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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lafcadio Hearn
+
+Author: Nina H. Kennard
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2010 [EBook #33345]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAFCADIO HEARN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Ernest Schaal and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             LAFCADIO HEARN
+
+
+
+
+      The Hearn crest is "on
+      a mount vert a heron
+      arg.," and the motto
+      "Ardua petit ardea."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.]
+
+
+
+
+                             LAFCADIO HEARN
+
+                                   BY
+                            NINA H. KENNARD
+
+
+              _CONTAINING SOME LETTERS FROM LAFCADIO HEARN
+                   TO HIS HALF-SISTER, MRS. ATKINSON_
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+                                 MCMXII
+
+
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1912, by
+                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                              REMEMBRANCE
+
+
+          No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the
+          thread,--softer than moonshine, thinner than
+          fragrance, stronger than death,--the Gleipnir-chain
+          of the Greater Memory.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+
+
+When Death has set his seal on an eminent man's career, there is a not
+unnatural curiosity to know something of his life, as revealed by
+himself, particularly in letters to intimate friends. "All biography
+ought, as much as possible, to be autobiography," says Stevenson, and of
+all autobiographical material, letters are the most satisfactory.
+Generally written on the impulse of the moment, with no idea of
+subsequent publication, they come, as it were, like butter fresh from
+the churning with the impress of the mind of the writer stamped
+distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's written to Flaubert,
+or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend Stilling, is worth
+pages of embellished reminiscences.
+
+The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a
+particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he
+himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon
+with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate
+sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of
+his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek
+an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence
+the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs.
+Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to
+Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary
+period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years
+of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting,
+giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and
+passionately enthusiastic nature.
+
+During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to Chamberlain
+were written, he initiated a correspondence with his half-sister, Mrs.
+Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His erratic nature, tamed
+and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo, turned with yearning
+towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years, and these Atkinson
+letters, though not boasting the high intellectual level of those to
+Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate playfulness, and
+in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under a new and
+delightful aspect.
+
+There has been a certain amount of friction with his American editress,
+owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use these
+letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to criticisms
+and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual outspoken
+fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original form, to allow
+them to pass into the hands of any one but a person intimately connected
+with the Hearn family; but I can assure Mrs. Wetmore and Captain
+Mitchell McDonald--those kind friends who have done so much for the sake
+of Hearn's children and widow--that Mrs. Koizumi, financially, suffers
+nothing from the fact of the letters not having crossed the Atlantic.
+
+Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to make
+extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss
+Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also
+to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests' House, Ferbane, for having put me
+in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to
+Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently
+Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to
+give me much information concerning his college career.
+
+I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan, to Mr. W. B.
+Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter
+and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who
+gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the
+period of his engagement as sub-editor to the _Kobe Chronicle and Japan
+Mail_.
+
+But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of
+Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs.
+Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and
+"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co.,
+Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In
+Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs.
+Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper
+for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French West Indies"; and,
+above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote
+from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's "Letters," for without
+quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to
+write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn
+became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a
+Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached
+England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound
+of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was
+animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the
+Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will
+be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in
+England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great
+deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere."
+
+How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed
+amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he
+looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in
+that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually
+growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day
+stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be
+studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the
+subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in
+exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and
+interest--the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold
+undisputed sway in the Far East.
+
+    _Southmead_,
+        _Farnham Royal_, 1911.
+
+
+
+
+                            CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAP.                                                   PAGE
+
+       I EARLY YEARS                                           1
+
+      II BOYHOOD                                              23
+
+     III TRAMORE                                              33
+
+      IV USHAW                                                40
+
+       V LONDON                                               52
+
+      VI CINCINNATI                                           65
+
+     VII VAGABONDAGE                                          81
+
+    VIII MEMPHIS                                              88
+
+      IX NEW ORLEANS                                          93
+
+       X WIDER HORIZON                                       102
+
+      XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS                111
+
+     XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS                          124
+
+    XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE                                137
+
+     XIV WEST INDIES                                         148
+
+      XV JAPAN                                               160
+
+     XVI MATSUE                                              172
+
+    XVII MARRIAGE                                            179
+
+   XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI                                 187
+
+     XIX KUMAMOTO                                            199
+
+      XX OUT OF THE EAST                                     231
+
+     XXI KOBE                                                238
+
+    XXII TOKYO                                               260
+
+   XXIII USHIGOME                                            274
+
+    XXIV NISHI OKUBO                                         286
+
+     XXV HIS DEATH                                           299
+
+    XXVI HIS FUNERAL                                         310
+
+   XXVII VISIT TO JAPAN                                      313
+
+  XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO                         328
+
+         CONCLUSION                                          339
+
+         INDEX                                               351
+
+
+
+
+                LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                          FACING
+                                                            PAGE
+
+    LAFCADIO HEARN AND HIS WIFE.               _Frontispiece_
+
+    MAJOR CHARLES BUSH HEARN (HEARN'S FATHER).                16
+
+    MRS. ATKINSON (HEARN'S HALF-SISTER).                     204
+
+    KAZUO (HEARN'S SON) AND HIS NURSE.                       220
+
+    KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).                  228
+
+    DOROTHY ATKINSON.                                        232
+
+    KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).              314
+
+    CARLETON ATKINSON.                                       318
+
+
+
+
+                             LAFCADIO HEARN
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+                              EARLY YEARS
+
+     "Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other
+     microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more,
+     indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless
+     ultimates--imaging sky, and land, and life--filled with
+     perpetual mysterious shudderings--and responding in some wise
+     to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In
+     each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences
+     infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in
+     every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn
+     from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal
+     peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a
+     dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that
+     appears to be is but the thrilling of it--sun, moon, and
+     stars--earth, sky, and sea--and mind and man, and space and
+     time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the
+     Shadow-maker shapes for ever."
+
+
+On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his
+grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio,
+Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura."
+
+The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink
+faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or
+mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the
+appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and
+remarkable figures of the end of the last century.
+
+Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin
+of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or
+curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock--mixture of
+Saxon and Celt--which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal
+lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United
+Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's
+grandfather--as has been stated--came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke
+of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The
+Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace,
+and about the same time--as recognition for services done, we
+conclude--became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of
+Westmeath.
+
+A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County
+Waterford--has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside
+place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers
+at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev.
+Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman
+Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present
+cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of
+the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is
+through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship
+with the County Westmeath portion of the family.
+
+As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an
+impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records
+certainly of several Daniel Hearns--it is the Christian name that
+furnishes the clue--occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire
+and Somersetshire.
+
+In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of
+Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty
+years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally
+"cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the
+Herons--pronounced Hearn--to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a
+well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's
+"Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of
+Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights."
+
+Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his
+name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'--heron with wings
+down--for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at
+the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the
+place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries,
+are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the
+various modifications of the word--namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern,
+Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic
+languages it is _irren_, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. _Hirn_,
+the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin _errare_
+and Frankish _errant_, with the Celtic _err_ names are related, though
+the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West
+Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in
+the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies
+of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or
+gipsies, is referred to.
+
+I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly
+maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their
+veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of
+gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered
+to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her
+head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger
+said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that
+Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons
+and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to
+show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible
+sign of Romany descent.
+
+Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members
+of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and
+black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his
+mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his
+second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element--quite
+distinct from the Japanese type--is so strong as to have impressed
+itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most
+remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The
+near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft
+voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton
+Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of
+the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies
+themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is
+not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio
+Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may,
+on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were
+looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India.
+
+On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full
+of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to
+state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn
+belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek;
+Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand,
+maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the
+agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine
+Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at
+various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his
+mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese
+census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to
+return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands.
+The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian,
+half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese
+origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on
+his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes,
+migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the
+Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original
+Venetian Maltese.
+
+"We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite
+addition--the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us,
+stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an
+exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life
+all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested
+themselves--the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the
+revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the
+oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited
+from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.
+
+From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country
+for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel
+of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in
+the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family
+distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she
+bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father
+Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to
+see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.
+
+Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while
+quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He
+never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by
+the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He
+was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic
+and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew--"Veritable blunderers," as
+Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world."
+
+Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some
+photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to
+represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good
+deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have
+never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked
+something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother.
+I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of
+soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the
+'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my
+firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular
+directions--guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions
+most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong
+characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a
+resemblance in his children by two different mothers--and I want so much
+to find out if the resemblance is also psychological."
+
+Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his
+father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army
+List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant
+surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical
+Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849
+infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At
+Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and
+strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English
+government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor,
+additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they
+arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were
+quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands.
+
+Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this
+half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the
+entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many
+stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in
+their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female
+portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes
+this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to
+join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics
+were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not
+return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore,
+necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep;
+the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous
+ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.
+
+But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there
+is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways.
+Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with
+equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious
+tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for
+the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had
+never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use.
+
+Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish
+country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by
+Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County
+Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress.
+A lock of hair was enclosed:--
+
+                    "Dearest and nearest to my heart,
+                     Thou art fairer than the silver moon,
+                     And I trust to see thee soon."
+
+There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with
+the following:--
+
+          "Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love
+           And evermore will beat for thee!!"
+
+"Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power
+of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.
+
+Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a
+countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and
+she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still
+smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa
+Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they
+met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo,
+but communication between the islands was frequent.
+
+As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland,
+of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in
+consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more
+than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted
+opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary
+wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as
+in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a
+daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she
+was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount
+of friction.
+
+Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient
+Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there
+by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island,
+excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern
+extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock
+whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends."
+Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled
+together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the
+altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that
+clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the
+divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling
+down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known
+as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a
+glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous
+haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.
+
+Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been
+born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world--the world
+that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty--impressed
+itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted
+shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral
+dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with
+its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for
+instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a
+dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court--his mother,
+presumably--chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the
+celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and
+temples of the ancient Leucadia.... Awakening, he heard, in the night,
+the moaning of the real sea--the muttering of the Tide of the Returning
+Ghosts.
+
+Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military
+occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were
+withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his
+regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight
+typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son
+should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his
+service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta.
+How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had
+left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.
+
+Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having
+been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer
+things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a
+monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint
+the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy
+may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have
+been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old.
+He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of
+the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn
+proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard.
+Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the
+way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"--indeed, all
+his belongings--were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it
+was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task
+entrusted to him.
+
+Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at
+Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred
+to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready
+pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript;
+the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and
+punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are
+very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous
+routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of
+social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the
+interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a
+text from the Gospels and Epistles.
+
+Because of the political and religious animus existing between
+Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more
+prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England.
+All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were
+members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious
+movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial
+functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with
+which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a
+Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious
+observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard
+Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation,
+thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in
+Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate
+opinions.
+
+On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard
+arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7
+o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a
+day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless
+and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady!
+Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition
+to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter
+from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear,
+beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears
+of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us."
+Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by
+our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as
+attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an
+interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs.
+Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the
+misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later,
+in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a
+word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to
+perfectly harmless actions and statements.
+
+Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son,
+having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves
+and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is
+easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding
+herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the
+murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major
+portion of the capital of Ireland.
+
+The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests
+Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory.
+She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and
+unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to
+cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the
+life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of
+the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the
+impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was
+capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe
+castigation.
+
+When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in
+imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he
+imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from
+their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them.
+In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to
+dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.
+
+When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the
+idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually
+became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission
+of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He
+then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the
+sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the
+eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another
+time, another heaven.
+
+Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he
+does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his
+cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers,
+after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name
+of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
+
+When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he
+felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated,
+with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as
+his own.
+
+"My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister,
+Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this
+reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark,
+with large black eyes--very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap
+it. I slapped it--simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was
+immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I
+deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in
+such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered
+amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane--"Sally Brenane,"
+Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin
+Brenane--a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means--and had
+adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak,
+bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in
+common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the
+people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted
+to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed
+for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The
+delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime
+favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady
+was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman
+Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and
+property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband.
+
+In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn
+found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands,
+something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent
+fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which
+the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she
+was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for
+Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes,
+accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in
+strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance
+as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded
+round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them.
+
+Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in
+marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was
+allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably
+laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman,
+when she went for her daily drive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's
+diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies.
+Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles
+had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on
+August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great
+hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the
+latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an
+entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton."
+
+The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was
+apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of
+storm!
+
+Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace and
+charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the
+light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and
+unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and
+ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about
+the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by
+chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the
+only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free
+again, and was living as a widow in Dublin.
+
+What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be
+surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary.
+"October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking
+well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once
+more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little
+boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we
+were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of
+Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained
+of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we
+are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay.
+
+An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We
+are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst
+stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw
+herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now,
+whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern
+nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person,"
+Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we
+only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people
+on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of
+silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that
+the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack
+was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year
+later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea.
+
+Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the
+battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and
+returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some
+little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the
+scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this
+time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred
+feet under the dinner-table.
+
+[Illustration: Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).]
+
+It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew,
+or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these
+years--the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father
+and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his
+mother's brain.
+
+In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
+which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety,
+strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says,
+"remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin
+soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order
+for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy
+with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of
+brotherhood, I was totally indifferent--especially for the reason that
+he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I
+followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him
+downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What
+afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was
+scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again."
+
+The following reminiscence requires little comment:--
+
+"I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was
+afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds
+above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way.
+Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and
+knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady
+came to meet us. She seemed to me tall--but a child cannot judge stature
+well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed
+to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down
+and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I
+found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given
+me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never
+to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I
+told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was
+frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I
+remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not
+tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after."
+
+The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's
+stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and
+Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time
+in Dublin.
+
+Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny,
+odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult
+to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long,
+lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent,
+myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he
+tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from
+him.
+
+"Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells
+of--the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan
+to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the
+same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her
+hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said
+angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly
+beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face
+hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we
+wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down
+easily. 'Ah!' she said:--'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my
+hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a
+large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When
+I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I
+cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and
+rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her
+mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and
+went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I
+think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a
+grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was
+cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But _how_ I would
+love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day--great
+huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels.
+
+"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a
+little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together
+like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then
+much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than
+now. I rather think I should like to see her."
+
+Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun
+was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more
+wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at
+Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life.
+
+In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from
+Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea
+is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma,
+the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a
+magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and
+the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love
+that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to
+be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only
+of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles
+Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on
+Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever
+person, beloved by her children and all her family connections,
+especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of
+stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her
+telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light
+before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to
+sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a
+charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would
+keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the
+years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become
+ridiculously old."[1]
+
+[1] "Out of the East," Gay & Hancock.
+
+"The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister,
+when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see
+me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had
+become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his
+head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very
+angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him
+again.
+
+"I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big
+beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him
+by some tale told her about his life in Paris."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's
+luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after
+her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her
+interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no
+proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some
+members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see
+her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa
+Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the
+vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and
+misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the
+tablets of her memory.
+
+After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles
+Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa
+Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the
+record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major
+Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.
+
+Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded
+with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of
+Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition
+that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith.
+
+Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was
+housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that
+made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy
+at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of
+those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his
+grand-aunt.
+
+Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard
+in Paris.
+
+Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article
+written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati
+friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked
+his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His
+father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson,
+"printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember
+he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote
+to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid
+you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she
+wished me to, and I was lazy."
+
+Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on
+his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of
+Indian fever, on board the English steamship _Mula_ at Suez, thus ending
+a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years.
+
+With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end.
