscan before Rome was”—as he declared he found them—he was to see a mighty modern nation spring full-armed, with all the sudden miraculous transformation of some great mailed beetle bursting from the grey hidden shell of a feeble-looking pupa. He saw the fourteenth century turn swiftly, amazingly, into the twentieth, and his twelve volumes of studies of the Japanese people were to have that unique and lasting value that would attach to equally painstaking records of Greek life before the Persian wars. Inestimable, immortal, would be such books—could they anywhere be found—setting down the faiths, the traditions, the daily lives, the songs, the dances, the names, the legends, the humble lore of plants, birds, and insects, of that people who suddenly stood up at Thermopylæ, broke the wave from the East, made Europe possible, and set the cornerstone of Occidental thought. This was what Lafcadio Hearn, a little penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer had come to do for Japan. To make immortal the story of the childhood of a people as simple as the early Greek, who were to break at Mukden thegreat wave of conquest from the West and to rejuvenate the most ancient East.
So naturally humble was his estimate of himself that it is safe to assert that not at this time, perhaps at no time, was he aware of the magnitude and importance of the work he had been set to do. For the moment he was concerned only with the odylic charm of the new faëry world in which he found himself, but even in faëry-land one may find in time rigidities underlying the charm. No Occidental at that period had as yet divined the iron core underlying the silken courtesy of the Japanese character. Within the first lustrum of his residence there Hearn had grasped the truth, and expressed it in a metaphor. In the volume entitled “Out of the East” he says:—
“Under all the amazing self-control and patience there exists an adamantine something very dangerous to reach.... In the house of any rich family the guest is likely to be shown some of the heirlooms.... A pretty little box, perhaps, will be set before you. Opening it you will see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with a silk running-cord decked with tiny tassels. Very soft and choice the silk is, and elaborately figured. What marvel can be hidden under such a covering? You open the bag and see within another bag, of a different quality of silk, but very fine. Open that, and lo! a third, which contains a fourth, which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth, which contains a seventh bag, which contains the strangest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay that you ever beheld. Yet it is not only curious but precious; it may be more than a thousand years old.”
In time he came to know better than any other Occidental has ever known all those smooth layers of the Japanese nature, and to understand and admire that rough hard clay within—old and wonderful and precious. Again he says:—
“For no little time these fairy folk can give you all the softness of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream—never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, into a world that is not, and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century, over spaces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into a vanished age, back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal; the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence.”
For in time he realized that feudal Japan, with its gentleness and altruism, had attained to its noble ideal of duty by tremendous coercion of the will of the individual by the will of the rest, with a resultant absence of personal freedom that was to the individualism of the Westerner as strangling as the stern socialism of bees and ants.
These, however, were the subtler difficulties arising to confront him as the expatriation stretched into years. The immediate concern was to find means to live. His original purpose of remaining only long enough to prepare a series of illustrated articles forHarper’s Magazine—to be later collected in book form—was almost immediately subverted by a dispute with the publishers. The discovery, during the voyage, that the artist who accompanied him was to receive more than double the pay allowed for the text, angered him beyond measure, and this, added to other matters in which he considered himself unjustly treated, caused him to sever abruptly all his contracts.
It was an example of his incapacity to look at business arrangements from the ordinary point of view that he declined even to receive his royalties from the books already in print, and the publishers could discharge their obligations to him only by turning over the money to a friend, who after some years and by roundabout methods succeeded in inducing him to accept it. That his indignation at what he considered an injustice left him without resources or prospects in remote exile caused him not a moment’s hesitation in following this course. Fortunately a letter of introduction carried him within the orbit of Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, a young officer of the American navy stationed in Yokohama. Between these two very dissimilar natures there at once sprang up a warm friendship, from which Hearn derived benefits so delicately and wisely tenderedthat even his fierce pride and sensitiveness could accept them; and this friendship, which lasted until the close of his life, proved to be a beautiful and helpful legacy for his children. The letters to Paymaster McDonald included in Volume II have a special character of gaiety and good fellowship—with him he forgot in great measure the prepossessions of his life, and became merely the man-of-the-world, delighting in the memories of good dinners, good wine and cigars, enjoyed together; long evenings of gay talk and reminiscences of a naval officer’s polyglot experiences; long days of sea and sunshine; but agreeable as were these cheerful experiences—so foreign to his ordinary course of existence—he was continually driving from him, in comic terror, the man who drew him now and again to forget the seriousness of his task.
Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, already famous for his studies of Japanese life and literature, also became interested in the wanderer,—and through his potent influence Hearn received an appointment to the Jinjō-chūgakkō or Ordinary Middle School at Matsue, in the province Izumo, in Shimane Ken, to which he went in August of 1890.
LAFCADIO HEARN AND MITCHELL McDONALD
LAFCADIO HEARN AND MITCHELL McDONALD
Matsue lies on the northern coast, near that western end of Japan which trails like a streaming feather of land through the Eastern Pacific along the coast of China. It is a town of about thirty-five thousand inhabitants, situated at the junction of Lake Shinji and the Bay of Naka-umi, and was at that time far out of the line of travel or Western influence, the manners of the people remaining almost unchanged, affording a peculiarly favourable opportunity for the study of feudal Japan. The ruins of the castle of the Daimyō, Matsudaira,—descendant of the great Shōgun Ieyasu,—who was overthrown in the wars of the Meiji, still frowned from the wooded hill above the city, and still his love of art, his conservatism of the old customs, his rigid laws of politeness were stamped deeply into the culture of the subjects over whom he had reigned, though ugly modern buildings housed the schools of that Western learning he had so contemned, and which the newcomer had been hired to teach. But this was a teacher of different calibre from those who had preceded him. Here was one not a holder of the “little yellow monkey” prepossession. Here was a rare mind capable at the age of forty of receiving new impressions, of comprehending a civilization alien to all its previous knowledge.
Out of this remarkable experience—a stray from the Nineteenth Century moving about in the unrealized world of the Fourteenth—grew that portion of his first Japanese book, “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,” which he called “From the Diary of an English Teacher,” and “The Chief City of the Province of the Gods.” It is interesting to compare the impression made upon the teacher by his pupils with the opinion formed by the pupils of their foreign teacher.
Hearn says:—
“I have had two years’ experience in large Japanese schools; and I have never had personal knowledge of any serious quarrel between students.... Ateacher is a teacher only: he stands to his pupils in the relation of an elder brother. He never tries to impose his will upon them ... severity would scarcely be tolerated by the students.... Strangely pleasant is the first sensation of a Japanese class, as you look over the ranges of young faces.... Those traits have nothing incisive, nothing forcible: compared with Occidental faces they seem but ‘half-sketched,’ so soft their outlines are.... Some have a childish freshness and frankness indescribable ... all are equally characterized by a singular placidity—expressing neither love nor hate nor anything save perfect repose and gentleness.... I find among the students a healthy tone of skepticism in regard to certain forms of popular belief. Scientific education is rapidly destroying credulity in old superstitions.... But the deeper religious sense remains with him; and the Monistic Idea in Buddhism is being strengthened ... by the new education.... Shintō the students all sincerely are ... what the higher Shintō signifies,—loyalty, filial piety, obedience to parents, and respect for ancestors.... The demeanour of a class during study hours is if anything too faultless. Never a whisper is heard; never is a head raised from the book without permission.... My favourite students often visit me of afternoons.... Their conversation and thoughts are of the simplest and frankest.... Often they bring me gifts of flowers, and sometimes they bring books and pictures to show me—delightfully queer things,—family heirlooms. Never by any possible chance are they troublesome, impolite, curious, or even talkative.Courtesy in its utmost possible exquisiteness seems as natural to the Izumo boy as the colour of his hair or the tint of his skin.”
Of the teacher one of his pupils, Teizabur? Inomata, now a student at Yale College, says:—
“We liked him for his appearance and for his gentle manners. He seemed more pleasing in his looks than most foreigners do to the Japanese.”
