Lafcadio Hearn Part 13

In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly after the great eruption of Mt. Pelee that destroyed Saint Pierre, he alludes to Arnoux' garden, and speaks of a spray of arborescent fern that had been sent him. In the fragment, also, called "Vanished Light,"

he describes the amber shadows and courtyard filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. A little boy and girl run to meet him, and the father's voice, deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell, calls from an inner doorway, "Entrez donc, mon ami!" "But all this was--and is not!... Never again will sun or moon s.h.i.+ne upon the streets of that city; never again will its ways be trodden, never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams."

Hearn definitely left Martinique in 1889, bound for America; having completed the task he had undertaken to do. Much as he loved the lazy, easy tropical life, "the perfumed peace of enormous azured noons, and the silent flickering of fire-flies through the lukewarm distance, the turquoise sky and the beautiful brown women," he began, before the end of his stay, to acknowledge that the resources of intellectual life were lacking; no libraries, no books in any language; a mind accustomed to discipline became, he said, like a garden long uncultivated, in which rare flowers returned to their primitive savage forms, smothered by rank, tough growths, which ought to be pulled up and thrown away.

"Nature does not allow serious study or earnest work, and if you revolt against her, she leaves you helpless and tortured for months. One must not seek the Holy Ghost, the world is young here,--not old and wise and grey as in the North.... The material furnished by the tropics could only," he said, "be utilised in a Northern atmosphere...." The climate numbed mental life, and the inspiration he hoped for wouldn't come.

During his stay in New York, while preparing "Youma" (a story written in the West Indies) for press and going over the proofs of "Chita" before its appearance in book form, he seems to have been in a pitiable state of dest.i.tution, obliged to make a translation of Anatole France's "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" to keep bread in his mouth.

"So you read my translation of 'Sylvestre Bonnard?'" he says to his sister, writing from j.a.pan. "I made it in two weeks, the Publishers paying me only $100. Of course the translation was too quickly done to be very good. I could not have written it all in the prescribed time, so a typewriter was hired for me. She was a pretty girl and I almost fell in love with her."

In 1889, Hearn made that ill-advised visit to Philadelphia, to Dr.

George Milbury Gould. He had only known this gentleman hitherto through an interchange of letters. Gould had written to him at New Orleans, expressing delight with some of Hearn's translations from the French, upon which Hearn, in his usual impulsive way rushed into a correspondence. This was in April, 1887. Gould had written several pamphlets on the subject of myopia and defective sight, these he sent to Hearn, and Hearn had responded, touching, as usual, on every sort of philosophical and literary subject. When he returned to the United States, after his two years in the French West Indies, he thought he would like to consult Gould on the subject of his eyesight. He therefore wrote, suggesting that if a quiet room could be found for him in Philadelphia he would try his luck there.

Gould's account of his first appearance in his consulting-room is familiar to all who have read his book. "The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that he would certainly have run out of the house if by a tone of voice I had betrayed any curiosity or a doubt."[20]

[20] "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.

Being extremely hard-up, Hearn was glad to accept an arrangement to stop in Gould's house for a while, sharing the family meals, but spending the greater part of the day at work on his proof-correcting in a room set apart for him. An incident, related by Gould, shows Hearn's extraordinary shyness and dislike to make the acquaintance of strangers.

He was desirous of giving an idea of the music of Creole songs in his book on the West Indies, but, because of his ignorance of technical counterpoint, was unable to do so. Gould made an arrangement with a lady, an acquaintance, to repeat the airs on her piano as he whistled them. An appointment was made for a visit, but on their way to the house Hearn gradually became more and more silent, and his steps slower and slower. When at last he reached the doorstep and the bell had been rung, his courage failed, and before the servant appeared he had run, as if for life, and was half a square away.

Gould claims to have made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character during the summer he stayed with him at Philadelphia. He declares that he first gave him a "soul," taught him the sense of duty, and made him appreciate the beauties of domestic life! A very beautiful story ent.i.tled "Karma,"

published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ after Hearn had left for j.a.pan, certainly shows that a change of some sort was being wrought. "I never could find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood which, in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about s.e.x, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect nature inspires a love that is fear. I don't think any love is n.o.ble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half compa.s.sion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive."