+We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined
+nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame,
+remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's
+advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness--that tenderness
+generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the
+arena of life.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+                                BOYHOOD
+
+     "You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with
+     which we look at a thing--half-angered by inability to
+     analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think
+     the feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says,
+     'the doors have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt
+     in looking at that tree, was it only your pleasure, no,--many
+     who would have loved you, were looking through you and
+     remembering happier things. The different ways in which
+     different places and things thus make appeal would be partly
+     explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences
+     reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest.
+     But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness
+     as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then
+     how much dead love lives again, how many ecstasies of the
+     childhoods of a hundred years must revive!"
+
+
+Most of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs. Brenane seems to have been
+passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper Leeson Street; at Tramore, a
+seaside place on the coast of Waterford in Ireland; at Linkfield Place,
+Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry Molyneux, a Roman Catholic
+friend of Mrs. Brenane's--destined to play a considerable part in the
+boy's life--and in visiting about among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose
+name was legion.
+
+Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house,
+Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have
+records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his
+sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio
+stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea
+was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now.
+
+Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to
+have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from
+thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous
+idea--common to most of Hearn's biographers--has originated from Hearn
+himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales,
+but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious
+genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore
+preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere.
+Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions
+of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's
+"Wanderings in Wales."
+
+Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful
+dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan,"[2] one of Hearn's last
+books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of
+which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the
+dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in
+his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as
+any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the
+forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his
+memory, and calls them "Welsh hills."
+
+[2] The publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who
+ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China,
+when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the
+allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real
+Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and
+strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his
+life for a friend."
+
+The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes,
+under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known
+character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if
+all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied
+her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the
+audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong.
+
+Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of
+Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent
+resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib,
+his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper
+place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth--
+
+          "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
+           Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..."
+
+The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who
+was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles
+Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for
+her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a
+coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance
+of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke
+suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and
+everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose
+to his eyes.
+
+In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus
+alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in
+the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a
+child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I
+forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been
+eight or nine years old--I might have been twelve. And that's all."
+
+It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who
+could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday.
+
+Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These
+visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's
+life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered,
+spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon
+Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience
+of the artistic productions of the Far East.
+
+One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a
+sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in
+every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient
+gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence
+these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a
+lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid
+description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the
+midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather
+beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the
+roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the
+Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.
+
+By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to
+manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it
+would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought
+to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much
+alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was,
+moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an
+incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same
+feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except
+when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is
+finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only
+learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their
+opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of
+life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so
+as a child; I was a perfect imp."
+
+Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his
+children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself
+was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to
+taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild
+imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief--traps
+arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened,
+the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he
+selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a
+hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and
+said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono'
+(flatterer) and run away and hide myself."
+
+He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when
+she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days
+after, she would discover it half-rotten.
+
+Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and
+touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the
+charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally
+Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an
+old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a
+lap-dog."
+
+But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was
+one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore,
+and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great
+extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison
+Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys,
+and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that
+was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was
+staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book
+Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he
+left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion
+with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy,
+of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the
+transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs.
+Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling,
+whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled,
+for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared
+himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion
+over the Celtic mind.
+
+Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a
+prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled
+"Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung
+and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy.
+
+He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by
+himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had
+children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings,
+ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried
+with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not
+forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind
+the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier
+there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the
+greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not
+"ghosts."
+
+The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
+Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he
+maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain,
+brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before
+the accident at Ushaw.
+
+The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish
+glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the
+ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from
+beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from
+eyestrain.
+
+After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen
+envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his
+small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a
+book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre
+de la Piti� et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on
+his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to
+the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen
+through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant
+incidents made too important.
+
+"Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall
+scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial
+self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in
+me--thus producing obvious incongruities."
+
+"My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish
+mind by a certain cousin Jane--apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a
+convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow
+intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell
+fire if he did not believe in God.
+
+When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by
+fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later,
+dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him
+a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It
+included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss
+Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint
+translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human
+Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological
+book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were
+apparently uninfluenced by her religious views.
+
+In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane,
+Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its
+smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic
+churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it
+was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business
+men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in
+England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of
+those who wanted to come and go daily to London.
+
+Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically
+to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at
+various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband
+in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street.
+
+When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt--we see his name assigned by the
+Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866--the house at Redhill was
+given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled
+permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to
+leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time
+had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment.
+
+Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew
+of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the
+second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the
+incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance.
+
+Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction--but was not
+sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of
+Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on
+the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and
+called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he
+goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was
+dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the
+property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the
+reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just
+what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she
+was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands
+of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was
+suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been
+brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four
+or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt
+told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was
+soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on
+the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in
+having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an
+annuity of (I think, but am not sure) �500. 'Henry,' who had 'made
+himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property
+into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own,
+as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into
+the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards
+sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them
+in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told
+to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon
+after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many
+things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor,
+but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find
+out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled
+his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a
+daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'--at fourteen. I
+used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a
+year or two....
+
+"Well,--there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any
+more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under
+pressure of work, I have to say good-bye.
+
+                             "Lovingly ever,
+                                "LAFCADIO HEARN."
+
+In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she
+told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used
+to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't
+think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if
+accurately known, give revelation about some other matters."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+                                TRAMORE
+
+     "If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in
+     early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to
+     that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if
+     you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the
+     fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once
+     breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean,
+     and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers....
+     When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars
+     dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning
+     hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of
+     the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long
+     intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some
+     memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand
+     and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'?
+
+     "So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself
+     revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles
+     away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has
+     the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and
+     shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant
+     of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new,
+     is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace
+     you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails
+     are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the
+     gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky
+     and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly
+     ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a
+     delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life
+     restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder
+     of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your
+     eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the
+     awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its
+     own thick breath.'"
+
+
+Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end
+of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the
+picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite
+resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light
+wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule
+supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves
+come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break
+with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay
+presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever
+on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.
+
+There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when
+impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is
+stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's
+brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea
+listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of
+sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent
+of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness,
+something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse,
+raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos,
+sometimes of inspiration.
+
+Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so
+bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes
+unconsciously, memories of these childish days.
+
+At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years
+later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there
+came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at
+something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether
+suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo
+hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black
+beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable
+in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly
+there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a
+coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of
+which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....
+
+Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had
+listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he
+remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world,
+the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion
+was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries,
+the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.
+
+The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a
+fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"[3] shows his inspiration at its best.
+Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the
+_Commercial_, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls
+the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the
+marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain
+has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of
+last century.
+
+[3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was
+published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
+published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
+
+"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic
+production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that
+constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then
+memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with
+sudden light. _Chita_, at the Viosca Ch�ni�re, conquering her terror of
+the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters
+curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the
+dawn--like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; _Chita_
+learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which,
+the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds,
+darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in
+level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own
+childish existence at Tramore.
+
+For him, as for _Chita_, there was no factitious life those days, no
+obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb
+revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no
+cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in
+gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter
+in the trees without.
+
+When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long
+days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his
+especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest
+for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every
+Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian
+warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are
+to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.
+
+Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he
+was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many
+additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often
+too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered
+for his habit of "drawing the long bow."
+
+Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly
+during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was
+not distinguished by accuracy of statement.
+
+The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those
+surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford
+fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from
+wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world.
+While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was
+building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light
+of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which
+none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul
+entrenched itself.
+
+Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears
+filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he
+saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens
+and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and
+divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of
+beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it,
+recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and
+existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing
+of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from
+countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from
+the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."
+
+It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in
+the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as
+having been found amongst his papers after his death.
+
+His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with
+a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any
+religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual
+sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly,
+stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however,
+exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing
+figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all
+the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure
+after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear.
+Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he
+remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan
+statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the
+gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The medi�val creed
+seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.
+
+The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow;
+the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books
+disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places,
+but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was
+placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many
+figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had
+been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross
+strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of
+beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational
+value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried
+persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By
+this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....
+
+After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things
+began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green
+of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before
+unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for
+he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty
+and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees,
+in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At
+moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so
+deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him
+a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.
+
+A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he
+had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the
+"Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of
+her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and
+difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city
+of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+                                 USHAW
+
+     "Really there is nothing quite so holy as a College
+     friendship. Two lads, absolutely innocent of everything in
+     the world or in life, living in ideals of duty and dreams of
+     future miracles, and telling each other all their troubles,
+     and bracing each other up. I had such a friend once. We were
+     both about fifteen when separated. Our friendship began with
+     a fight, of which I got the worst; then my friend became for
+     me a sort of ideal which still lives. I should be almost
+     afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other
+     so): but your letter brought his voice and face back--just as
+     if his ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder."
+
+
+St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, is situated on a slope of the Yorkshire
+Hills, near Durham. In the estimation of English Roman Catholics, it
+stands next to Stonyhurst as an educational establishment. Since Patrick
+Lafcadio Hearn's days it has counted amongst its pupils Francis Thomson,
+the poet, and Cardinal Wiseman, the archbishop, both of whom ever
+retained an affectionate and respectful memory of their Alma Mater.
+
+Lafcadio Hearn was sent there from Redhill in Surrey, arriving on
+September 9th, 1863, at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Brenane is not likely
+to have been a determining influence in sending him to college. For all
+her narrow-minded piety, the old lady was warm-hearted and intensely
+attached to Lafcadio, and must have known how unfitted he was for
+collegiate life in consequence of constitutional delicacy and defective
+eyesight.
+
+We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his religious
+education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs.
+Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a
+hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been
+prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the
+Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early
+impressions.
+
+That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is
+incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to
+preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says:
+"You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the
+priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic
+Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the
+pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic."
+
+Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a
+school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the
+part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the
+authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the
+"mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was
+quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This
+disposes of one of the many Hearn myths.
+
+That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities
+of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the
+Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject"
+was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit
+that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in
+his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and
+conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of
+forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in
+Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire
+absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching.
+
+All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against
+prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against
+restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst
+those whom the French term _des�quilibr�s_, one of those ill-poised and
+erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to
+madness.
+
+Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism
+was artistic and �sthetic.
+
+Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and
+informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient
+Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as
+exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof.
+
+"I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my
+back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I
+could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe
+that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to
+explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the
+folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I
+immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my
+imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground,
+but also to become the sky!"
+
+That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of
+discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were
+the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded
+ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very
+stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist?
+
+If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been
+at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a
+contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the
+little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his
+prototype, Flaubert, there was a _fond d'eccl�siastique_ in Hearn's
+nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry,
+and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and
+pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line?
+
+It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional
+youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a
+university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his
+eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped
+himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger,
+better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from
+Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is
+plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry,
+French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to
+instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre
+Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely
+ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
+remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition
+for three years of his residence at Ushaw.
+
+He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance on
+many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were
+cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions
+of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight
+in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible
+dream of modern �sthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.'
+
+"Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas, and
+the Sagas, and the Chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of the
+Vikings and Berserks, he had at his finger ends, because they were
+mighty and awesomely grand."
+
+Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from Kobe,
+in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me incapacitated
+to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of having
+dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge of some
+one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of
+so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything I
+learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some
+of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..."
+
+In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D----, one of those in his class
+at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you much about
+him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember him as a boy
+about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming with delight
+at some of his many mischievous plots with which he disturbed the
+College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or three classes,
+or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But he was always
+considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and the terror of
+his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I fancy very
+popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody, but he
+loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or of
+glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,'[4] who was one of
+his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many whippings, wrote
+poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in fact, quite
+irresponsible."
+
+[4] I give this name as it is written in Canon D----'s letter.
+
+Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of Ushaw
+College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:--
+
+"He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one
+could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in
+evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks
+of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very
+respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped
+muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc.
+
+"As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his
+class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly
+first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who
+were considered very good English writers--for boys. In other subjects,
+he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose he exerted
+himself except in English.
+
+"I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to say
+and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from the
+Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and brightness,
+disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He was so very
+curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that you felt he
+might do anything in different surroundings."
+
+Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat the
+same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this
+subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably
+getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati,
+Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being
+given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little
+fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it.
+
+His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was
+exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very
+close to his eyes. He had a great taste for the strange and weird, and
+had a certain humour of a grim character. There was always something
+mysterious about him, a mystery which he delighted in increasing rather
+than dissipating. The confession which he is supposed to have made to
+Father William Wrennal that he hoped the devil would come to him in the
+form of a beautiful woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the
+desert, was worthy of his fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic
+mischief and humour.
+
+Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been
+Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary
+talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel.
+His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed
+and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already
+noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what
+chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once
+rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had
+never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects,
+and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque.
+Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low
+red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces, and glinting
+on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts
+shrieking in the gale--these were favourite topics of conversation, and
+in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich.
+
+"I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I
+were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in, I
+think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'[5]
+This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not
+permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A
+note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this
+library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was
+eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now
+more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a
+correct copy of it:--
+
+[5] "High Figures" is the name of a class or "School" (as we call
+"classes" at Ushaw), _e.g._ Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax,
+Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or class for
+two years, _e.g._ High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to be
+moved up into the next class, Grammar. Each class has its own library,
+so that a boy in the class of High Figures would not be allowed to
+intrude into the Library of the school or class above him, Grammar.
+
+          "'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door,
+            Massive and quaint, of the days of yore;
+            When the spectral forms of the mighty dead
+            Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread;
+            When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak
+               Shrieks forth his note so wild,
+            And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak
+               In the moonlight soft and mild,
+            When the dead in the lonely vaults below
+               Rise up in grim array
+            And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow,
+               Weird forms, unknown in day;
+            When the dismal death-bells clang so near,
+               Sounding o'er world and lea,
+            And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear
+               Like the moan of the sobbing sea.'
+
+"He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the
+initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make
+sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd.
+His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then
+romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when
+the passing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for
+school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of
+his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he
+were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the
+College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell
+summoned us again to study.
+
+"A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio
+said his address was longer--'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near
+Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, Space,
+God.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest.
+
+"You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland or
+Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during the
+vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I believe
+I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having told me
+anything of his relations with his family, or of his childhood."
+
+It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter
+written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a
+heading to this chapter.
+
+At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of Hearn's
+subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one
+of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to slip from his
+hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation
+supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by
+the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched out at
+school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in Jesuitical
+schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in Dublin in the
+hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation.
+
+Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They
+must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton,
+has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been
+disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the Japanese army.
+
+There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea
+of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of
+the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he imagined, to
+the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of
+youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe
+limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests,
+and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which
+Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos.
+
+Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He
+never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much
+disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in
+appearance, especially to women, always pursued him.
+
+Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power,
+Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power.
+
+Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he
+alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist,
+declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more
+mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective
+sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the
+conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as
+it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into
+others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The
+quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind.
+"I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being
+haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he
+says, in his essay on "Dust."
+
+The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and
+accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of
+his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No
+doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of
+the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept
+him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power.
+
+It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw.
+Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of
+action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons
+were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question
+of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence
+of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his
+grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees.
+
+Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his
+holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as
+time went on.
+
+Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable any
+longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded her
+that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and declared
+her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a Christian
+household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that she, who
+only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned a home
+of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail himself of
+Molyneux's hospitality.
+
+At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage
+which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane
+bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane,
+had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady.
+The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the
+Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore.
+
+Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited it
+would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont to
+say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a
+necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value
+betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I
+am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself
+to things of the imagination and spirit."
+
+Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live upon,
+might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating vague
+philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of being
+driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and children?
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+                                 LONDON
+
+     "In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to
+     self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a
+     little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody
+     else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of
+     Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly
+     abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no
+     escape, save by an iron ladder.