Masanobu Ōtani, his favourite pupil in Matsue, says: “He was a very kind and industrious teacher, incomparable to the common foreigners engaged in the Middle Schools of those days. No wonder therefore that he won at once the admiration of all the teachers and students of the school.” He sends a copy of one of his own compositions corrected and annotated by Hearn, and observes:—
“How he was kind and earnest in his teaching can well be seen by the above specimen. It seems that themes for our composition were such as he could infer our artless, genuine thoughts and feelings.... He attentively listened to our reading, corrected each mispronunciation whenever we did.... We Japanese feel much pain to pronounce ‘l’ and ‘th.’ He kindly and scrupulously taught the pronunciation of these sounds. He was not tired to correct mispronunciation.... He was always exact, but never severe.”
Hearn’s first residence in Matsue was at an inn in the quarter called Zaimoku-ch?, “but,” says his wife in the reminiscences which she set down to assist his biographer, “circumstances made him resolve to leave it very soon. The chief cause was as follows:The daughter of the innkeeper was suffering from a disease of the eyes. This aroused his sympathy (as did all such troubles in a special manner); he asked the landlord to send her to a hospital for treatment, but the landlord did not care much about her, and refused, to Hearn’s great mortification. ‘Unmerciful fellow! without a father’s heart,’ he said to himself, and removed to a house of his own on the shore of the lake.”
This house was near the bridge Ōhashi which crossed the largest of the three outlets from the lake to the bay, and commanded the beautiful scenery described in “The Chief City of the Province of the Gods”:—
“I slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning over a soft green cloud of foliage rising from the river-bounded garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ōhashi-gawa, opening into the Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a dim grey frame of peaks.... But oh, the charm of the vision,—those first ghostly love-colours of a morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself!... Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake verge.... All the bases of the mountains are veiled by them ... so that the lake appears incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume—an exquisite chaos, ever changing aspect as the delicate fogs rise, slowly, very slowly.As the sun’s yellow rim comes into sight, fine thin lines of warmer tone—violets and opalines—shoot across the flood, tree-tops take tender fire.... Looking sunward, up the long Ōhashi-gawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden bridge, one high-pooped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw,—a dream of Orient seas, so idealized by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost that catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly semi-diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light.”
Here, constantly absorbed when off duty in the study of the sights and sounds of the city,—the multitudinous soft clapping of hands that greeted the rising sun, the thin ringing of thousands of woodengetaacross the bridge, the fantastic craft of the water traffic, the trades of the street merchants, the plays and songs of the children,—he began to register his first impressions, to make his first studies for his first book. Of its two volumes he afterwards spoke slightingly as full of misconceptions and errors, but it at once, upon its appearance in print, attracted the serious consideration of literary critics, and is the work which, with “Japan: an Interpretation,” remains most popular with his Japanese friends. It records his many expeditions to the islands and ports of the three provinces included in the Ken of Shimane, and his study of the manners, customs, and religion of the people. Of special value was his visit to the famous temple at Kizuki, to whose shrine he was the first Westerner ever admitted. Lord Senke Takamori, priest of thistemple, was a friend of the family of the lady who became Hearn’s wife, and prince of a house which had passed its office by direct male line through eighty-two generations; as old a house as that of the Mikado himself. From him Hearn received the unusual courtesy of having ordered for his special benefit a religious dance by the temple attendants.