Gould, also, much to the indignation of Hearn's friends, claims to have been the first person who definitely turned his thoughts to the Far East. Inasmuch as Hearn's mind had been impregnated with j.a.pan from New Orleans days, this seems an unlikely statement; but of all unprofitable things in this world is the sifting of literary wrangles; Hearn's intimacy with George Milbury Gould has led to lawsuits, recriminations, and many distasteful and painful episodes between Gould and some of Hearn's friends. It is as well perhaps, therefore, to go into detail as little as possible.

A pa.s.sage occurs in one of Hearn's letters to Ellwood Hendrik which disposes of the matter. "Of course we shall never see each other again in this world, and what is the use of being unkind after all?... The effect is certainly to convince a man of forty-four that the less he has to do with his fellowmen the better, or, at least, that the less he has to do with the so-called 'cultured' the better...."

From the city of doctors and Quakers, Hearn wrote several letters to Miss Bisland, at first entirely formal upon literary subjects. He couldn't say when he was going to New York, as he was tied up by business muddle, waiting for information, anxious beyond expression about an undecided plan, s.h.i.+vering with cold, and longing for the tropics.

Lights are thrown upon his emotional and intellectual life in letters written in the autumn to Dr. Gould from New York.

j.a.pan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival Lowell, ent.i.tled "The Soul of the Far East," had just appeared. It apparently made a profound impression upon Hearn; every word he declared to be dynamic, as lucid and philosophical as Schopenhauer. All his former enthusiasm for j.a.pan was aroused, he followed her progress with the deepest interest. The j.a.panese const.i.tution had been promulgated in 1889, the first diet had met in Tokyo in 1890, the simultaneous reconstruction of her army, and creation of a navy, was gradually placing her in the van of far eastern nations; and, what was more important to commercial America, her trade had enormously developed under the new regime.

Harpers, the publishers, came to the conclusion that it would be expedient to send one of their staff to Tokyo as regular correspondent; Hearn had succeeded in catching the attention of the public by his story of "Chita" and "A Midsummer Trip," that had both been published serially in their magazine. With his graphic and picturesque pen he would adequately, they thought, fill the post.

In an interview with the managing director he was approached upon the subject, and, needless to say, eagerly accepted the offer. It was arranged, therefore, that, accompanied by Charles D. Weldon, one of Harpers' artists, he was to start in the beginning of the March of 1890 for the Far East.

Little did Hearn realise that the strange land for which he was bound was to receive him forever, to make him one with its religion, its inst.i.tutions, its nationality, and that, as he closed the door of the publisher's room that day, he was closing the door between himself and western civilisation forever.

CHAPTER XV j.a.pAN

"... Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk can give you all the soft bliss 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 j.a.panese 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 s.p.a.ces 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 all here 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."

Mrs. Wetmore is inaccurate in stating that Lafcadio Hearn started for j.a.pan on May 8th, 1890. She must mean March, for he landed in Yokohama on Good Friday, April 13th, after a six weeks' journey. His paper, ent.i.tled "A Winter Journey to j.a.pan," contributed to _Harper's_, describes a journey made in the depth of winter.

He stepped from the railway depot, "not upon Canadian soil, but upon Canadian ice. Ice, many inches thick, sheeted the pavement, and lines of sleighs, instead of lines of hacks, waited before the station for pa.s.sengers.... A pale-blue sky arched cloudlessly overhead; and grey Montreal lay angled very sharply in the keen air over the frozen miles of the St. Lawrence; sleighs were moving,--so far away that it looked like a crawling of beetles; and beyond the farther bank where ice-cakes made a high, white ridge, a line of purplish hills arose into the horizon...."

Hearn's account of his journey through wastes of snow, up mountain sides, through long chasms, pa.s.sing continually from sun to shadow, and from shadow to sun, the mountains interposing their white heads, and ever heaping themselves in a huge maze behind, are above the average of ordinary traveller's prose, but there is no page that can be called arresting or original. The impressions seem to be written to order, written, in fact, as subordinate to the artist's ill.u.s.trations. So irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's ill.u.s.trations become, that it is said to have been one of the reasons for the rupture of his contract with Harpers almost immediately after his arrival in j.a.pan.