+
+     "As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each
+     rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had
+     quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the
+     least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the
+     climber."[6]
+
+[6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+
+A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied
+her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at
+Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in
+London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To
+them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly
+comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only
+ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr.
+Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was
+cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open,
+or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and
+plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and
+excitable imagination.
+
+The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law.
+It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling
+against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and
+luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne
+and chicken mayonnaise on board.
+
+Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a
+biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance.
+Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping,
+was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he
+had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he
+might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work.
+
+As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take
+refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by
+his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to
+submit to discipline or restraint of any kind.
+
+Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this
+period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some
+of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to
+finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home,
+surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in
+spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of
+his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was
+forced to become a servant.
+
+This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of
+fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he
+arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for
+there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in
+Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his
+destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was
+probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr.
+Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses.
+
+With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum
+given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the
+first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio
+that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles
+away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying
+himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all
+the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by
+official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can
+imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during
+the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no
+dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or
+trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going.
+
+At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the
+experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to
+the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to
+the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up.
+He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never
+possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of
+the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness
+was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the
+psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive
+recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that
+the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to
+spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self,
+lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most
+efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.
+
+Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then,
+as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or
+when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of
+rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the
+body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight
+and acute dyspepsia.
+
+Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from
+communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he
+possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in
+silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and
+aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.
+
+Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and
+misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he
+showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and
+sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external
+influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If
+those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him
+forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse
+himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.
+
+After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in
+front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of
+achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you
+are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic
+material?
+
+Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that
+literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling,
+as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance,
+that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that
+the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient
+sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly
+the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until
+at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. Analysing the
+feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand
+exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary
+utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for
+months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising;
+for our best work is often out of the unconscious."
+
+Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other
+men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination
+which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his
+blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of
+life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which
+was possible to a man of his temperament.
+
+"All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the
+right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within
+hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within
+hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying
+through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all,
+his own genius.
+
+"Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One
+must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson,
+recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making."
+
+Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows
+and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the
+undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of
+the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at
+Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid
+surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the
+sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great
+metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,
+strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea
+of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range
+of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the
+ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of
+the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in
+imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted
+fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum,
+where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he
+pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of
+Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly
+at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid
+another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation
+or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire
+some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of
+the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain?
+Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally
+divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft
+serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet
+give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into
+conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I
+have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the
+immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding
+sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good
+and true.'"
+
+We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the
+white-winged ships, "swift Herm� of traffic--ghosts of the infinite
+ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of
+which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed
+little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day
+destined to become the interpreter.
+
+We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were
+the sheets--destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical
+stuff--that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not
+destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the
+aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.
+
+"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a
+girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two
+little words--'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw
+her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the
+passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a
+double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain--pain and pleasure,
+doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and
+dead suns.
+
+"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be
+of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there
+never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the
+utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the
+myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar
+even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no
+doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of
+pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may
+revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual
+being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of
+generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the
+darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest
+moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7]
+
+[7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock.
+
+It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England
+in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the
+wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the
+future.
+
+Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in
+every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and
+the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at
+Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his
+fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his
+candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of
+art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in
+writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in
+dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of
+October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers,
+called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to
+lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of
+sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The
+_Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published
+in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of
+Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the
+intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to
+Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first
+time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans,
+and _kakemonos_ embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his
+whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon
+marbles."
+
+Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and
+evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy
+and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single
+theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text,
+seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature
+in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by
+Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he
+maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been
+written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy."
+
+Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to
+Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the
+creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached
+his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have
+wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that
+came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to
+think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been
+fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter,"
+indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters
+contributed to the _Commercial_ from New Orleans. There is a certain
+pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and
+character of _Midwinter_ made to his imagination. "What had I known of
+strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as
+hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had
+known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in
+corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and
+cheated and starved."
+
+Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his
+lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period
+intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain
+endeavoured to penetrate.
+
+Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven,"
+alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who
+had 'run away from a Monastery _in Wales_,' and who still had part of
+his monk's garb for clothing."
+
+In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency
+to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow,
+told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at
+the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had
+been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His
+brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says
+that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France,
+and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that
+Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to
+Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has
+been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic
+colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of
+every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of
+the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or
+destroyed.
+
+Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads
+to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and
+good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman
+Catholic institution of the _Petits Pr�cepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen.
+Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he
+took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he
+went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle
+Richard, who was living there at the time.
+
+Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor,
+disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort
+of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The
+church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore,
+not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as
+far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and
+renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.
+
+It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage
+of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris,
+where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to
+express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to
+clutch the Unattainable."
+
+A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital
+memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.
+
+It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war,
+when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and
+luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the
+world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin,"
+while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon
+Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists
+who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of
+their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_,
+and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were
+inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the
+painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, Fran�ois Millet, in
+poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing
+"The Sowers" and "The Angelus."
+
+Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of
+Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle
+it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's.
+Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however
+lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers.
+However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty
+to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.
+
+It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that
+ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the
+moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for
+itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of
+Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of
+Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of
+his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented
+exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit,
+which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and
+Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He
+could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves
+of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in
+praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the
+originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.
+
+It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert
+Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands,
+Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the
+same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about
+the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also
+frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which
+he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"--"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes
+later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.
+
+In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who
+had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed
+to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he
+was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's
+brother-in-law.
+
+It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to
+propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have
+well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any
+inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+                               CINCINNATI
+
+     "... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus
+     and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the
+     Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every
+     one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the
+     Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't
+     kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and
+     I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my
+     soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome
+     question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply
+     telling her, 'I don't know.'"[8]
+
+[8] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+
+In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later,
+Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English
+printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I
+asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know
+anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay
+you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can
+feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming
+department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of
+tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr.
+Watkin's frugal meals."
+
+In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation
+that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his
+shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in
+the year 1859.
+
+"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"
+
+"To write, sir."
+
+"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first,
+try your hand at writing later on."
+
+Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied
+reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge
+of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to,
+but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other
+than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one
+time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy,
+Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant,
+regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's
+weird tales.
+
+The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely
+near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had
+befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy,
+and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself
+was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a
+something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air
+of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says,
+hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each
+other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a
+ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his
+printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned
+at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality,
+and conceived an immediate affection for the boy.
+
+Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left
+France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop
+in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati.
+
+Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of
+events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In
+his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had
+been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself
+in considerable difficulties.
+
+Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he
+tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the
+names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is
+sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading
+of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian
+publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the
+same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago
+in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food,
+he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian
+peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of
+brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the
+vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a
+beauty and charm that never were hers--and under the title of "My First
+Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers.
+
+After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have
+touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of
+misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement
+in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he
+had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to
+seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot."
+
+"My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson,
+when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very
+lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the
+apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.
+
+"I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew
+nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out
+of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's
+photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had
+to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then
+I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to
+sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen
+from the house."
+
+This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as
+having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister
+and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses,
+unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at
+that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen.
+
+His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft,
+delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his
+hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure
+of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the
+frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he
+thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were
+of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining
+stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures
+like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The
+horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they
+were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was,
+yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did
+not.
+
+"I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a
+business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling
+the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary
+calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph
+Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I
+looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was touchy--went
+off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends refused to do anything
+further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of doors. At last I became
+a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires, shovelled coals, etc., in
+exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on the floor of the
+smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half years, finding time
+to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap Weekly
+Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for them. I tried other
+occupations also--canvassing, show-card writing, etc. These brought
+enough to buy smoking tobacco and second-hand clothes--nothing more."
+
+It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never
+applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are
+not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop,
+with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even
+sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a
+disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of
+money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry
+Molyneux's brother-in-law.
+
+In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"[9] Dr. George Milbury Gould
+alludes to this gentleman in the following terms:--
+
+[9] Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
+
+"There is still living, an Irishman, to whom Lafcadio was sent from
+Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was
+placed. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870."
+
+"He was not sure," says Gould in his account of an interview with Mr.
+Cullinane, "whether Mrs. Brenane was really Hearn's grand-aunt; the fact
+is, he declared that he knew nothing, and no one knew anything true of
+Hearn's life. Asked why the lad was shipped to him, he replied, 'I do
+not know--I do not even know whether he was related to my
+brother-in-law, Molyneux, or not.'"
+
+From these statements Gould infers that the boy couldn't stop in any
+school to which he was sent, that he was apparently an unwelcome charge
+upon his father's Irish relations. Every one, indeed, who had anything
+to do with him made haste to rid themselves of the obligation.
+
+The friendship with Mr. Watkin, the old English printer, was destined to
+last for the term of Hearn's life.
+
+Many of Hearn's friends in America have insinuated that Mr. Watkin
+exaggerated the strength of the tie that bound him to Lafcadio Hearn;
+but Hearn's letters to his sister bear out all the statements made in
+the introduction to the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." Even
+when Hearn succeeded in obtaining occupation elsewhere, he would return
+to Mr. Watkin's office during leisure hours, either for a talk with his
+friend, or, if Mr. Watkin was out, for a desultory reading of the books
+in the "library," the appellation by which the two or three shelves
+containing Mr. Watkin's heterogeneous collection was dignified. He was
+of no use in Mr. Watkin's business owing to defective eyesight, but when
+he returned after his day's work elsewhere, literary, political and
+religious subjects were discussed and quarrelled over.
+
+As was now and afterwards his custom with his friends, in spite of daily
+intercourse, Hearn kept up a frequent correspondence with Mr. Watkin.
+This correspondence has been edited and published by Mr. Milton Bronner
+under the title of "Letters from the Raven." Edgar Allan Poe had died in
+1849, but the influence of his weird and strange genius was still
+pre-eminent in America. Early in their acquaintance Hearn established
+the habit of addressing Mr. Watkin as "Old Man" or "Dad," while on the
+other hand the boy, in consequence of his sallow complexion, black hair,
+and admiration for Poe's works, was known as the "Raven." During the
+long years of their correspondence, a drawing of a raven was generally
+placed in lieu of signature when Lafcadio wrote to Mr. Watkin. Many of
+these pen-and-ink sketches interspersed with other illustrations here
+and there through the letters show considerable talent for drawing, of a
+fantastic sort, that might have been developed, had Hearn's eyesight
+permitted, and had he not nourished other ambitions.
+
+Some of the letters are simply short statements left on the table for
+Mr. Watkin's perusal when he returned home, or a few lines of nonsense
+scribbled on a bit of paper and pinned on a door of the office.
+
+Often when Hearn was offended by some observation, or a reprimand
+administered by the older man, he would "run away in a huff." Mr.
+Watkin, who was genuinely attached to the erratic little genius and
+understood how to deal with him, would simply follow him, tell him not
+to be a fool, and bring him back again.
+
+In the fourth autobiographical fragment, found amongst Hearn's papers
+after his death, is one entitled "Intuition." He there alludes to Watkin
+as "the one countryman he knew in Cincinnati--a man who had preceded him
+into exile by nearly forty years."
+
+In a glass case at the entrance to a photographer's shop, Hearn had come
+across the photograph of a face, the first sight of which had left him
+breathless with wonder and delight.... The gaze of the large dark eyes,
+the aquiline curve of the nose, the mouth firm but fine--made him think
+of a falcon, in spite of the delicacy of the face.... He stood looking
+at it, and the more he looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed
+to grow like a fascination. But who was she? He dared not ask the owner
+of the gallery. To his old friend Watkin, therefore, he went and at once
+proposed a visit to the photographer's. The picture was as much a puzzle
+to him as to Hearn.
+
+For long years the incident of the photograph passed from Hearn's memory
+until, in a Southern city hundreds of miles away, he suddenly perceived,
+in a glass case in a druggist's shop, the same photograph.
+
+"Please tell me whose face that is," he asked.
+
+"Is it possible you do not know?" responded the druggist. "Surely you
+are joking?"
+
+Hearn answered in the negative. Then the man told him--it was that of
+the great tragedienne, Rachel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cincinnati is separated from Kentucky by the Ohio. It is there but a
+narrow river, and the Cincinnati folk were wont to migrate into Kentucky
+when there were lectures on spiritualism, revivalist meetings, or
+political haranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to
+make the journey when the day's work was done.
+
+Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of thought.
+We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle" as well
+as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its astral
+visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of
+tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects
+through space.
+
+These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later,
+Hearn was on the staff of the _Enquirer_ as night reporter, his "Dad"
+often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as the
+water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi valley.
+
+At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the _Enquirer_ staff
+visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's Home"
+(he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati where
+business people of small means spend their declining years. An account
+of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The writer
+described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many pigeon-holes,
+holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels of Tual"--the
+letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman tottered when the
+reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings, and as he
+balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told, in a voice
+heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and how their
+friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition with the
+years.
+
+"I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloomy
+views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny
+reminded me of Poe at his best--or worst, as you might call it; only, in
+my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to my place
+when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a raven
+varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour he was
+in when he sketched it."
+
+Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can hardly
+be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of his
+statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to see
+him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be quite
+accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having spent
+nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures after his
+arrival, of his having worked as type-setter and proof-reader for the
+Robert Clarke Co., before seeking employment at Mr. Watkin's office.
+
+It was while he was sleeping on the bed of paper shavings behind Mr.
+Watkin's shop that he acted as private secretary to Thomas Vickers,
+librarian in the public library at Cincinnati. He mentions Thomas
+Vickers at various times in his letters to Krehbiel, and refers to rare
+books on music and copies of classical works to be found at the library.
+
+During all this period, wandering from place to place, endeavouring to
+find employment of any kind, the boy's underlying ambition was to obtain
+a position on the staff of one of the large daily newspapers, and thus
+work his way to a competency that would enable him to devote himself to
+literary work of his own.
+
+"I believe he would have signed his soul away to the devil," one of his
+colleagues says, "to get on terms of recognition with either Colonel
+John Cockerill, then managing editor of the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
+Mr. Henderson, the city editor of the _Commercial_." Though Hearn may
+not have signed his soul to the devil, he certainly sold his genius to
+ignoble uses when he wrote his well-known description of the tan-yard
+murder. His ambition however was gratified. A reporter who could thus
+cater to the public greed for horrors was an asset to the Cincinnati
+press.
+
+We have an account, given by John Cockerill, twenty years later, of
+Hearn's first visit to the _Enquirer_:--
+
+"One day there came to the office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow,
+strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and
+bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding
+terms.
+
+"When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for
+outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in
+the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to what
+he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and
+tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted
+brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and
+indescribable.
+
+"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I
+was astonished to find it charmingly written....
+
+"From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote
+special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as
+anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him
+to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of
+the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work,
+for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper
+was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his
+prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit,
+scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more
+annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those
+days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as
+sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him
+as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense
+resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the
+beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither
+wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city
+staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive
+powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled
+about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out
+charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings
+fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth
+ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba
+dances."
+
+A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was
+Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous
+steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the
+city from that exalted position.
+
+Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the
+performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not
+listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there
+was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the
+climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that
+he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the
+remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.'
+Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished
+their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns
+describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained
+from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have
+seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose."
+
+Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the
+paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his
+wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them
+and to his fellow-reporters.
+
+After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in
+the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning,
+under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its
+wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations
+from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire.
+
+Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the
+Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create
+something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the
+latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified
+considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art,
+he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and
+finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right
+phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position,
+the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to
+vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined
+conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist
+of Hearn's quality.
+
+Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first
+translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification
+of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales,
+included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he
+undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de
+Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man
+cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I
+translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass
+without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I
+think nothing ought to be suppressed."