It was while Lafcadio was living in the house by the Ōhashi bridge that he married, in January, 1891, Setsu Koizumi, a lady of high samurai rank. The revolution in Japan which overthrew the power of the Shōguns and restored the Mikado to temporal power had broken the whole feudal structure of Japanese society, and with the downfall of the daimyōs, whose position was similar to that of the dukes of feudal England, fell the lesser nobility, the samurai, or “two-sworded” men. Many of these sank into as great poverty as that which befel theémigrésafter the French Revolution, and among those whose fortunes were entirely ruined were the Koizumis. Sentarō Nishida, who appears to have been a sort of head master of the Jinjō-chūgakkō, in special charge of the English department, was of one of the lesser samurai families, his mother having been an inmate of the Koizumi household before the decline of their fortunes. Because of his fluency in English, as well as because of what seems to have been a peculiar sweetness and dignity of character, he soon became the interpreter and special friend of the new English teacher. It was through his mediation that the marriage was arranged. Under ordinary circumstances a Japanese woman of rank would consideran alliance with a foreigner an inexpugnable disgrace; but the circumstances of the Koizumis were not ordinary, and whatever may have been the secret feelings of the girl of twenty-two, it is certain that she immediately became passionately attached to her husband, and the marriage continued to the end to be a very happy one. It was celebrated by the local rites, as to have married according to English laws, under the then existing treaties, would have deprived her of her Japanese citizenship and obliged them to remove to one of the open ports; but the question of the legality of the marriage and of her future troubled Hearn from the beginning, and finally obliged him to renounce his English allegiance and become a subject of the Mikado in order that she and her children might never suffer from any complications or doubts as to their position. This could only be achieved by his adoption into his wife’s family. He took their name, Koizumi, which signifies “Little Spring,” and for personal title chose the classical term for Izumo province, Yakumo, meaning “Eight Clouds”—or “the place of the issuing of clouds”—and also being the first word of the oldest known Japanese poem.
Mrs. Hearn says: “We afterwards removed to a samurai house where we could have a home of our own conveniently equipped with numbers of rooms,—our household consisting of us two, maids, and a small cat. Now about this cat: while we lived near the lake, when the spring was yet cold, as I was watching from the veranda the evening shadow falling upon the lake one day, I found a group of boys trying to drown a small cat near our house. I asked the boysand took it home. ‘O pity! cruel boys!’ Hearn said, and took that all-wet, shivering creature into his own bosom (underneath the cloth) and kindly warmed it. This strongly impressed me with his deep sincerity, which I ever after witnessed at various occasions. Such conduct would be very extreme, but he had such an intensity in his character.” This cat seems to have been an important member of the household. Professor Ōtani in referring to it says: “It was a purely black cat. It was given the name ofHinoko(a spark) by him, because of its glaring eyes like live coals. It became his pet. It was often held in his hat.”
Later another pet was added to the establishment—anuguisu, sent to him by “the sweetest lady in Japan, daughter of the Governor of Izumo, who, thinking the foreign teacher might feel lonesome during a brief illness, made him the gift of this dainty creature.”
“You do not know what anuguisuis?” he says. “Anuguisuis a holy little bird that professes Buddhism ... very brief indeed is my little feathered Buddhist’s confession of faith,—only the sacred name of thesutrasreiterated over and over again, like a litany—‘Ho-ke-kyō!’—a single word only. But also it is written: ‘He who shall joyfully accept but a single word from thissutra, incalculably greater shall be his merit than the merit of one who should supply all the beings in the four hundred thousand worlds with all the necessaries for happiness.’ ... Always he makes a reverent little pause after uttering it. First the warble; then a pause ofabout five seconds; then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name in a tone as of meditative wonder; then another pause; then another wild, rich, passionate warble. Could you see him you would marvel how so powerful and penetrating a soprano could ripple from so minute a throat, yet his chant can be heard a wholechōaway ... a neutral-tinted mite almost lost in his box-cage darkened with paper screens, for he loves the gloom. Delicate he is, and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at precisely the same hour each day.”
In this house, surrounded with beautiful gardens, and lying under the very shadow of the ruined Daimyō castle, Hearn and his wife passed a very happy year. The rent was about four dollars a month; his salaries from the middle and normal schools, added to what he earned with his pen, made him for the first time in his life easy about money matters. He was extremely popular with all classes, from the governor to the barber; the charm and wonder of the life about him was still unstaled by usage, and he found himself at last able to achieve some of that beauty and force of style for which he had so long laboured. He even found pleasure in the fact that most of his friends were of no greater stature than himself. It seems to have been in every way the happiest portion of his life. Mrs. Hearn’s notes concerning it are so delightful as to deserve literal reproduction.
“The governor of the prefecture at that time wasViscount Yasusada Koteda, an earnest advocate of preserving old, genuine Japanese essentials, a conservatist. He was very much skilful in fencing; was much respected by the people in general.
“Mr. Koteda was also very kind to Lafcadio.
