Lafcadio Hearn Part 12

There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him lying on his back in the gra.s.s, looking up at the sky, that he was a pantheist.

After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though he confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a Russian Ma.s.s would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Ma.s.s, interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II.

In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy, contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise s.h.i.+ntoism and Buddhism with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer.

Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement that "ancestor wors.h.i.+p was the root of all religion." Cut off from communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, a.s.serting that the wors.h.i.+p of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor wors.h.i.+p--was the beginning of the religious sentiment in man.

It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead.

From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found Spencer declaring that ancestor wors.h.i.+p, the influence of spirits or ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same idea. "The real religion of j.a.pan," he says in his essay on the ancient cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor wors.h.i.+p.' Patriotism belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears the approval of ghostly witnesses."

Mr. Robert Young, editor of the _j.a.pan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason, who both of them have lived in j.a.pan for many years, keen observers of j.a.panese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor wors.h.i.+p.

The j.a.panese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all their hero-wors.h.i.+p had been devoted to their own nationality; but practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pus.h.i.+ng forward in every direction, grasping the necessities that the compet.i.tive struggle of modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by a.n.a.logy, it is not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at every opportunity as it pa.s.ses, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead."

Nature wors.h.i.+p, the wors.h.i.+p of the sun, that gave its name to the ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the ancient j.a.panese far more potent than any idea connected with their "ancestral spirits."

In s.h.i.+nto there is no belief in the pa.s.sage of "mind essence" from form to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most ancient j.a.panese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn in j.a.pan by the s.h.i.+nto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the scientific theory of evolution.

"He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic heart of j.a.pan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound,--a compound so rare as to have introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before.

More than any other living author he has added a new thrill to our intellectual experience."

When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori, where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought--you will perchance be shown a wonderful fabric minutely intersected with delicate traceries on a dark-coloured texture. If you are accompanied by any one who is acquainted with ancient j.a.panese embroidery, they will show you that these traceries are fine j.a.panese ideographs; poems, proverbs, legends, embroidered by the laying on of thread by thread all over the tissue, producing a most harmonious and beautiful effect. Thus did Hearn, like these ancient artificers, weave ancient theories of pre-existence and Karma into spiritual fantasies and imaginations. Ever in consonance with wider interests his work opened up strange regions of dreamland, touched trains of thought that run far beyond the boundaries of men's ordinary mental horizon. In his sketch, for instance, called the "Mountain of Skulls,"[17] how weirdly does he make use of the idea of pre-existence. A young man and his guide are pictured climbing up a mountain, where was no beaten path, the way lying over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments.

[17] "In Ghostly j.a.pan," Little, Brown & Co.

Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull cras.h.i.+ngs.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth that was not stone--and lifted it--and was startled by the cheekless gibe of death.

In his inimitable way, Hearn tells how the dawn breaks, casting a light on the monstrous measureless height round them. "All of these skulls and dust of bones, my son, are your own!" says his guide. "Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires."

The Buddhist idea of pre-existence has been believed in by orientals from time immemorial; in the Sacontala the Indian poet, Calidas, says: "Perhaps the sadness of men, in seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music, arises from some remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence." The idea has been re-echoed by many in our own time, but by none more exquisitely and fancifully than by Lafcadio Hearn.

In one of his sketches, ent.i.tled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies, the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines.

"The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt a.s.sured,--that the mystery was of other existences than mine."[18]

[18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co.

Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution--created by experiences of vanished being more countless than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless remembrance, and with that awakening the delight pa.s.sed, and in the dark the sadness only lingered--unutterable--profound.

CHAPTER XIV WEST INDIES

"Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes from the hills--all cool out of the sleep of the forest, ...

and the wild high winds that run roughling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound. And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green drenched with silent pouring of creepers ... and the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea.... And the violet velvet distances of evening, and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning sunset,--when all the heavens seem filled with vapours of a molten sun!"

In the early part of June, 1887, Hearn left New Orleans, and made his way to New York via Cincinnati. He went to see no one in the western city, where he had been so well known, but his old friend Mr. Watkin.

Seated in the printing-office, then situated at 26, Longworth Street, they chatted together all day to the accompaniment of the ticking of the tall clock, loud and insistent, like the footstep of a man booted and spurred. We can imagine their discussions and arguments on the subject of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, Esoteric Buddhism, and "that which the Christian calls soul,--the Pantheist Nature,--the philosopher, the Unknowable."

Hearn took his departure from Cincinnati late in the evening. A delightful trip, he wrote to Mr. Watkin, had brought him safe and sound to New York, where his dear friend, Krehbiel, was waiting to receive him and take him as a guest to his cosy home. "I cannot tell you," he adds, "how our little meeting delighted me, or how much I regretted to depart so soon.... I felt that I loved you more than I ever did before; feel also how much I owed you and will always owe you."

Mr. Watkin, who died in the spring of 1911, aged eighty-six, spent the last years of his life in the "Old Men's Home" in Cincinnati. I received a letter from him a few months before his death relating to his friend Lafcadio Hearn. After this meeting in 1887, he was never fated to see his "Raven," but the old man kept religiously all the letters written to him by the odd little genius, who forty years before had so often sat with him in his printing-office, pouring forth his hopes and ambitions, his opinions and beliefs, his wild revolts and despairs. Loyally did the old printer add his voice to Krehbiel's and Tunison's in defence of his reputation after Hearn's death in 1904.

The Krehbiels lived in a flat, 438, West Fifty-seventh Street, New York, and Lafcadio had arranged to stop with them there before he left New Orleans.

Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the _Tribune_ necessitated his frequenting busy literary and social circles; it is easy to imagine how Hearn, just arrived from the easy-going, loafing life of New Orleans, must have suffered in such a _milieu_.

Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds, "that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a horrible nightmare, that he had been a demophobe for years, hating crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help it;--just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,--to see no one except you and Joe."

It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment and feeling must have arisen between them in that s.p.a.ce of ten years, subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the pa.s.sage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters transmitted across thousands of miles.

Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn, Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion.

Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths and Vandals--and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that claims art merit by a Gothic standard.

From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on the other hand--no musician from a technical point of view--frankly declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's sonata or an opera by Wagner.

Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, ent.i.tled "Hearn and Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions, by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The _glissando_ effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal splinterings.' They had for him a great charm."

Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see her. "n.o.body can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you--but since you live in h.e.l.l what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison.

To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him, so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the _Barracouta_ for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared originally in _Harper's Monthly_. It was afterwards incorporated in his larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies."

Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics, is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced enthusiasms.

He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and, unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no sn.o.bs; everything primitive and morally pure. Confound fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms distilled _Elixir Vitae_."[19]

[19] Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"

published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.

There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friends.h.i.+p, the two comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion.

During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on board the _Barracouta_, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird atmosphere, that make his j.a.panese books so arresting and original, is a delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep,"

written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:--

"Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people.

On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than hear behind you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb oscillations of raiment,--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter swiftly pa.s.ses with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."

"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated

"A mon cher ami, "LeOPOLD ARNOUX "Notaire a Saint Pierre, Martinique.

"Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des sympathies echangees, de tout le charme d'une amitie inalterable et inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle a l'ame au doux Pays des Revenants."

Arnoux is mentioned subsequently in one or two of Hearn's letters. He alludes to suppers eaten with him at Grande Anse, in a little room opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of the sea, with the great voice thundering outside so that they could scarcely hear themselves speak, and the candle in the verrine fluttering like something afraid.