+
+As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech
+at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's
+productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and
+Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets
+and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the
+matter of social morality.
+
+When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp"
+was refused admittance to the pages of a San Francisco magazine as
+likely to shock the sentiments of its readers and injure the circulation
+of the periodical in consequence of the morals of the mother of the
+_Luck_, we are not surprised that Hearn's attempt to introduce the
+American public to the masterpieces of the French Impressionist School
+was foredoomed to failure. There is a certain na�ve, determined defiance
+of convention in his insistence on gaining admiration both from his
+friends and the public for productions that were really quite unsuited
+to general circulation at that time in America. We find him, for
+instance, recommending the perusal of "Mdlle. de Maupin" to a clergyman
+of the Established Church and sending a copy of Gautier's poems to Miss
+Bisland in New Orleans.
+
+"I shall stick," he says, "to my pedestal of faith in literary
+possibilities like an Egyptian Colossus with a broken nose, seated
+solemnly in the gloom of my own originality, seeking no reward save the
+satisfaction of creating something beautiful; but this is worth working
+for."
+
+It is a noteworthy fact and one that may be mentioned here that, in
+spite of his extraordinary mastery of the subtleties of the French
+language, he always spoke French with an atrociously bad accent. "He had
+a very bad ear," his friend, Henry Krehbiel, tells us in his article on
+"Hearn and Folk Music," "organically incapable of humming the simplest
+tune; he could not even sing the scale, a thing that most people do
+naturally."
+
+From these Cincinnati days dates Hearn's hatred of the drudgery of
+journalism, "a really nefarious trade," he declared later; "it dwarfs,
+stifles and emasculates thought and style.... The journalist of to-day
+is obliged to hold himself in readiness to serve any cause.... If he can
+enrich himself quickly and acquire comparative independence, then,
+indeed, he is able to utter his heart's sentiments and indulge his
+tastes...."
+
+Amongst his colleagues on the staff of the _Enquirer_ Hearn was not
+popular. He was looked upon as what Eton boys call a "sap"; his
+fussiness about punctuation and style, soon earned for him the sobriquet
+of "Old Semi-Colon." This meticulous precision on the subject of
+punctuation and the value of words remained a passion with him all his
+life. He used to declare he felt about it as a painter would feel about
+the painting of his picture. He told his friend, Tunison, that the word
+"gray" if spelt "grey" gave him quite a different colour sensation.
+
+We remember his delightful outburst in a letter to Chamberlain, that has
+been so often quoted. "For me words have colour, form, character: they
+have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations;--they have moods, humours,
+eccentricities:--they have tints, tones, personalities," etc., etc.
+
+Though Hearn did not get on with others of the newspaper staff, he
+formed ties of intimacy with several choice spirits then moving in the
+best literary circles of Cincinnati and now well known in the literary
+life of the United States.
+
+Henry Krehbiel, recognised in England and America as an eminent music
+lecturer and critic, was one of his most intimate friends. Joseph
+Tunison was another; he afterwards became editor of the _Dayton
+Journal_, and, as well as Krehbiel, wrote sympathetically of the little
+Irishman after his death, expressing indignation at the scurrilous
+attacks made upon his reputation by several papers in the United States.
+"He was a wonderfully attractive personality, full of quaint learning,
+and a certain unworldly wisdom. He had a fashion of dropping his friends
+one by one; or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing;
+whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit it
+would be hard to say. But he never spoke ill of them afterwards. It was
+not his way to tell much about himself; and what he did say was let out
+as if by accident in the course of conversation on other topics.... It
+was impossible to be long in his company without learning that his early
+years had been years of bitterness. His reminiscences of childhood
+included not only his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, but also a
+beautiful blonde lady, who had somehow turned his happiness to misery."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+                              VAGABONDAGE
+
+     "Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black skin that
+     remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to
+     me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should
+     it not be beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is,
+     and has been so acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced
+     slave-owning races. Either Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps,
+     told the world that after long living in Africa, the sight of
+     white faces produced something like fear (and the evil
+     spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost
+     their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the
+     fairer, the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in
+     the North, of its kind. But it is not, surely, comparable
+     with the wonderful beauty of colour in other races."[10]
+
+[10] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin
+& Co.
+
+
+As to Hearn's more intimate life at this time there are many
+contradictory accounts. Published facts and the notoriety of legal
+proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and generally manage to work
+their way through any deposit of inaccurate scandal or imaginative
+rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set forth; otherwise how
+emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by discipline and
+self-control out of the depths into which at this time he fell?
+
+The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman,
+"Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries,
+which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of
+his unbalanced mental equipment.
+
+On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing
+reporter's work for the _Enquirer_ he fell under the "Shadow of the
+Ethiopian."
+
+In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain
+was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown
+off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through
+the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental
+vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and struggle.
+
+"He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs.
+Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I
+do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint
+in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat
+extremes of hate and love--a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature.
+Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had
+been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a
+different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood
+that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and
+lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If
+we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been
+better for those dependent on us."
+
+The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged. Hearn,
+then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to return from
+work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the morning. She was a
+handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed
+him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the
+circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and
+compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near
+Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863
+President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted
+into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself.
+
+In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She
+saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they
+talked much of her early days and years of slavery.
+
+His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no one
+so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave
+herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found
+himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible
+position.
+
+After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to
+assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books.
+The _Enquirer_ had articles running through several issues in 1906 on
+the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after his
+death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws of
+Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage
+between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone
+through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto,
+or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole."
+
+It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his work
+called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it would
+have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of French
+writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so great an
+influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for alien races
+and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness, primitive impulses,
+as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and admiration of strange
+people, were a vital part of the impressionist creed, constituted,
+indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations of their unwholesome
+opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared his preference for the
+women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's earlier novels were but the
+histories of love affairs with women of "dusky races," either Eastern or
+Polynesian.
+
+Hearn, as we have said before, was an exemplification of the theory of
+heredity. The fancy for mulattos, Creoles and orientals, which he
+displayed all his life, is most likely to be accounted for as an
+inheritance from his Arabian and oriental ancestors on his mother's
+side. He but took up the dropped threads of his barbaric ancestry.
+
+All his life he preferred to mix in the outer confines of society; the
+"levee" at Cincinnati; the lower Creoles and mixed races at New Orleans;
+fishermen, gardeners, peasants, were chosen by preference as companions
+in Japan. He railed against civilisation. "The so-called improvements in
+civilisation have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see,
+hear, or find anything out. You are improving yourself out of the
+natural world. I want to get back amongst the monkeys and the parrots,
+under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an eternally lilac and
+luke-warm sea--where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an
+exertion.... Civilisation is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery!
+Surely a palm two hundred feet high is a finer thing in the natural
+order than seventy times seven New Yorks."[11]
+
+[11] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+Hearn was a born rebel, and every incident of his life hitherto had
+goaded him into further rebellion against all constituted authority.
+That a race should be trampled upon by one regarding itself as superior
+was a state of things that he could not contemplate without a protest,
+and by his action he protested in the most emphatic manner possible. He
+never took into consideration whether it was wise to do so or not.
+Later, when the turbulent spirit of youth had settled down to accept the
+discipline of social laws and conventions, he took a very different view
+of the racial question in the United States and confessed the want of
+comprehension he had displayed on the subject. Writing years afterwards
+to a pupil in Japan, he alludes to the unfortunate incident in
+Cincinnati. He resolved to take the part of some people who were looked
+down upon in the place where he lived. He thought that those who looked
+down upon them were morally wrong, so he went over to their side. Then
+the rest of the people stopped speaking to him, and he hated them. But
+he was then too young to understand. The trouble was really caused by
+moral questions far larger than those he had been arguing about.
+
+Hearn was certainly correct in thinking that, from the point of view of
+the people amongst whom he was living, an attempt to legalise a union
+with a coloured woman was an unpardonable lapse from social law. Not
+only then, but for years afterwards, public opinion was strongly
+influenced against him in consequence of this lamentable incident. Even
+at the time of his death, in 1904, a perfect host of statements and
+distorted legends exaggerating all his lapses from conventional
+standards were raked up. Amongst other accusations, they declared that
+when in New Orleans he was the favoured admirer of Marie Levaux, known
+as "The Voodoo Queen."
+
+Page Baker, the editor of the _Times Democrat_ immediately came forward
+to defend Hearn from the charge. Referring to the Voodoo Queen, the
+article says: "All this wonderful tale is based upon the fact that
+Hearn, like every other newspaper man in New Orleans who thought there
+might be a story in it, entered into communication with a negro woman,
+who called herself 'Marie Levaux,' and pretended, falsely as was
+afterward shown, to know something of the mysteries of Voodooism.
+
+"Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on investigating
+for himself what he wrote about; but what the _Sun_ states is not only
+untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern city like New
+Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If Hearn had been
+the man the _Sun_ says he was, he could not have held the position he
+did a week, much less the long years he remained in this city.... He
+certainly was not conventional in the order of his life any more than he
+was in the product of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and
+silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge upon him."
+
+In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the _Enquirer_, and in
+the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the _Commercial_, but he had
+too seriously wounded the susceptibilities of society in Cincinnati to
+make existence any longer comfortable, or, indeed, possible. The
+uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit his delicate
+constitution. He longed to get away.
+
+Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great
+South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were
+evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New
+Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey
+north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South,
+his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a
+November morning, were oddly connected with _Jean ah-Poquelin_. Even
+before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond the
+wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar sheds,
+to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion.
+
+A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes of the
+statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any difference of
+opinion with the editor of the _Commercial_. In fact, money for the
+journey was given to him as well as a roving commission for letters from
+Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+                                MEMPHIS
+
+     "So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of
+     Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they
+     will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the
+     Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns of
+     wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes
+     bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the perfume
+     of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot
+     help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea
+     mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that
+     moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed--vivifying,
+     illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion--the
+     sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple.
+     You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when
+     the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ
+     ..."[12]
+
+[12] Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
+Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
+
+
+It was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio Hearn, with forty dollars in
+his pocket and a head full of dreams, started for Memphis on his way to
+New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr. Edward Henderson, editors of the
+_Commercial_, and his old friend, Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami
+depot to bid him God speed.
+
+Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio
+rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey
+from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced,
+and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several
+days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication
+in the northern city he had left was Henry Watkin. Hieroglyphs of
+ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in
+moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis,
+that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost
+defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions.
+
+On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In
+a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its
+head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His
+finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a
+day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to
+lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel.
+
+I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias
+Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this
+time to the _Commercial_. These letters, his first professional work,
+except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St.
+Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging
+industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit,
+giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which,
+combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed
+him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day.
+
+A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the
+identification in the files of the _Commercial_ of these "Midwinter"
+letters.
+
+He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the
+Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered
+windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up
+appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted
+about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It
+gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great
+misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came,
+the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden
+uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of
+stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy
+brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists
+lingering like shades upon its banks.
+
+"Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial
+Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and
+heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would
+appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus."
+
+Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at
+Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough,
+rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the
+life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical
+pioneer--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a
+kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation."
+
+Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a
+storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the
+Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading
+army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild
+charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that
+the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader,
+were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union."
+
+To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking
+the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the
+cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the
+_Thompson Dean_ there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every
+corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy
+spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at
+night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following
+him in the dark.
+
+It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself alone
+in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary hours of
+the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from
+vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am
+writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and
+perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is
+accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose
+you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would
+write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again,
+only by years--until the times and places of old friendships were
+forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams.
+
+At last the New Orleans steamer, the _Thompson Dean_, arrived, and Hearn
+floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and also,
+inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the flood-tide of
+his genius. A letter contributed to the _Commercial_, describing the
+"Fair Paradise of the South," the great sugar country, in which he now
+found himself, shows how he was gaining in the manipulation of his
+material, also gaining in the power of appreciating the splendour of the
+vision, the inmost ultimate secret Nature ever reveals to those who can
+comprehend and decipher it.
+
+As the little half-blind genius sat on the cotton bales on the deck of
+the _Thompson Dean_ those autumn days, peering forth one moment, the
+next with nose close to the paper, his pen scratching rapidly,
+describing the marvellous pictures, setting down the impressions that
+slipped by on either hand, all the joy of an imprisoned tumultuous soul
+set free, mentally and morally free, must have come to him. It breathes
+in every line, in every paragraph of his work. And not only was this
+passionate joy his, but also the exhilarating assurance of knowing that
+by self-denial, industry and the determination to succeed he had
+achieved and perfected the power to describe and expound the marvellous
+pageant to others. From the horizon widening in front of him, through
+the "Great South Gate," from "The Gulf" and the Tropics, from Martinique
+and Florida came the health-giving breeze, carrying on its wings
+courage, regeneration, and the promise of future recognition and fame.
+
+Many were his backslidings, even to the extent of meditating suicide
+during the first years of his sojourn in New Orleans, but never did he
+fall so morally low as at Cincinnati. That life of sordidness and
+ignominy was left behind, the unclean spirit exorcised and cast forth!
+He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set
+throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and
+response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man
+again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise
+on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight
+of his soul.
+
+Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the page
+athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the _Commercial_; some magic,
+bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor, inducing him
+to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his "Ozias Midwinter"
+correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the ordinary reading
+public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+                              NEW ORLEANS
+
+     "The infinite gulf of blue above seems a shoreless sea, whose
+     foam is stars, a myriad million lights are throbbing and
+     flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with
+     perfume prevails over the land,--made only more impressive by
+     the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy
+     voices of business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton
+     presses closed, and the city is half empty. So that the time
+     is really inspiring. But I must wait to record the
+     inspiration in some more energetic climate."
+
+
+It is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin that we are able to follow his
+more intimate feelings and mode of life at this period of his career. He
+was at first extravagantly enthusiastic about the quaint beauty and
+novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the
+climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the
+city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was
+to be found in this half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her
+pitiful decay, it still was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view
+of New Orleans was soon dissipated by pressing financial anxiety.
+
+He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of
+beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for
+twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to
+sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds,
+as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need
+of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was
+unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper
+correspondence.
+
+Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of
+residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of
+Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven
+sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes
+himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed
+with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to
+the fire, smoking his pipe of "_terre Gambi�se_," conjuring up fancies
+of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while a "voice
+from the far tropics called to him across the darkness."
+
+It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he
+started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his
+sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three
+days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of
+the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and
+brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate,
+it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for
+mastering the ignoble necessity for making expenditure tally with
+revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with
+the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a
+fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in
+the matter of ways and means.
+
+Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his
+literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his
+shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only
+enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a
+penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_
+hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his
+helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business
+affairs from sending a reply for some weeks.
+
+His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time,
+surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched
+close by.
+
+"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when
+referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty
+and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American
+city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter
+that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for
+the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American
+city appals me--because I remember."
+
+The _Hermes_ of �schylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer
+of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The
+same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not
+only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows
+it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was
+absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and
+eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and
+expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in
+any other city in the world.
+
+From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's
+Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can
+conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its
+multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric
+fa�ades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its
+picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves,
+dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out
+of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green
+batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron,
+framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine
+the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as
+they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses
+decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels,
+American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards
+and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings.
+
+We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river
+bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of
+the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow
+of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria
+and the Gulf.
+
+He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal
+splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide
+its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left
+untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined,
+refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to
+allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.
+
+We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through
+the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the
+great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow
+as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors
+from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus,
+Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing
+the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the
+face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves
+at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New
+Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as
+their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to
+distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the
+antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a
+vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some
+of his oranges, a dozen at six cents.