“Thus all Izumo proved favourable to him. The place welcomed him and treated him as a member of its family, a guest, a good friend, and not as a stranger or a foreigner. To him all things were full of novel interest; and the hospitality and good-naturedness of the city-people were the great pleasure for him. Matsue was, as it were, a paradise for him; and he became enthusiastically fond of Matsue. The newspapers of the city often published his anecdotes for his praise. The students were very pleased that they had a good teacher. In the meantime, the wonderful thread of marriage happened to unite me with Lafcadio....
“When I first saw Lafcadio, his property was a very scanty one,—only a table, a chair, a few number of books, a suit of both foreign and Japanese cloth [clothes], etc.
“When he came home from school, he put on Japanese cloth and sat on cushion and smoked.
“By this time he began to be fond of living in all ways like Japanese. He took Japanese food with chopsticks.
“In his Izumo days, he was pleased to be present on all banquets held by the teachers; he also invited some teachers very often and was very glad to listen to the popular songs.
“On the New Year’s day of 1891, he went roundfor a formal call with Japanesehaoriandhakama....
“But on those days I had to suffer from the inconvenience of conversation between us. We could not understand each other very well. Nor was Hearn familiar with complicated Japanese customs. He was a man with a rare sensibility of feeling; also he had a peculiar taste. Having been teased by the hard world, and being still in the vigour of his life, he often seemed to be indignant with the world. (This turned in his later years into a melancholic temperament.) When we travelled through the province of Hōki, we had to rest for a while at a tea-house of some hot-spring, where many people were making merry. Hearn pulled my dress, saying: ‘Stop to enter this house! No good to rest here. It is an hell. Even a moment we should not stay here.’ He was often offended in such a way. I was younger than now I am and unexperienced with the affairs of the world; and it was no easy task for me then to reconcile him with the occasions.
“We visited Kūkedo, which is a cave on a rocky shore in the sea of Japan. Hearn went out from the shore and swam for about two miles, showing great dexterity in various feats of swimming. Our boat entered the dark, hollow cave, and it was very fearful to hear the sounds of waves dashing against the wall. There are many fearful legends concerning this cave. To keep our boat from the evil-spirit, we had to continue tapping our boat with a stone. The deep water below was horribly blue. After hearing my story about the cave, Hearn began to put off hisclothes. The sailor said that there would be a great danger if any one swam here, on account of the devil’s curse. I dissuaded him from swimming. Hearn was very displeased and hardly spoke with me till the next day....
“In the summer of 1891 he visited Kizuki with Mr. Nishida. The next day he sent for me to come. When I arrived at his hotel I found the two had gone to sea for swimming, and Hearn’s money, packed in his stocking, was left on the floor. He was very indifferent in regard to money until in later years he became anxious for the future of family, as he felt he would not live very long on account of his failing health....
“He was extremely fond of freedom, and hated mere forms and restraint. As a middle school teacher and as a professor in the University he was always democratic and simple in his life. He ordered to make flock-coat when he became University professor, and it was after my eager advice. He at first insisted that he would not appear on public ceremony where polite garments are required, according to the promise with Dr. Toyama, and it was after my eager entreaties that at last he consented to have flock-coat made for him. But it was only some four or five times that he put on that during his life. So whenever he puts on that, he felt the task of putting on very troublesome, and said: ‘Please attend to-day’s meeting instead of me. I do not like to wear this troublesome thing; daily cloth is sufficient, etc.’ He disliked silk-hat. Some day I said in joke: ‘You have written about Japan very well. His Majesty theEmperor is calling you to praise. So please put on the flock-coat and silk-hat.’ He answered: ‘Therefore I will not attend the meeting; flock-coat and silk-hat are the thing I dislike.’
“Our conversation was through Japanese language. Hearn would not teach me English, saying: ‘It is far lovelier for the Japanese women that they talk in Japanese. I am glad that you do not know English.’
“Some time (when at Kumamoto) I told him of various inconveniences on account of my ignorance of English. He said that if I were able to write my name in English it would be sufficient; and instead he wanted me to teach him Japanese alphabet. He made progress in this and were able to write letters in Japanese alphabet with a few Chinese characters intermixed.