The seventeen days that he pa.s.sed on the northern Pacific, with their memories of heavy green seas and ghostly suns, the roaring of the rigging and spars against the gale, the steamer rocking like a cradle as she forced her way through the billowing waves, are well described.

There is a weird touch, too, in his description of the Chinese steerage pa.s.sengers, playing the game of "fan-tan" by the light of three candles at a low table covered with a bamboo mat.

Deep in the hold below he imagines the sixty square boxes resembling tea-chests, covered with Chinese lettering, each containing the bones of a dead man, bones being sent back to melt into that Chinese soil from whence, by nature's vital chemistry, they were shapen ... and he imagines those labelled bones once crossing the same ocean on just such a s.h.i.+p, and smoking or dreaming their time away in just such berths, and playing the same strange play by such a yellow light, in even just such an atmosphere, heavy with vaporised opium.

"Meanwhile, something has dropped out of the lives of some of us, as lives are reckoned by Occidental time,--a day. A day that will never come back again, unless we return by this same route,--over this same iron-grey waste, in the midst of which our lost day will wait for us,--perhaps in vain."

Not from the stormy waters of the Pacific, however, not from gleaming Canadian pinnacles, or virgin forests, or dim canons, was this child of the South and the Orient, this interpreter of mankind in all his exotic and strange manifestations to draw his inspiration, but from the valleys and hill-sides of that immemorial East that stretched in front of him, manured and fructified by untold centuries of thought and valour and belief.

The spell fell on him from the moment that, through the transparent darkness of the cloudless April morning, he caught sight of the divine mountain. The first sight of Fuji, hanging above Yokohama Bay like a snowy ghost in the arch of the infinite day, is a sight never to be forgotten, a vision that, for the years Hearn was yet to traverse before the heavy, folded curtain fell on his stage of life, was destined to form the background of his poetic dreams and imaginings.

Mr. Henry Watkin appears to have been the first person to whom Hearn wrote from j.a.pan. So great was the charm of this new country that he seemed irresistibly called to impart some of the delight to those he had left behind in America. He told him that he pa.s.sed much of his time in the temples, trying to see into the heart of the strange people surrounding him. He hoped to learn the language, he said, and become a part of the very soul of the people. He rhapsodised on the subject of the simple humanity of j.a.pan and the j.a.panese.... He loved their G.o.ds, their customs, their dress, their bird-like, quavering songs, their houses, their superst.i.tions, their faults. He was as sure as he was of death that their art was as far in advance of our art, as old Greek art was superior to that of the earliest art groupings. There was more art in a print by Hokusai, or those who came after him, than in a $100,000 painting. Occidentals were the barbarians.

Most travellers when first visiting j.a.pan see only its atmosphere of elfishness, of delicate fantasticality. The queer little streets, the quaint shops where people seem to be playing at buying and selling, the smiling, small people in "geta" and "kimono," the mouldering shrines with their odd images and gardens; but to Hearn a transfiguring light cast a ghostly radiance on ordinary sights and scenes, opening a world of suggestion, and inspiring him with an eloquent power of impressing upon others not only the visible picturesqueness and oddity of j.a.panese life, but that dim surmise of another and inscrutable humanity, that atmosphere of spirituality so inseparably a part of the religion Buddha preached to man. With almost sacramental solemnity, he gazed at the strange ideographs, wandered about the temple gardens, ascended the stairways leading to ancient shrines. What these experiences did for his genius is to be read in the first book inspired by the Orient while he was still under the glamour of enchantment. Amidst the turmoil, the rush, the struggle of our monster City of the West, if you open his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan," and read his description of his first visit to a Buddhist temple, you will find the silence of centuries descending upon your soul, the thrill of something above and beyond the commonplace of this everyday world. The bygone spirit of the race, with its hidden meanings and allegories, its myths and legends, the very essence of the heart of the people, that has lain sleeping in the temple gloom, will reveal itself; the faint odour of incense will float to your nostrils; the shuffling of pilgrim feet to your ear; you will see the priests sliding back screen after screen, pouring in light on the gilded bronzes and inscriptions; involuntarily you will look for the image of the Deity, of the presiding spirit between the altar groups of convoluted candelabra, and you will see "only a mirror! Symbolising what? Illusion? Or that the universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? Or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our hearts?"