+
+From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the
+representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where
+plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the
+ancient r�gime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory
+from the carven stone.
+
+Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the
+levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living
+iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground,
+with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon
+teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the
+more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the
+anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner
+in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of
+the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The
+lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale
+was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it
+into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws
+closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened,
+flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five
+inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to
+disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw
+remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I
+thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible
+yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque,
+through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed."
+
+The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to
+Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit
+to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of
+futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their
+country that had sold them for expediency.
+
+With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of
+those who had once been opulent--the princely misery that never doffed
+its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on bread and
+orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an
+invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the _mont
+de pi�t�_) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the pretty misery,
+young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too jocosely to have
+its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers,
+and crying for hunger after they were gone.
+
+Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn
+mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue.
+
+During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various
+intervals contributed letters to the _Commercial_. Now that his genius
+has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the
+autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value;
+but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of
+the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting.
+The American public wanted a clear and dispassionate view of political
+affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect
+trade in the state of Ohio.
+
+We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following,
+and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant
+by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:--
+
+"I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is
+not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty'
+serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of
+all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of
+silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?"
+
+In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited
+to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on
+political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion
+that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans
+signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an
+opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of
+earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself
+acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be
+credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so
+frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part
+was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head
+above water until regular work came his way.
+
+Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth
+birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file
+of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery
+in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway
+by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments.
+Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some
+unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness
+and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which,
+instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid
+frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this
+he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr.
+Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been
+through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when
+twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he
+said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in
+retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he
+damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that
+gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he
+disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same
+place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for
+the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow
+and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a
+broken capital of the Parthenon."
+
+About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city,
+desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a
+severe attack of "dengue" fever.
+
+"I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson.
+It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken
+city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky
+bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river,
+its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with
+vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale
+smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each
+day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the
+faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles,
+pillars of verandahs, lamps over government letter-boxes, glimmered the
+white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And
+lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after
+sunset.
+
+After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to
+insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he
+had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected.
+
+"I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no
+friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor
+failed," he tells his sister.
+
+In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences,
+he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a
+sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began
+within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair,
+between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in
+their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a
+coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self
+something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and
+human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart
+and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth
+living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up
+the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish
+tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the
+infinite world.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+                             WIDER HORIZONS
+
+     "There are no more mysteries--except what are called hearts,
+     those points at which individuals rarely touch each other,
+     only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a
+     ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what
+     lies out of soul-sight."[13]
+
+[13] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+
+The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf
+Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person
+in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost
+stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months
+his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular
+literary work.
+
+Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic
+admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection,
+and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from
+Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is
+said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him
+the book was dedicated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the yellow fever had passed away "there were plenty of vacancies
+waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his sister....
+
+A daily newspaper called the _Item_ was at that time issued in New
+Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its production,
+"items" taken from European and American sources filling most of its
+columns. Hearn described it as a poor little sheet going no farther
+north than St. Louis.
+
+He was offered the assistant-editorship; the leisure that he found for
+literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the
+smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as
+he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more
+consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and
+weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing
+with strange characters, invaluable as literary material--Creoles,
+Spaniards, Mexicans--all that curious, heterogeneous society peculiar to
+New Orleans.
+
+If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to
+place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so
+in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest
+pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous
+tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and
+throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and
+outcasts from the world of so-called respectability.
+
+At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same roof
+as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened
+windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious
+shrine. This was quite sufficient to associate his name with hers, and
+many were the unfounded rumours--Nemesis of the unfortunate episode with
+Althea Foley at Cincinnati--which floated northwards regarding the
+manner of his life.
+
+Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this
+time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and
+in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry
+of ancient India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and
+emotion, the illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of
+annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of
+occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the _Item_ by weird and
+mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds,
+considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing
+attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own genius.
+
+The routine of his life at this time is given in letters written to his
+"old Dad" and his friend, Krehbiel.
+
+The same ascetic scorn for material comfort, heritage of his oriental
+ancestry, seems to have distinguished him at this period in New Orleans,
+as later in Japan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the
+office, "concocting devilment" for the _Item_, his Spanish lessons with
+Jos� de Jesus y Preciado, the "peripatetic blasphemy," as he named him
+afterwards, dinner at a Chinese restaurant for an infinitesimal sum, an
+hour or two spent at second-hand book-stalls, and home to bed. There is,
+I am told, an individual, Armand Hawkins by name, owner of an ancient
+book-store at New Orleans, still alive, who remembers the curious little
+genius, with his prominent eyes, wonderful knowledge on all sorts of
+out-of-the-way subjects recounted in a soft, musical voice, who used to
+come almost daily to visit his book-store. He it was who enabled Hearn
+to get together the library about which there has been so much
+discussion since his death. Next to his love of buying old books,
+Hearn's great indulgence seems to have been smoking, not cigars, but
+pipes of every make and description.
+
+The glimpses we get of him from his own letters and from reminiscences
+collected from various people in New Orleans all give the same
+impression. A Bohemian love of vagabondage, picking up impressions here
+and there, some of which were set down in pencil, some in ink; as far as
+his eyesight would permit, many were the sketches made at this time.
+None of them have been preserved, except the very clever Mephistophelian
+one sent to Mr. Watkin and reproduced in the volume entitled "Letters
+from the Raven." "He was a gifted creature," says a lady who knew him at
+this time. "He came fluttering in and out of our house like a shy moth,
+and was adored by my children."
+
+He had no ambitions, no loves, no anxieties, sometimes a vague unrest
+without a motive, sometimes a feeling as if his heart were winged and
+trying to soar; sometimes a half-crazy passion for a great night with
+wine and women and music; but the wandering passion was strongest of
+all, and he felt no inclination to avail himself of the only anchor
+which keeps the ship of a man's life in port.... Nights were so liquid
+with tropic moonlight, days so splendid with green and gold, summer so
+languid with perfume and warmth, that he hardly knew whether he was
+dreaming or awake.
+
+In 1881, Hearn succeeded in becoming a member of the staff of the
+leading New Orleans paper, the _Times Democrat_, "the largest paper," he
+tells his sister, "in the Southern States." He now seemed to have
+entered on a halcyon period of life--congenial society, romantic and
+interesting surroundings. Penetrated with enthusiasm for the modern
+French literary school as he was, he here met intellects and
+temperaments akin to his own. Now he was enabled to get his translations
+from Gautier and Baudelaire printed, and read for the first time by an
+appreciative public. "Everybody was kind," he tells his sister; "I
+became well and strong, lived steadily, spent my salary on books. I was
+thus able to make up for my deficiencies of education.... I had only a
+few hours of work each day;--plenty of time to study. I wrote novels and
+other books which literary circles approved of."
+
+With Page Baker, the owner and editor-in-chief of the _Times Democrat_,
+he formed a salutary and enduring friendship. The very difference in
+character between the two seems to have made the bond all the more
+enduring. Page Baker was a man of great business capacity, and at the
+same time keen discrimination in literary affairs. From the first he
+conceived the highest opinion of Hearn's literary ability. However
+fantastic or out-of-the-way his contributions to the columns of the
+_Times Democrat_, they were always inserted without elision. Years
+afterwards, writing to him from Japan, Hearn declares, in answer to a
+panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his Japanese books, that the
+most delightful criticisms he ever had were Page Baker's own readings
+aloud of his vagaries in the "_T. D._" office, after the proofs came
+down, just fresh from the composition room, with the wet, sharp, inky
+smell still on the paper. Baker, apparently, in 1893 sent him
+substantial help, and Hearn writes thanking him from the bottom of his
+much-scarified heart. Often amidst the cramped, austere conditions of
+his existence in Japan, he recalled these days of communion with
+congenial spirits at New Orleans, and work with his colleagues at the
+_Times Democrat_ office. "Ghosts! After getting your letter last night I
+dreamed. Do you remember that splendid Creole who used to be your city
+editor--John----?--is it not a sin that I have forgotten his name? He
+sat in a big chair in the old office, and told me wonderful things,
+which I could not recall on waking."
+
+In a letter dated July 7, 1882, Hearn tells Mr. Watkin that he had
+entered into an arrangement with Worthington, the publisher, for the
+issuing of his translation of Gautier's stories made at Cincinnati. It
+was to cost him one hundred and fifty dollars, but there was an
+understanding that this money was to be repaid by royalties on the sale
+of the book and any extra profits. He announced his intention of going
+North in a few months by way of Cincinnati, as he wished to see
+Worthington about his new publication. Though he was making, he said,
+the respectable wage of thirty dollars a week for five hours' work a
+day, he felt enervated by the climate, incapable of any long stretch of
+work, and thought change to a northern climate for a bit might stimulate
+his intellectual powers. He then touched on the changes that passing
+years had wrought in his outlook on life. "Less despondent, but less
+hopeful; wiser a little and more silent; less nervous, but less merry;
+... not strictly economical, but coming to it steadily." His horizons
+were widening, the accomplishment of a fixed purpose in life was really
+the only pleasurable experience, and the grasp of a friendly hand the
+only real satisfaction of an existence that wisdom declared a delusion
+and a snare.
+
+Hearn at times indulged in exaggerated fits of economy, the one thought
+that animated him being the idea of freeing himself from the yoke of
+dependence on the whims of employers--from the harness of journalism. He
+made up his mind to keep house for himself, so hired a room in the
+northern end of the French quarter, and purchased a complete set of
+cooking utensils and kitchen ware. He succeeded in reducing his expenses
+to two dollars a week, and kept them at that (exclusive of rent),
+although his salary rose to thirty dollars a week. Having saved a
+respectable sum, he formed the fantastical idea of trying to keep a
+restaurant, run on the lines of the cheap Spanish and Chinese
+restaurants he had been wont to frequent. "Business--ye Antiquities";
+hard, practical business! he told Krehbiel; honourable, respectable
+business, but devoid of dreamful illusions. "Alas, this is no world for
+dreaming."
+
+The venture ended as might have been expected. Hearn had not inherited
+the commercial instincts of his ancestors who sold oil and wine in the
+Ionian Islands; his partner robbed him of all the money he had invested,
+and decamped, leaving him saddled with the restaurant and a considerable
+number of debts. A swindling building society seems to have absorbed the
+rest of his savings.
+
+After these two catastrophes the little man became almost comically
+terrified at financial enterprise of any kind, even the investment of
+money in dividend-paying concerns. When Captain Mitchell McDonald later,
+in Japan, endeavoured to induce him to put his money into various
+lucrative concerns, Hearn declared that he would prefer to lose
+everything he owned than submit to the worry of investing it. The mere
+idea of business was "a horror, a nightmare, a torture unspeakable."
+
+Though apparently only journalising and translating, Hearn was piling up
+experiences and sensations, not making use of them except in letters,
+but laying down the concrete and setting the foundation for his work in
+the West Indies and Japan. "The days come and go like muffled and veiled
+figures sent from a friendly, distant party; but they say nothing, and
+if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away."
+Emerson did not take into account those apparently infertile periods in
+an artist's life, when the days come and go, but though they pass
+silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their passage
+unproductive. How invaluable, for instance, was Hearn's study of Creole
+proverbs for his "Two Years in the French West Indies." How invaluable
+for his interpretation of the Orient were the studies he undertook for
+"Strange Leaves from Strange Literature," and his six small adaptations
+entitled "Chinese Ghosts."
+
+After several refusals "Stray Leaves" was accepted for publication by
+Osgood. He thus announced the fact to his friend Krehbiel:--
+
+"DEAR K. (Private),
+
+"'Stray Leaves,' etc., have been accepted by James R. Osgood and Co.
+Congratulate your little Dreamer of Monstrous Dreams,
+
+"Aschadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah,
+
+                             "Bismillah,
+                                            "Allah-hu-akbar."
+
+The book was dedicated to "Page M. Baker, Editor of the New Orleans
+_Times Democrat_."
+
+This series of small sketches is typical of the clarity of language and
+purity of thought that invariably distinguish Hearn's work; but it lacks
+the realism, the keenness of _choses vues_, so characteristic of his
+Japanese sketches. There is none of the haunting, moving tragedy and
+ghostliness, the spiritual imagination and introspection of "Kokoro" or
+the "Exotics." Though polished and scholarly, showing refinement in the
+use of words, the interest is remote and visionary, permeated here and
+there also with a certain amount of Celtic sentimentality, a "Tommy
+Moore" flavour, somewhat too saccharine in quality. The one, for
+instance, called "Boutimar" treats of a very hackneyed subject, the
+offering of the water of youth, and life without end, to Solomon, and
+the sage's refusal, because of the remembrance suggested by Boutimar
+that he would outlive children, friends and all whom he loved; therefore
+"Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the
+cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder
+of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond
+dew of the heart, which is tears."
+
+"Chinese Ghosts," though distinguished also by that _soigneux_ flavour
+that gives a slightly artificial impression, holds far more the
+distinctive flavour of Hearn's genius. His own soul is written into the
+legend of "Pu the potter." "Convinced that a soul cannot be divided, Pu
+entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit
+of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for
+the soul of his Vase."
+
+By the publication of the "Letters from the Raven" we are enabled to
+push those to Krehbiel, published by Miss Bisland, into place, and
+assign fairly accurate dates to each of them. He tells Mr. Watkin that
+he was six months before finding a fixed residence. In August, 1878, he
+writes inviting him to come in the autumn to pay him a visit, and
+telling him of delightful rooms with five large windows opening on
+piazzas, shaded by banana-trees. This apparently is the house in St.
+Louis Street, which he describes to Krehbiel. Miss Bisland places it
+almost at the beginning of the series, but it must have been written at
+a considerably later period. How picturesque and vivid is his
+description! With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway,
+with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their
+dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a hoary
+dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball,"
+with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and
+rising to the ceiling.
+
+Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said
+to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom
+the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with
+only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his
+genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw,
+but an immaterial and spiritual world as well.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XI
+                  LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
+
+     "Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and
+     fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties
+     and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would
+     write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem
+     strange in words, appears very strange upon paper."
+
+
+Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed
+with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed,
+for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various
+friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland
+(Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the
+many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during
+the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of
+publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine
+that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which
+his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the
+outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and
+versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to
+pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and
+sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles,
+his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily
+intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and
+a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting
+considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and
+thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity.
+
+To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to
+plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it
+was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work.
+Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn
+would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion,
+especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own
+room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he
+habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument;
+these he would leave later on Gould's study table.
+
+To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face
+to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In
+his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and
+sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour.
+Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature,
+inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being
+egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd
+specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed amongst
+an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a
+necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought;
+his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of
+spirit--perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding
+him--a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted
+country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of
+temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of
+remarkable picturesqueness and reality.
+
+The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given
+possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely
+different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am
+not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual
+petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of
+relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the
+world.
+
+Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore,
+been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely
+interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto
+shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories,
+incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and
+people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to
+outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his
+half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and
+intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and
+unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the
+charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you
+would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering
+friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all,
+in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private
+inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his
+undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a
+Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are
+addressed.
+
+It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life
+that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him
+and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled
+the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual
+struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to
+Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque
+silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western
+city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom
+hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant
+to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting
+higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day
+in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever
+cometh.'"
+
+He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and
+ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the
+Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles,
+publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist,
+he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of
+the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss
+Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her
+magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable."
+
+Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a
+particle of literary jealousy in his composition.
+
+To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old
+fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain
+qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an
+Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical.
+You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and
+labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I
+cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the
+thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think."
+
+Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically
+averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald
+not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an
+opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of
+the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the
+thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can
+see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others
+would reach the same standard.