“OurmutualJapanese language made great progress on account of necessity. This special Japanese of mine proved much more intelligible to him than any skilful English of Japanese friend. Hearn was always delighted with my Japanese. By and by he was able to teach Kazuo in Japanese. He also taught Japanese stories to other children in Japanese.
“But on Matsue days we suffered in regard to conversations. Sometimes we had to refer to the dictionary. Being fond from my girlhood of old tales, I began from these Matsue days telling him long Japanese old stories, which were not easy for him to understand, but to which he listened with much interest and attention. He called our mutual Japanese language ‘Hearn san Kotoba’ (Hearn’s language). So in later years when he met some difficult words he would say in joke to explain them in our familiar ‘Hearn san Kotoba.’”
Unfortunately this idyllic interval was cut short by ill health. The cold Siberian winds that pass across Izumo in winter seriously affected his lungs, and the littlehibachi, or box of burning charcoal, which was the only means in use of warming Japanese houses, could not protect sufficiently one who had lived so long in warm climates. Oddly too, cold always affected his eyesight injuriously, and very reluctantly, but under the urgent advice of his doctor, he sought employment in a warmer region and was transferred to the Dai Go Kōtō Gakkō, the great Government College, at Kumamoto, situated near the southern end of the Inland Sea. In “Sayonara”—the last chapter of the “Glimpses”—there is a description of his parting:—
“The quaint old city has become so endeared to me that the thought of never seeing it again is one I do not venture to dwell upon.... These days of farewells have been full of charming surprises. To have the revelation of gratitude where you had no right to expect more than plain satisfaction with your performance of duty; to find affection where you supposed only good will to exist: these are assuredly delicious experiences.... I cannot but ask myself the question: Could I have lived in the exercise of the same profession for the same length of time in any other country, and have enjoyed a similar unbroken experience of human goodness? From each and all I have received only kindness and courtesy. Notone has addressed to me a single ungenerous word. As a teacher of more than five hundred boys and men I have never even had my patience tried.”
There were presents from the teachers, of splendid old porcelains, of an ancient and valuable sword from the students, of mementos from every one. A banquet was given, addresses made, the Government officials and hundreds of friends came to bid him good-bye at the docks, and thus closed the most beautiful episode of his life.
Matsue was old Japan. Kumamoto represented the far less pleasing Japan in the stage of transition. Here Hearn remained for three years, and at the expiration of his engagement abandoned the Government service and returned to journalism for a while. Living was far more expensive, the official and social atmosphere of Kumamoto was repugnant to him, and he fell back into the old solitary, retiring habits of earlier days—finding his friends among children and folk of the humbler classes, excepting only the old teacher of Chinese, whose name signified “Moon-of-Autumn,” and to whom he makes reference in several of his letters. In “Out of the East”—the book written in Kumamoto—he says of this friend: “He was once a samurai of high rank belonging to the great clan of Aizu. He had been a leader of armies, a negotiator between princes, a statesman, a ruler of provinces—all that any knight could be in the feudal era. But in the intervals of military or political duty he seems always to have been a teacher. Yet to see him now you would scarcely believe how much he was once feared—though loved—by theturbulent swordsmen under his rule. Perhaps there is no gentleness so full of charm as that of the man of war noted for sternness in his youth.”
Of his childish friends he relates a pretty story. They came upon one occasion to ask for a contribution of money to help in celebrating the festival of Jizō, whose shrine was opposite his house.
“I was glad to contribute to the fund, for I love the gentle god of children. Early the next morning I saw that a new bib had been put about Jiz?’s neck, a Buddhist repast set before him.... After dark I went out into a great glory of lantern-fires to see the children dance; and I found, perched before my gate, an enormous dragonfly more than three feet long. It was a token of the children’s gratitude for the help I had given them. I was startled for a moment by the realism of the thing, but upon close examination I discovered that the body was a pine branch wrapped with coloured paper, the four wings were four fire-shovels, and the gleaming head was a little teapot. The whole was lighted by a candle so placed as to make extraordinary shadows, which formed part of the design. It was a wonderful instance of art-sense working without a speck of artistic material, yet it was all the labour of a poor little child only eight years old!”