A storm soon pa.s.sed across the heaven of his dreams. He suddenly terminated his contract with Harpers. "I am starved out," he wrote to Miss Bisland. "Do you think well enough of me to try to get me employment at a regular salary, somewhere in the United States?"...

It is said that his reason for breaking with Harpers was a difference of opinion as to the relative position of himself and their artist, Mr.

Charles D. Weldon. Hearn was expected to write up to the ill.u.s.trations of the articles sent to the magazine, instead of the ill.u.s.trations being done for Hearn's letterpress. Besides which, the fact transpired that the artist was receiving double Hearn's salary.

The little Irishman was a mixture of exaggerated humility and sensitive pride on the score of his literary work; always in extremes in this, as in all else. He was also, as we have seen, extremely unbusinesslike; he never attempted to enter into an agreement of any kind. It seems difficult to accept his statement that his publishers, having made a success with "Chita" and "Youma" and "Two Years in the French West Indies," paid him only at the rate of five hundred dollars a year. No doubt Harpers might have been able to put a very different complexion on the matter. As a proof of the difficulty in conducting affairs with him, when he threw up his j.a.panese engagement he declined to accept royalties on books already in print. Harpers were obliged to make arrangements to transmit the money through a friend in j.a.pan, and it was only after considerable persuasion and a lapse of several years that he was induced to accept it. So often in his career through life Hearn proved an exemplification of his own statement. Those who are checked by emotional feeling, where no check is placed on compet.i.tion, must fail.

Uncontrolled emotional feeling was the rock on which he split, at this and many other critical moments in his career.

He had brought a letter of introduction, presumably from Harpers, the publishers, to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, professor, of English literature at the Tokyo University, the well-known author of "Things j.a.panese." On his arrival, Hearn thought of obtaining a position as teacher in a j.a.panese family, so as to master the spoken language.

Simply to have a small room where he could write would satisfy him, he told Professor Chamberlain, and so long as he was boarded he would not ask for remuneration. He knew, also, that he could not carry out his fixed determination of writing a comprehensive book on j.a.pan, without pa.s.sing several years exclusively amongst the j.a.panese people.

Chamberlain, however, saw at once that Hearn's capacities were far superior to those necessary for a private tutors.h.i.+p. Having been so long resident in j.a.pan, and written so much upon the country, as well as occupying a professors.h.i.+p in Tokyo Imperial University, his influence in j.a.panese official life was considerable; he now bestirred himself, and succeeded in getting Hearn an appointment as English teacher in the Jinjo Chugakko, or ordinary middle school, at Matsue, in the province of Izumo, for the term of one year.

A week or two later Hearn was able to announce to his dear sister, Elizabeth, that he was going to become a country schoolmaster in j.a.pan.

On several occasions Professor Chamberlain held out the kindly hand of comrades.h.i.+p to Lafcadio; to him Hearn owed his subsequent appointment at the Tokyo University.

For five or six years the two men were bound together in a close communion of intellectual enthusiasms and mutual interests, as is easy to see by the wonderful correspondence recently published. To him and to Paymaster Mitch.e.l.l McDonald, Lafcadio dedicated his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan."

TO THE FRIENDS WHOSE KINDNESS ALONE RENDERED POSSIBLE MY SOJOURN IN THE ORIENT PAYMASTER MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD, U.S.N.

AND BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ.

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOLOGY AND j.a.pANESE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES IN TOKEN OF AFFECTION AND GRAt.i.tUDE

Then came a sudden break.

After Hearn's death, Chamberlain, in discussing the subject, lamented "the severance of a connection with one so gifted." He made one or two attempts at renewal of intercourse, which were at first met with cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing him to desist from further endeavours. The key, perhaps, to Hearn's course of action, is to be found in some observations that he addresses to Professor Chamberlain just before the close of their friends.h.i.+p. They had been in correspondence on the subject of the connection of the tenets of Buddhism and scientific expositions of evolutionary science in England.

"Dear Chamberlain: In writing to you, of course, I have not been writing a book, but simply setting down the thoughts and feelings of the moment as they come....

"I write a book exactly the same way; but all this has to be smoothed, ordinated, corrected, toned over twenty times before a page is ready....