+
+In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor
+Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most
+finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his
+boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College.
+
+He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his
+advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that
+give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in
+prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he
+says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one
+side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be
+sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a
+medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose.
+
+In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio
+Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing
+no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little
+man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make his a
+trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood
+or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to
+commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of
+the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not
+see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an
+extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and
+unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic
+theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though
+you were passing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape.
+You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round
+the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical
+passage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather
+was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than
+ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his
+possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude,
+others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others
+dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage
+the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries,
+freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen.
+
+Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him
+hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance
+and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of
+people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other
+day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan
+unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there
+came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and
+sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty,
+all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that
+voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back,
+and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14]
+
+[14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he
+could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having
+learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson,
+Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating
+the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at Kumamoto
+entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's
+poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because
+Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson
+had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all
+honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century,"
+because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" reminded him of Miss
+Bisland. He pronounced Matthew Arnold to be "one of the colossal humbugs
+of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and an unutterably dreary essayist,"
+because at the moment he was animated by one of his intense enthusiasms
+for _Edwin_ Arnold, whose acquaintance Hearn had made during one of
+Arnold's visits to Japan. "Far the nobler man and writer, permeated with
+the beauties of strong faiths and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in
+some happier era, may bless mankind with the universal religion in
+perfect harmony with the truths of science, and the better nature of
+humanity."
+
+But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique or
+partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpassed, here and there
+expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when
+passing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like
+a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises
+suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of
+phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside
+the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are
+shimmering, a mass of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the
+dullest subjects--writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the subject
+of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain force, he
+suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and Shintoism.
+"There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and race
+feeling. I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a
+Polish brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells
+the story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still
+under the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least
+murmur,--'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands fell, but
+the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At last, old
+Steinmetz gave a signal--_the_ signal. The bugles rang out with the
+force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air forbidden ever to
+be sung or heard at other times--the national air (you know it)--'_No!
+Poland is not dead_!' And with that crash of brass all that lives of the
+brigade was hurled at the French batteries. Mechanical power, if
+absolutely irresistible, might fling back such a charge, but no human
+power. For old Steinmetz had made the mightiest appeal to those 'Polish
+brutes' that man, God, or devil could make, the appeal to the ghost of
+the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a
+thousand years."
+
+Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld
+Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some
+everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas,
+connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely
+recounted:--
+
+"'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years
+ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been
+surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed
+not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a
+stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then
+came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly
+sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense
+thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in
+tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang
+Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous,
+audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in
+my heart still."
+
+Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there
+were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance.
+Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among
+these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of
+Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysanth�me," Hearn retained the same
+admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman
+d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lema�tre or Anatole
+France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will
+have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die,
+one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read
+'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."
+
+Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of
+the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told
+us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an
+argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's
+criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement,
+repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his
+soft musical voice.
+
+A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject
+of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat
+apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the
+insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a
+flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so
+accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement.
+
+Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the
+biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the
+world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little
+boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in
+Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the
+Japanese kimono.
+
+At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of
+promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he
+was a much more responsible and important person than the little
+"brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office,
+turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
+doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in
+consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping
+gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his
+complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient
+features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes,
+the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the
+other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the
+disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in
+conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always
+photographed in profile looking down.
+
+In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and
+well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited
+the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the
+musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo
+University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and
+white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made
+his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal
+manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before
+the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I
+first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to
+begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice;
+seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much,
+and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind
+ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but
+nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be
+surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and
+whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected,
+companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was
+extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a
+physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his
+tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with
+velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and
+gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and
+you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly,
+he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He
+appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I
+found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in
+Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion,
+tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious.
+Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a
+foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in
+appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our
+acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any
+better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting."
+
+Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately
+protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy,
+diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting
+attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb
+themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they
+could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in the streets of
+Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a
+queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step,
+singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould
+tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional headgear for the
+enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel shirt, that
+he habitually wore.
+
+Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a
+starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as
+a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't
+wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do.
+"Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an
+article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts!
+Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in
+itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It
+represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious
+class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons
+sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."
+
+In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is
+unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing
+winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His
+wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject
+of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his
+Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have
+nothing that was not of the best make and quality.
+
+In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd,
+nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated
+voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean
+in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you
+came in contact with him.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+                     THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS
+
+     "The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses
+     and change them several times a day; and the multitude of
+     dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to
+     the multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she
+     was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was
+     of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of
+     the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and
+     people doubted their own senses when they saw these things
+     ... and the men who most admired her could not presume to
+     fall in love with her because that would have been absurd.
+     She had altogether too many souls."
+
+
+The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course
+of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he
+had hitherto known entered his life, an influence destined to last for
+close on a quarter of a century, from these New Orleans days until the
+month of September, 1904, when he died.
+
+In all the annals of literary friendships between men and women, it is
+difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory than
+this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange
+little Irish genius.
+
+Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more tender,
+none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and friendship, as
+told in his letters.
+
+The affection between Jean Jacques Amp�re and Madame R�camier is the one
+that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is
+reversed. Madame R�camier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth
+Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been
+something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable
+blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity,
+shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of
+affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him
+in the tussle of life.
+
+Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for
+Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his
+life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the
+unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable
+thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was
+disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his
+side.
+
+"There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik
+from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore,
+"whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well
+for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement."
+
+Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better
+self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed
+conviction that her love--as love is understood in common
+parlance--could never be his.
+
+And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare
+in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere
+friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not;
+she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her
+lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was
+offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a
+neophyte, also worshipped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner,
+ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family
+by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her
+parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of
+journalistic work in New Orleans.
+
+Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the _Times
+Democrat_. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the
+beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an
+appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed
+of what were known as "Hearn's admirers."
+
+His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange
+Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He
+also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then
+slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called
+them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them
+all--love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a
+thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant
+fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of
+green hashisch.
+
+One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse--
+
+               "My heart would hear her and beat
+                Had I lain for a century dead;--
+                Would start and tremble under her feet,
+                And blossom in purple and red."
+
+The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the _Times Democrat_.
+There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years,
+wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic"
+was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitchell
+McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to the
+expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor
+Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story
+in which I first used it--years and years ago. Don't return the
+thing--it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush."
+
+Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return
+the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead
+Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to
+deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is
+distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French
+Impressionist school.
+
+The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the
+unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of
+continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate
+every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by
+Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.
+
+A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love,
+yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his
+lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb
+the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the
+litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that
+which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor
+Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of
+music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and
+the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And
+at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by
+his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient
+place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle
+of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she,
+unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away
+forever.
+
+Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a
+period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The
+problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron.
+Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who
+preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence,
+dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his
+idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not
+obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself
+in the mediocrity to which she belonged.
+
+Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland
+had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange
+old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness,
+and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where
+she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a
+grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought,
+_une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could give the same
+sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the
+country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a
+particular variety of savage, that he could not understand--and was
+afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since
+then I have become grey and the father of three boys."
+
+For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's
+friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position
+of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to
+induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social
+unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this
+young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic
+beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems,
+he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby,
+has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But
+if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres fran�aises' (as
+Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a
+nicer copy...."
+
+Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her,
+mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her
+voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The
+gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom
+in the room--but in the future, which was black without stars!"
+
+In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for
+his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the
+same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature
+of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the
+copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the
+Tertiary epoch--three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most
+ancient branch of humanity."
+
+It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was
+written and contributed to _Harper's Magazine_ under the title of "Torn
+Letters."
+
+We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New
+York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she
+taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of
+circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and
+subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as
+you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to
+chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the
+memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best
+inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his
+genius and quickened his pen.
+
+I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when
+she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I
+looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in
+lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as
+he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers
+was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the
+Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for
+dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.
+
+In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the
+_Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent
+correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.
+
+She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think
+I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a
+pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much
+better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own
+personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does
+a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?
+
+"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow,
+but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at
+this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the
+nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of
+existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved
+simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of
+the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek
+romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic
+sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing
+but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case,
+this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work
+he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever
+attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was
+occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at
+highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches,
+the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details,
+that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and
+accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the
+descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being
+fragmentary and unfinished.
+
+After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of
+literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly,
+writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing
+her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope.
+
+"It is a formality--and you are you; and you are not a formality--but a
+somewhat--and I am only I."[15]
+
+[15] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland
+ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional
+life.
+
+During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies for
+his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two
+delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he
+was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to
+him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years.
+
+The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and
+pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a word:--
+
+"Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed solid was
+breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very
+foolish--made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter
+was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it
+is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the
+Unknown for Art's sake,--or rather, you _must_ obey them. The Spahi's
+fascination by the invisible forces was purely physical. I think I am
+right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a
+home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance
+compelling another change.
+
+"The carriage--no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or
+sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East
+River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I
+shan't put anybody's name to it."[16]
+
+[16] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to
+George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia.
+
+On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to
+call at the office of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. On her arrival at
+eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York
+for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey
+round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in
+competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss
+Bisland consented.
+
+After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she
+published her experiences in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. These
+contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are
+charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as
+the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period.
+
+Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that
+he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of
+a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers
+and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return.
+He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never
+audible in dreams.
+
+In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not
+I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in
+the _Tribune_ there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of
+unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,--an absurd sense of absolute
+loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for
+you to win your race--so that every one may admire you still more, and
+your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your
+portrait--in spite of you--appear in some French journal where they know
+how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one
+from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in
+succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of
+you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..."
+
+I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are
+any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of
+the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems
+almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give
+the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words
+but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the
+multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead
+within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face.
+
+"It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you--all the Me's
+that were--keep asking the Me that is, for something always
+refused;--and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot
+see--you can only feel; and I can see,--and I will not open to you,
+because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would
+be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep
+and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake
+up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in
+spite of yourself,--and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would
+come--and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ...
+what was it?
+
+"Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of
+it,--just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly
+exposed.... Will you ever be _like that always_ for any one being?--I
+hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at
+latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you
+will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the
+leaves."
+
+Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around
+the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of
+his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and
+then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and
+she married Mr. Wetmore.
+
+Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between the
+time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his
+professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the
+simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he
+think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the
+_jeune fille un peu farouche_, who in distant New Orleans days had
+understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's
+unsophisticated enthusiasm. She had written to him, and he gives her a
+whimsically pathetic answer, touching on memories, on thoughts, on
+aspirations, which had been a closed book for so long a period of time,
+and now, when re-opened, was seen to be printed as clearly on mind and
+heart as if he had parted with her but an hour before.
+
+About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September, 1904--the
+month in which he died--comes his last. He tells her that to see her
+handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was a great
+pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was undeserved.
+He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese Miscellany" which he
+had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its way, and perhaps you
+will later on find no reason to be sorry for your good opinions of the
+writer. I presume that you are far too clever to believe more than
+truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a few estimable
+people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...."
+
+He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing to
+her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear in
+book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on
+sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects
+and flowers, and queer small things--and leave the subject of the
+destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains
+will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the
+book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will
+recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof.
+
+"May all good things ever come to you, and abide."
+
+It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years, that
+he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any affection or
+sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may read," is this
+record of a devotion and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a
+century, lasting intact through fair years and foul, through absence,
+change of scene, even of nationality.
+
+               "Fear not, I say again; believe it true
+                That not as men mete shall I measure you...."
+
+Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for
+the estimation of human character and genius.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIII
+                          RELIGION AND SCIENCE
+
+     "For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor
+     yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man.
+     Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a
+     ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is
+     potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in
+     Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the
+     world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice
+     brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly
+     doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that
+     even now there does not remain one place on earth where life
+     has not been freely given for love or duty?"
+
+
+Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite
+marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of
+operations where effective work and fame awaited him.
+
+"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin.
+"Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little
+milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I
+have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor
+I may do well in Japan."
+
+When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the
+publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an
+artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was
+to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied
+from photographs, of the principal exhibits.
+
+On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In
+it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese
+department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a
+flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning;
+the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy
+hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting
+of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere
+copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense
+as did also the representations of the matchless mountain
+Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred
+different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of
+sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn,
+exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above
+stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled
+by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara.
+
+It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy
+world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of
+clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty
+day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he
+ascended Fuji-no-yama.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young
+Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at
+West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He
+was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn
+frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy
+was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last
+century.
+
+One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First
+Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately
+accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that
+day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the
+colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.
+
+The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest
+mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all
+human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated
+materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity,
+and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history
+of a sun."
+
+Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at
+various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness
+of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss
+the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with
+the offending individual.
+
+"A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
+rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a
+cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of
+tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The
+pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things
+visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity--all sensed
+existences--are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one
+infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...."
+
+This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first
+volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had
+taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like
+that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in
+darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of
+things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
+that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had
+appeared before.
+
+It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and
+philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in
+London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to
+have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the
+present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new
+survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of
+thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been
+proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher
+demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature.
+Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of
+Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific
+philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in
+his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral
+consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage
+of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately,
+moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than
+we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and
+faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put
+forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural
+selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it,
+"Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from
+which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were
+eliminated.
+
+These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring
+that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or
+pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as
+efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.
+
+In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and
+Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on
+Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man
+towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was
+concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and
+science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the
+learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us
+there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
+re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
+said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'"
+
+It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn,
+in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid
+most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had
+read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is
+disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of
+words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own
+wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only
+to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific
+facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.
+
+Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental
+religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical
+theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean
+only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great
+Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty."
+The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.
+
+Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to
+imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and
+self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after
+his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its
+picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away
+by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied.
+
+It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he
+emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he
+subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.
+
+Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no
+permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The
+opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound
+interest!"
+
+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 grass, 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 Mass 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 Mass,
+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 Shintoism 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 worship 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, asserting that
+the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--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 worship, the influence of spirits or
+ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same
+idea. "The real religion of Japan," 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 worship.' 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 _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason,
+who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of
+Japanese 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 worship.
+
+The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their
+heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all
+their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but
+practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every
+direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of
+modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every
+means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is
+not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at
+every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn
+describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead."
+
+Nature worship, the worship 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 Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their
+"ancestral spirits."
+
+In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form
+to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most
+ancient Japanese 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 Japan by the Shinto 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 �sthetic heart of
+Japan, 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 Japanese embroidery, they will show you
+that these traceries are fine Japanese 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 Japan," 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
+crashings.... 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, entitled, "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 assured,--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 passed, 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 space of ten years,
+subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the
+passage 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, entitled "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. "Nobody 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 Hell 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 snobs; 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 Vit�_."[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 friendship, 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 Japanese 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 passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."
+
+"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated
+
+                            "A mon cher ami,
+                             "L�OPOLD ARNOUX
+                  "Notaire � Saint Pierre, Martinique.
+
+"Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des
+sympathies �chang�es, de tout le charme d'une amiti� inalt�rable et
+inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle � l'�me 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.
+
+In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly
+after the great eruption of Mt. Pel�e 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 shine 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 destitution, 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 Japan. "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 entitled "Karma,"
+published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ after Hearn had left for Japan,
+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 sex, while
+absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect nature inspires a love that
+is fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman
+inspires a love that is half compassion; 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 Japan 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 passage 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, shivering 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.
+
+Japan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival
+Lowell, entitled "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 Japan was aroused, he followed her progress with
+the deepest interest. The Japanese constitution 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 r�gime.