It was in Kumamoto that Hearn first began to perceive the fierceness and sternness of the Japanese character. “With Kyūshū Students” and “Jiu-jutsu” contain some surprising foreshadowings of the then unsuspected future. Such characteristics, however he might respect or understand them, werealways antipathetic to his nature, and his relations with the members of the school were for the most part formal. He mentions that the students rarely called upon him, and that he saw his fellow teachers only in school hours. Between classes he usually walked under the trees, smoking, or betook himself to an abandoned cemetery on the ridge of the hill behind the college, where an ancient stone Buddha sat upon a lotus—“his meditative gaze slanting down between half-closed eyelids”—and where he wrought out the chapter in “Out of the East” which is called “The Stone Buddha.” It became a favourite resort. Mrs. Hearn says: “When at Kumamoto we two often went out for a walk in the night-time. On the first walk at Kumamoto I was led to a graveyard, for on the previous day he said: ‘I have found a pleasant place. Let us go there to-morrow night.’ Through a dark path I was led on, until we came up a hill, where were many tombs. Dreary place it was! He said: ‘Listen and hear the voices of frogs.’”
He was still in Kumamoto when Japan went to war with China, and his record of the emotion of the people is full of interest. The war spirit manifested itself in ways not less painful than extraordinary. Many killed themselves on being refused the chance of military service.
It was here in the previous year, November 17, 1893, that his first child was born, and was named Kazuo, which signifies “the first of the excellent, best of the peerless.” The event caused him the profoundest emotion. Indeed, it seemed to work a great change in all his views of life, as perhaps it doesin most parents, reconciling them to much against which they may have previously rebelled. Writing to me a few weeks after this event he declared with artless conviction that the boy was “strangely beautiful,” and though three other children came in later years, Kazuo always remained his special interest and concern. Up to the time of his death he never allowed his eldest son to be taught by any one but himself, and his most painful preoccupation when his health began to decline was with the future of this child, who appeared to have inherited both his father’s looks and disposition.
The constant change in the personnel of the teaching force of the college, and many annoyances to which he was subjected, caused his decision at the end of the three years’ term to remove to Kōbe and enter the service of the KōbeChronicle. Explaining to Amenomori he says:—
“By the way, I am hoping to leave the Gov’t service, and begin journalism at Kōbe. I am not sure of success; but Gov’t service is uncertain to the degree of terror,—a sword of Damocles; and Gov’t doesn’t employ men like you as teachers. If it did, and would give them what they should have, the position of a foreign teacher would be pleasant enough. He would be among thinkers, and find some kindliness,—instead of being made to feel that he is only the servant of petty political clerks. And I have been so isolated, that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be among Englishmen again—with all their prejudices and conventions.”
Kōbe was at that time, 1895, an open port, that isto say, one of the places in which foreigners were allowed to reside without special government permission, and under the extra-territorial rule of their own consuls. Of Hearn’s external life here there seems to be but scant record. He worked as one of the staff of theChronicle,—his editorials frequently bringing upon him the wrath of the missionaries,—he contributed some letters to the McClure Syndicate, and there was much talk of a projected expedition, in search of material for such work, to the Philippines or the Loo Choo Islands; a project never realized. The journalistic work seriously affected his eyes, and his health seems to have been poor at times. He made few acquaintances and had almost no companions outside of his own household, where in 1896 another son was born.
Perhaps because of the narrowness of his social life his mental life deepened and expanded, or possibly his indifference to the outer world may have resulted from the change manifesting itself in his mental view.
“Kokoro” (a Japanese word signifying “The Heart of Things”) was written in Kōbe, as was also “Gleanings in Buddha-Fields,” and they quite remarkably demonstrate his growing indifference to the externals of life, the deepening of his thought toward the intrinsic and the fundamental. The visible beauty of woman, of nature, of art, grew to absorb him less as he sought for the essential principle of beauty.