+
+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
+institutions, 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
+                                 JAPAN
+
+     "... 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 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 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
+Japan 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,
+entitled "A Winter Journey to Japan," 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
+passengers.... 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, passing 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 illustrations. So
+irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's illustrations
+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
+Japan.
+
+The seventeen days that he passed 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
+passengers, 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 ship, 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 ca�ons, 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 Japan. 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 passed 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 Japan and the Japanese.... He loved their gods,
+their customs, their dress, their bird-like, quavering songs, their
+houses, their superstitions, 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 Japan 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 Japanese
+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 Japan," 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 passed 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 illustrations
+of the articles sent to the magazine, instead of the illustrations 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 Japanese 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 Japan, 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 competition, 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
+Japanese." On his arrival, Hearn thought of obtaining a position as
+teacher in a Japanese 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 Japan, without
+passing several years exclusively amongst the Japanese people.
+
+Chamberlain, however, saw at once that Hearn's capacities were far
+superior to those necessary for a private tutorship. Having been so long
+resident in Japan, and written so much upon the country, as well as
+occupying a professorship in Tokyo Imperial University, his influence in
+Japanese 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 Japan.
+
+On several occasions Professor Chamberlain held out the kindly hand of
+comradeship 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 Mitchell McDonald, Lafcadio dedicated his "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan."
+
+                             TO THE FRIENDS
+                 WHOSE KINDNESS ALONE RENDERED POSSIBLE
+                        MY SOJOURN IN THE ORIENT
+                  PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N.
+                                  AND
+                      BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ.
+                  EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOLOGY AND
+                  JAPANESE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY
+                                OF TOKYO
+                        I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES
+                              IN TOKEN OF
+                        AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE
+
+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 friendship. 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....
+I cannot help fearing that what you mean by 'justice and temperateness'
+means that you want me to write as if I were you, or at least to measure
+sentence or thought by your standard.... If I write well of a thing one
+day, and badly another, I expect my friend to discern that both
+impressions are true, and solve the contradiction--that is, if my
+letters are really wanted."
+
+The fact is that, if Hearn took up a philosophic or scientific opinion,
+he was determined to make all with whom he held converse share them, and
+if they did not do so at once, like the despotic oriental monarch, he
+would overturn the chessboard.
+
+"The rigid character of his philosophical opinions," says Chamberlain,
+"made him perforce despise as intellectual weaklings all those who did
+not share them, or shared them in a lukewarm manner, and his
+disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to
+find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable."
+
+It was principally during the last fourteen years of his life that Hearn
+acquired the unenviable name of being ungrateful, inconstant, and
+capricious. To those friends made in his youthful days of struggle and
+adversity he remained constant, but with the exception of Mitchell
+McDonald, Nishida Sentaro, and Amenomori, it is the same story of
+perversity and estrangement.
+
+An unceremonious entry into his house, without deference to ancient
+Japanese etiquette, which enjoined the taking off of boots and the
+putting on of sandals, a sneer at Shinto ancestor worship, a difference
+of opinion on Herbert Spencer, and Hearn would disappear actually and
+metaphorically. This proves his want of heart, you say. But a careful
+study of Hearn's "Wesen" will show that his apparent inconstancy did not
+arise from a change of affection, but because his very affection for the
+people he had turned from made the taut strands of friendship more
+difficult to reunite, especially for a person of his shy temperament.
+Which of us has not recognised the greater difficulty of making up a
+"tiff" with a friend for whom one cares deeply than with a person to
+whom one is indifferent? The tougher the stuff the more ravelled the
+edges of the tear, and the more difficult to join together.
+
+At Kobe, an incident was related to us by Mr. Young, his chief on the
+_Kobe Chronicle_ and a person to whom Hearn owed much and was attached
+by many ties of gratitude and friendship. A guest at dinner ventured to
+dissent from Hearn's opinion that the reverential manner in which people
+prostrated themselves before the mikado was in no way connected with
+religious principles. Hearn shrugged his shoulders, rose, walked away
+from the table, and nothing would induce him to return. He did not,
+indeed, enter Mr. Young's house again for some days, though doing his
+work at the office for the newspaper as usual.
+
+When Hearn left Tokyo to take up his appointment at Matsue, he was
+accompanied by his friend Akira, a young student and priest, who spoke
+English and could, therefore, act as interpreter. At Kobe they left the
+railway and continued their journey in jinrikishas, a journey of four
+days with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan.
+
+"Out of the city and over the hills to Izumo, the Land of the Ancient
+Gods!" The incantation is spoken, we find ourselves in the region of
+Horai--the fairyland of Japan--with its arch of liquid blue sky,
+lukewarm, windless atmosphere, an atmosphere enormously old, but of
+ghostly generations of souls blended into one immense translucency,
+souls of people who thought in ways never resembling occidental ways.
+
+Writing later to Chamberlain, Hearn acknowledged that what delighted him
+those first days in Japan was the charm of nature in human nature, and
+in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness,
+politeness ... for in Japan even hate works with smiles and pretty
+words.
+
+For the first time Hearn was not merely describing a sensuous world of
+sights and sounds, but a world of soft domesticity, where thatched
+villages nestled in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist
+temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above a congregation of
+thatched homesteads. Can anything be more delightful than his
+description of one of the village inns, with its high-peaked roof of
+thatch, and green-mossed eaves, like a coloured print out of Hiroshige's
+picture-books, with its polished stairway and balconies, reflecting like
+mirrored surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms
+fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid
+down. The old gold-flowered lacquer ware, the diaphanous porcelain
+wine-cups, the teacup holders, which are curled lotus leaves of bronze;
+even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the
+brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions; distant as it
+was from all art-centres, there was no object visible in the house which
+did not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty and form. "Indeed, wherever
+to-day in Japan one sees anything uninteresting in porcelain or metal,
+something commonplace and ugly, one may be almost sure that detestable
+something has been shaped under foreign influence. But here I am in
+Ancient Japan, probably no European eyes ever looked upon these things
+before."
+
+After he had submitted to being bathed by his landlord, as if he had
+been a little child, and eaten a repast of rice, eggs, vegetables and
+sweetmeats, he sat smoking his kiseru until the moon arose, peeping
+through the heart-shaped little window that looked out on the garden
+behind, throwing down queer shadows of tilted eaves, and horned gables,
+and delightful silhouettes. Suddenly a measured clapping of hands became
+audible, and the echoing of _geta_, and the tramping of wooden sandals
+filled the street. His companion, Akira, told him they were all going to
+see the dance of the Bon-odori at the temple, the dance of the Festival
+of the Dead, and that they had better go, too. This dance of the
+Festival of the Dead he describes in his usual graphic way: the ghostly
+weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet--above all, the flitting
+of the marvellous sleeves, apparitional, soundless, velvety as the
+flitting of great tropical bats. In the midst of the charmed circle
+there crept upon him a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted, until,
+recalled to reality by a song full of sweet, clear quavering, gushing
+from some girlish mouth, and fifty other voices joined in the chant.
+"Melodies of Europe," he ends, "awaken within us feelings we can utter,
+sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations
+behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant,
+totally unlike anything in western melody, impossible even to write in
+those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue?
+
+"And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be
+something infinitely more old than I, something not of only one place or
+time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the
+universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught
+spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in
+some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes,--all trillings of
+summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVI
+                                 MATSUE
+
+     "Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions
+     and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty
+     spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its
+     impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
+     Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which
+     the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of
+     heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith
+     have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive."
+
+
+The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue--birth-place of the
+rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion--was one of the
+happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career.
+
+His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as
+finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years
+afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read
+about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"--then he howled and
+wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was
+only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be
+kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however,
+though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of
+enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always
+make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work,
+the one which is most read and by which he is best known.
+
+Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the
+odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue
+was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick
+warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living
+force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still
+an animating power.
+
+How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day
+and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the
+first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled
+echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most
+pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the
+pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the
+hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people
+saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant
+vendors, the sellers of _daikon_ and other strange vegetables ... and
+the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of
+kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.
+
+Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long
+nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral
+sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an
+exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the
+sun's yellow rim came into sight.
+
+From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was
+packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old
+city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country
+round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples.
+
+One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at
+night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the
+feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint
+imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some
+communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the
+world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls,
+that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish
+little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day
+of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all
+waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant
+Land."
+
+Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy
+precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the
+spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their
+ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary
+urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family
+to which Hearn's future wife belonged.
+
+To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living
+centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing
+in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past--that religion that
+lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The
+magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him,
+working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion
+of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary
+mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the
+very heart and soul of ancient Japan.
+
+If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was
+called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this
+strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could
+create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had
+selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy
+cycle of its eternal utterance.
+
+The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in
+which the real development of his genius lay; the loose, quivering
+needle of thought, that had moved hither and thither, was now set in one
+direction. The stage he was treading, though at first he did not realise
+it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a drama with eternal and
+immutable forces as scene-shifters and curtain-raisers. The qualities
+that had enabled Japan to conquer China, and had placed her practically
+in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to analyse
+and explain; to interpret the curious myths of this great people of
+little men, who, shut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of
+years, had, out of their own inner consciousness, built up a code of
+discipline and behaviour that, in its self-abnegation, its sense of
+cohesion, and fidelity to law, throws our much-vaunted western
+civilisation into the shade. Hearn brought to bear upon the
+interpretation a rare power of using words, sympathetic insight, an
+earnest and vivid imagination that enabled him to comprehend the
+strongly accentuated characteristics of a race living close to the
+origins of life; barbaric, yet highly refined; superstitious, yet
+capable of adapting themselves to modern thought; playful as children,
+yet astounding in their heroic gallantry and patriotism. His genius
+enabled him to catch a glimpse of the indisputable truth that legend and
+tradition are a science in themselves, that, however grotesque, however
+fantastic primeval myths and allegories may be, they are indicative of
+the gradual evolution of the heart and mind of generations as they arise
+and pass away.
+
+An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of
+superstition, as compared with the utility of religion. In consequence
+of his having elected to live the everyday life, and enter into the
+ordinary interests and occupations of this strange people, as no
+occidental ever had before, he was enabled to see that many Japanese
+superstitions had a sort of shorthand value in explaining eternal and
+valuable things. When it would have been useless to preach to people
+vaguely about morality or cleanliness or ordinary rules of health, a
+superstition, a belief that certain infringement of moral law will bring
+direct corporal punishment, that maligned spirits will visit a room that
+is left unswept, that the gods will chastise over-excess in eating or
+drinking, are related to the most inexorable and highest moral laws, and
+it is easy to understand how invaluable is the study of their
+superstitions in analysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the
+Japanese.
+
+"Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated Japanese think nothing,"
+said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation.
+Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated Japanese
+must you go to understand the vitality of heart and intelligence which
+through centuries of the Elder Life has evolved so remarkable a
+nationality. To set forth the power that has moulded the character of
+this far eastern people, material must be culled from the
+unsophisticated hearts of the peasants and the common folk. "The people
+make the gods, and the gods the people make are the best." Hearn did not
+attempt, therefore, a mechanical repetition of social and religious
+tenets; but in the mythological beliefs, in the legendary lore that has
+slumbered for generations in simple minds he caught the suggestion of
+obedience and fidelity to authority, the strenuous industry and
+self-denial that endowed these quaint superstitions with a potency far
+beyond the religion and meaning, or the primitive idea that caused their
+inception. Merely accurate and erudite students would call the
+impressions that he collected here, in this unfamiliar Japan, trifling
+and fantastic, but he is able to prove that the details of ordinary
+intercourse, however trifling, the way in which men marry and bring up
+their children, the very manner in which they earn their daily bread,
+above all, the rules they impose, and the punishment and rewards they
+invoke to have them obeyed, reveal more of the manner by which the
+religion, the art, the heroism of this far eastern people have been
+developed, than hundreds of essays treating of dynasties, treaties and
+ceremonials.
+
+Aided by that very quality which some may look upon as a mental defect,
+Hearn's tendency to over-emphasise an impressive moment at the expense
+of accuracy stood him now in good stead. Physical myopia, he maintained,
+was an aid to artistic work from one aspect: "The keener the view, the
+less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of
+attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like
+the eye of a hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of
+every leaf." So mental myopia united with the shaping power of
+imagination was more helpful in enabling him to catch a glimpse of the
+trend of thought and characteristics of the folk whose country he
+adopted than the piercing judgment that saw faults and intellectual
+short-comings.
+
+Many people, even the Japanese themselves, have said that Hearn's view
+in his first book of things in their country was too roseate. Others
+have declared that he must have been a hypocrite to write of Japan in so
+enthusiastic a strain when in private letters, such as those to
+Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik, he expresses so great a detestation for
+the people and their methods. Those who say so do not know the nature of
+the man whom they are discussing; compromise with those in office was
+entirely antagonistic to his mode of thought. His life was composed of
+passing illusions and disillusions. That he, with his artistic
+perception, should have been carried off his balance by the quaintness
+and mysticism that he encountered in the outlying portions of the
+country was but natural. Go into the highlands of Japan amongst the
+simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where the ancient
+gods are still believed to haunt the ancient shrines, where the glamour
+and the grace of bygone civilisation still lingers, you will yield to
+the same charm, and, as Hearn himself says, better the sympathetic than
+the critical attitude. Perhaps the man who comes to Japan full of hate
+for all things oriental may get nearer the truth at once, but he will
+make a kindred mistake to him who views it all, as I did at first,
+almost with the eyes of a lover.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVII
+                                MARRIAGE
+
+     "'Marriage may be either a hindrance or help on the path,'
+     the old priest said, 'according to conditions. All depends
+     upon conditions. If the love of wife and child should cause a
+     man to become too much attached to the temporary advantages
+     of this unhappy world, then such love would be a hindrance.
+     But, on the contrary, if the love of wife and child should
+     enable a man to live more purely and more unselfishly than he
+     could do in a state of celibacy, then marriage would be a
+     very great help to him in the Perfect Way. Many are the
+     dangers of marriage for the wise; but for those of little
+     understanding, the dangers of celibacy are greater, and even
+     the illusion of passion may sometimes lead noble natures to
+     the higher knowledge.'"
+
+
+Hearn's marriage, as his widow told us, took place early in the year of
+1891, "23rd of Meiji." That on either side it was one of passionate
+sentiment is doubtful. Marriages in Japan are generally arranged on the
+most businesslike footing. By the young Japanese man, it is looked upon
+as a natural duty that has duly to be performed for the perpetuation of
+his family. Passion is reserved for unions unsanctioned by social
+conventions.
+
+Dominated as he was by the idea that his physical deficiencies rendered
+a union with one of his own nationality out of the question, he yet knew
+that at his time of life he had to enter into more permanent conditions
+with the other sex than hitherto, or face a future devoid of settled
+purpose or stability. His state of health also demanded domestic comfort
+and feminine care. The only alternative that presented itself to a
+celibate life was to choose a wife from amongst the people with whom his
+lines were cast.
+
+From the first moment of his arrival, Hearn had been carried away by
+enthusiasm for the gentleness, the docility, of the women of Japan. He
+compares them, much to their advantage, with their American sisters. "In
+the eternal order of things, which is the highest being, the childish,
+confiding, sweet Japanese girl, or the occidental Circe women of
+artificial society, with their enormous power of evil and their limited
+capacity for good?" In his first letter to Miss Bisland, he writes:
+"This is a domesticated nature, which loves man and makes itself
+beautiful for him in a quiet grey and blue way like the Japanese women."
+
+It seems an unromantic statement to make with regard to an artist who
+has written such exquisite passages on the sentiment that binds a man to
+a woman, but Hearn, in spite of his intellectual idealism, had from
+certain points of view a very material outlook. All considerations--even
+those connected with the deepest emotions that stir the human
+heart--were secondary to the necessities of his genius and artistic
+life.