In one of the letters written about this time he says: “I have to acknowledge to feeling a sort ofresentment against certain things in which I used to take pleasure. I can’t look at a number of thePetit Journal pour Rireor theCharivariwithout vexation, almost anger. I can’t find pleasure in a French novel written for the obvious purpose of appealing to instincts that interfere with perception of higher things than instincts. I should not go to the Paris Opera if it were next door. I should not like to visit the most beautiful lady and be received in evening dress. You see how absurd I have become—and this without any idea of principle about the matter except the knowledge that I ought to avoid everything which does not help me to make the best of myself—small as it may be.”
And again: “I might say that I have become indifferent to personal pleasure of any sort ... what is more significant, I think, is the feeling that the greatest pleasure is to work for others—for those who take it as a matter of course that I should do so, and would be as much amazed to find me selfish about it as if an earthquake had shaken the house down.... It now seems to me that time is the most precious of all things conceivable. I can’t waste it by going out to hear people talk nonsense.... There are rich natures that can afford the waste, but I can’t, because the best part of my life has been wasted in the wrong direction and I shall have to work like thunder till I die to make up for it.”
The growing gravity and force of his thought was shown not only in his books but in his correspondence. Most of the letters written at this period were addressed to Professor Chamberlain, dealing withmatters of heredity and the evolution of the individual under ancestral racial influences. The following extract is typical of the tone of the whole:—
“Here comes in the consideration of a very terrible possibility. Suppose we use integers instead of quintillions or centillions, and say that an individual represents by inheritance a total of 10-5 of impulses favourable to social life, 5 of the reverse. (Such a balance would really occur in many cases.) The child inherits, under favourable conditions, the father’s balance plus the maternal balance of 9,—four of the number being favourable. We have then a total which becomes odd, and the single odd number gives preponderance to an accumulation of ancestral impulse incalculable for evil. It would be like a pair of scales, each holding a mass as large as Fuji. If the balance were absolutely perfect the weight ofonehair would be enough to move a mass of millions of tons. Here is your antique Nemesis awfully magnified. Let the individual descend below a certain level and countless dead suddenly seize and destroy him,—like the Furies.”
One begins to miss the beautiful landscapes against which he had set his enchantingly realistic pictures of beautiful things and people, but in the place of the sensuous charm, the honeyed felicities of phrase, he offered such essays as the “Japanese Civilization” in “Kokoro,” with its astounding picture of New York City, and its sublimated insight into the imponderable soul of the Eastern world—such intolerable imaginings as “Dust” in the “Gleanings from Buddha-Fields,” and the delicate poignancies of “The Nun of the Temple of Amida” or of “A Street Singer.”
I think it was at Kōbe he reached his fullest intellectual stature. None of the work that followed in the next eight years surpassed the results he there achieved, and much was of lesser value, despite its beauty. He had attained to complete mastery of his medium, and had moreover learned completely to master his thought before clothing it in words—a far more difficult and more important matter.
Yet the clothing in words was no small task, as witness the accompanying examples of how he laboured for the perfection of his vehicle. These are not the first struggles of a young and clumsy artist, but the efforts at the age of fifty-three of one of the greatest masters of English.
It was done, too, by a man who earned with his pen in a year less than the week’s income of one of the facile authors of the “six best sellers.”
As has been said of De Quincey, whom Hearn in many ways resembled, “I can grasp a little of his morbid suffering in the eternal struggle for perfection of utterance; I can share a part of his æsthetic torment over cacophony, redundance, obscurity, and all the thousand minute delicacies and subtleties of resonance and dissonance, accent and cæsura, that only a De Quincey’s ear appreciates and seeks to achieve or evade. How many care for these fine things to-day? How many are concerned if De Quincey uses a word with the long ‘a’ sound, or spends a sleepless night in his endeavour to find another with the short ‘a,’ that shall at once answerhis purpose and crown his sentence with harmony? Who lovingly examine the great artist’s methods now, dip into the secret of his mystery, and weigh verb against adjective, vowel against consonant, that they may a little understand the unique splendour of this prose? And who, when an artist is the matter, attempt to measure his hopes as well as his attainments or praise a noble ambition perhaps shining through faulty attempt? How many, even among those who write, have fathomed the toil and suffering, the continence and self-denial of our great artists in words?”