+
+His intimacy with Althea Foley in Cincinnati was prompted and fostered
+by gratitude for her care in preparing his meals, and nursing him when
+ill, thus saving him from the catastrophe of relinquishing his position
+on the staff of the _Enquirer_, which meant not only the loss of all
+means of subsistence, but also the possibility of prosecuting the
+ambition of his life--a literary career.
+
+Now, at Matsue, after a touch of somewhat severe illness obliging him to
+pass some weeks in bed, it became really a matter of life or death that
+he should give up living from hand to mouth in country inns.
+
+With the Japanese teacher of English at the Matsue College, an
+accomplished English scholar, Hearn had formed a close intimacy from the
+moment of his arrival, an intimacy, indeed, only broken by Nishida
+Sentaro's death in 1898.
+
+"His the kind eyes that saw so much for the stranger, his the kind lips
+that gave him so much wise advice, helping him through the difficulties
+that beset him, in consequence of his ignorance of the language." At the
+beginning of his first term Hearn found the necessity of remembering or
+pronouncing the names of the boys, even with the class-roll before him,
+almost an insurmountable difficulty. Nishida helped him; gave him all
+the necessary instructions about hours and text-books, placed his desk
+close to his, the better to prompt him in school hours, and introduced
+him to the directors and to the governor of the province. "Out of the
+East," the volume written later at Kumamoto, was dedicated to Nishida
+Sentaro, "In dear remembrance of Izumo days."
+
+"Hearn's faith in this good friend was something wonderful," his wife
+tells us. "When he heard of Nishida's illness, in 1897, he exclaimed: 'I
+would not mind losing everything that belongs to me if I could make him
+well.' He believed in him with such a faith only possible to a child."
+
+Nishida Sentaro was also one of the ancient lineage and caste, and an
+intimate friend of the Koizumi family.
+
+Matsue had been at one time almost exclusively occupied by the Samurai
+feudal lords. After throwing open her doors to the world, and admitting
+western civilisation, Japan found herself obliged to accept, amongst
+other democratic innovations, the sweeping away of the great feudal and
+military past, reducing families of rank to obscurity and poverty.
+Youths and maidens of illustrious extraction, who had only mastered the
+"arts of courtesy" and the "arts of war," found themselves obliged to
+adopt the humblest occupations to provide themselves and their families
+with the means of livelihood. Daughters of men once looked upon as
+aristocrats had to become indoor servants with people of a lower caste,
+or to undertake the austere drudgery of the rice-fields or the
+lotus-ponds. Their houses and lands were confiscated--their heirlooms,
+costly robes, crested lacquer ware, passed at starvation prices to those
+whom "misery makes rich." Amongst these aristocrats the Koizumis were
+numbered. Nishida Sentaro, knowing their miserable circumstances, and
+seeing how advisable it would be, if it were Hearn's intention to remain
+in Japan, to have a settled home of his own, formed the idea of bringing
+about a union between Setsu and the English teacher at the Matsue
+College.
+
+On his own initiative he undertook the task of approaching his foreign
+friend. Finding him favourably inclined, he suggested the marriage as a
+suitable one to Setsu's parents.
+
+It is supposed that marriage in Japan must be solemnised by a priest,
+but this is not so. A Japanese marriage is simply a legal pledge, and is
+not invested with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in
+occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a Japanese woman
+can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom
+looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nishida, when
+he undertook to act as intermediary, or _Nakodo_, as they call it in
+Japan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu
+Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously,
+but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that
+the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and
+then only by his nationalising himself a Japanese citizen.
+
+One of Hearn's saving qualities was compassion for the weak and
+suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the
+deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted--as he was--behind the
+closely drawn veil of pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats
+drew between their poverty and public observation.
+
+What the Samurai maiden,--brought up in the seclusion of Matsue--may
+have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of
+forty-four (a patriarchal age in Japan), who was offered to her as a
+husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, Japanese fashion, and as
+the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding
+and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred
+ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during
+these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection,
+indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the _Gakusha_ (learned
+person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all
+the American and English tourists at Tokyo.
+
+So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the
+exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible
+fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to
+Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,--the complexion darker
+and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women--but comely, with the
+comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have
+been.
+
+Tender and true, as her _Yerbina_, or personal, name, "Setsu,"
+signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of
+patience and self-restraint--a daughter of Japan--one of a type fast
+becoming extinct--who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to
+wound other hearts.
+
+She may not have been obliged to submit to the trials of most Japanese
+wives, the whims and tyranny, for instance, of her father- and
+mother-in-law, or the drudgery to provide for, or wait upon a numerous
+Japanese household; but from many indications we know that her life
+sometimes was not by any means a bed of roses. Humorous, and at the same
+time pathetic, are her reminiscences of these first days of marriage, as
+related in later life.
+
+"He was such an intense nature," she says, "and so completely absorbed
+in his work of writing that it made him appear strange and even
+outlandish in ordinary life. He even acknowledged himself that he must
+look like a madman."
+
+During the course of his life, when undergoing any severe mental or
+physical strain, Hearn was subject to periods of hysterical trance,
+during which he lost consciousness of surrounding objects. There is a
+host of superstitions amongst the Japanese connected with trances or
+fainting fits. Each human being is supposed to possess two souls. When a
+person faints they believe that one soul is withdrawn from the body, and
+goes on all sorts of unknown and mysterious errands, while the other
+remains with the envelope to which it belongs; but when this takes place
+a man goes mad; mad people are those who have lost one of their souls.
+On first seeing her husband in this condition, the little woman was so
+terrified that she hastened to Nishida Sentaro to seek advice. "He
+always acted for us as middle-man in those Matsue days, and I confess I
+was afraid my husband might have gone crazy. However, I found soon
+afterwards that it was only the time of enthusiasm in thought and
+writing; and I began to admire him more on that account."
+
+The calm and material comforts of domestic life gave Hearn, for a time,
+a more assured equilibrium, but these trances returned again with
+considerable frequency in later days.
+
+Amenomori, his secretary at Tokyo, tells a story of waking one night and
+seeing a light in Hearn's study. He was afraid Hearn might be ill, and
+cautiously opened the door and peeped in. There he saw the little
+genius, absorbed in his work, standing at his high desk, his nose almost
+touching the paper on which he wrote. Leaf after leaf was covered with
+his small, delicate handwriting. After a while, Amenomori goes on, he
+held up his head, "and what did I see? It was not the Hearn I was
+familiar with; his face was mysteriously white; his eyes gleamed. He
+appeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence."
+
+Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much
+perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"[21] she
+says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently,
+was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so
+interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at Kumamoto he told her
+that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there,
+she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He
+said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the
+Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark
+and the eerieness.
+
+[21] It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or write a word
+of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her by the
+Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi.
+
+She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store,
+when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he
+selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or
+spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful.
+
+"I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an
+unmistakable streak of passion for gay things--however, his quiet
+conscience held him back from giving way to it."
+
+His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of
+etiquette--looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially for people
+in official positions--was a continued source of trouble to the little
+woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite
+garments," which were _de rigueur_ at any official ceremony. On one
+occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the
+Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat.
+
+The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they
+instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called
+it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The
+"race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two.
+That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between
+two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and
+Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little
+wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to
+me, though always in a lovable way--of course a man and a woman know
+each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race
+tendencies difficult to understand."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVIII
+                          THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI
+
+     "The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after
+     the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all
+     illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion
+     which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them.
+     And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all
+     emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at
+     the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire
+     anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is
+     like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like
+     violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though
+     I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a
+     man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he
+     marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable,
+     so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for
+     intellectual converse a man can't really have with women.
+     Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as
+     plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer
+     or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to
+     the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex
+     civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many
+     questions involved."
+
+
+As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the
+Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the
+rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that
+ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.
+
+On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the
+former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under
+military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its
+Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the
+straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yashiki_ were
+untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though
+he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and
+going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city
+and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in
+the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and
+care.
+
+The summer passed in this Japanese _Yashiki_ was as happy as any in
+Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing
+regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf
+shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy
+peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul
+stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free,
+clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully.
+Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were
+soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he
+could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life
+was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment
+receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said,
+twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds,
+this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of
+two.
+
+Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the
+announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.
+
+He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his
+Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household.
+After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian
+dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss
+Elizabeth Bisland.
+
+Hearn's description of the old _Yashiki_ garden is done with all the
+descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described
+Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the
+special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of
+the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to
+follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls
+it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and
+_Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature
+hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by
+flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from
+spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the
+curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these
+sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their
+effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native
+gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in perfect form.
+
+Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the
+bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns,
+and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject
+to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and
+superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light.
+
+We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can
+catch the song of the caged _Uguisu_, an inmate of the establishment,
+presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of
+the Governor of Izumo.
+
+The _Uguisu_, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and
+over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist
+confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five
+seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name.
+
+They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He
+watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was
+equally wretched when he saw them withering.
+
+One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the
+sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese,
+"Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a
+serious intention).
+
+When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in
+despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my
+flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident.
+
+He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his
+dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and
+exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable
+Japanese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five
+class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah
+overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below
+their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the
+city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling
+of _semi_, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and
+those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them
+hummed the changed Japan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-ships.
+Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the
+sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a
+faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty
+of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they
+were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams,
+creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce.
+
+The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time is an interesting
+psychological study. He had been wont to declare that his vocation was a
+monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as severe in its discipline
+as that of St. Francis of Assisi on the Umbrian hills. The code on which
+he moulded his life was formulated according to the teaching of the
+great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and effect progress,
+continual struggle against temptation is necessary. Appetites must be
+restrained. Indulgence means retrogression.
+
+It is not without a sense of amusement that we observe the complex
+personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and
+discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had
+seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the
+erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the
+starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel shirt,
+and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now
+clad in official robes, he passed out through a line of prostrate
+servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been
+handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and
+submission by the daughter of a line of feudal nobles.
+
+He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as
+to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the
+sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at
+eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the
+little lamps of the _kami_ before the shrine were left to burn until
+they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal
+for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as
+to forget the hour.
+
+Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of
+the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was
+very real indeed.
+
+The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was
+I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty,
+and honour, and Hell fire staring you in the face, you would have gone
+after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and
+quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I
+am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in
+Japan."
+
+Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain,
+alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine,"
+of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and
+she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little
+like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a
+gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their
+tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had
+everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all,
+however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and
+selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring
+off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in
+riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese--don't you think so?
+And the man was certainly a detestable fellow."
+
+Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper,
+he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese
+food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to
+interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose
+knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women."
+
+"Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one
+of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later.
+Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild,
+wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone
+by.
+
+When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the
+wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha.
+After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies,
+and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear
+the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan,
+where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man
+is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it,
+and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of
+existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over
+the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about.
+
+A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the
+old _Yashiki_, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed
+Japanese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of
+the interpreter, the superstitions and legends of the ancient Province
+of the Gods.
+
+She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring,
+"How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked
+fixedly in front of him.
+
+Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed
+to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"[22] or "Dancing Girl," the
+finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written
+during the course of the summer passed in the old _Yashiki_. Its first
+inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891.
+"There was a story some time ago in the _Asahi-shimbun_[23] about a
+'Shirabyoshi,' that brought tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully
+translated by a friend."
+
+[22] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+[23] The _Asahi-shimbun_ was one of the principal Japanese illustrated
+daily papers, printed and published at Osaka.
+
+The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign
+languages--German, Swedish, French and Italian--a writer in the _Revue
+des Deux Mondes_ declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world.
+The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in
+England.
+
+The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a
+Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible
+and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a
+vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of
+warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into
+kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is
+no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature,
+in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her
+regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the
+possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she
+cherishes is for her.
+
+Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story
+that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an
+account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how
+they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men.
+
+It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a
+woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife,
+that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to
+ideal things, her pure and simple passion, he thrills us through with
+the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength
+of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life.
+
+How different the manner in which he treats the scenes between the young
+man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the manner in which his
+French prototypes--in which Pierre Loti, for instance, whom Hearn
+declares to be one of the greatest living artists--would have treated
+it. Far ahead has he passed beyond them; the moral, the life of the
+soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line does he play on the lower
+emotions of his readers.
+
+A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to
+Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to passing
+the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a
+single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way
+towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's
+house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear
+any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He
+told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a
+woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and
+then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his
+feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier
+was set before him, and a cotton _zabuton_ for him to kneel upon. He was
+struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when
+she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no
+time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and
+paper mosquito curtain."
+
+After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly
+fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of
+the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated _Butsudan_, he
+saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but
+before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad
+when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find
+out what I was doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she
+had fallen in love with one another, and how they had gone away and
+built the cottage in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to
+please him. One cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had
+lived alone with nothing to console her but the memory of her lover,
+laying daily before his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly
+dancing to please his spirit.
+
+After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try
+again to sleep.
+
+On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had
+received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was
+not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the
+path he had to follow, she watched him until he passed from sight, his
+heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left
+behind.
+
+Many years passed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous.
+One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with
+him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but
+she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master.
+When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the
+knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments
+of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a _Shirabyoshi_.
+
+With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched
+her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred
+in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw
+the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated
+hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the
+strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night.
+"Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he
+said, as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years
+since we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up
+to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your
+story."
+
+The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years,
+she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house,
+and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before
+the _Butsudan_. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she
+desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and
+attitude of the dance that she might hang it up before the _Butsudan_.
+"I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young
+again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose
+sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!"
+
+He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to
+thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted
+her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she
+clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master?
+She had nothing to offer but her _Shirabyoshi_ garments. He took them,
+saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to
+place her beyond the reach of want.
+
+No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went
+away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day
+took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and
+outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and
+receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the
+aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired
+lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the
+lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him.
+
+Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor seemingly asleep.
+On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient _Butsudan_ with its tablet,
+and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning; in front of it stood the
+portrait he had painted.
+
+"The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as
+she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he
+gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the
+ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow
+had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier
+than he."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIX
+                                KUMAMOTO
+
+     "Of course Urashima was bewildered by the gods. But who is
+     not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a
+     bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the
+     purpose of the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without
+     any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima
+     Mio-jin....
+
+     "These are quite differently managed in the West. After
+     disobeying Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to
+     learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative
+     sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at
+     the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become
+     after death small gods in our own right. How can we pity the
+     folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with
+     visible gods?
+
+     "Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity
+     must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a
+     myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular
+     time of blue light and soft wind,--and always like an old
+     reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the
+     feeling of a season not to be also related to something real
+     in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors."
+
+
+Only for a year did Hearn's sojourn in Fairyland last. The winter
+following his arrival was a very severe one. The northern coast of Japan
+lies open to the Arctic winds blowing over the snow-covered plains of
+Siberia. Heavy falls of snow left drifts five feet high round the
+_Yashiki_ on the hill. The large rooms, so delightful in the summer with
+their verandah opening on the garden, were cold as "cattle barns" in
+winter, with nothing but charcoal braziers to heat them. He dare not
+face another such experience, and asked, if possible, to be transferred
+to warmer quarters. Aided again by his friend, Professor Chamberlain,
+the authorities at Tokyo were induced to give him the professorship of
+English at the Imperial University at Kumamoto.
+
+Kumamoto is situated in Kyushu, facing Formosa and the Chinese coast;
+the climate, therefore, is much milder than that of Matsue. Here,
+however, began Hearn's first disillusionment; like Urashima Taro, having
+dwelt within the precincts of Fairyland he felt the shock of returning
+to Earth again. The city struck him as being ugly and commonplace, a
+half-Europeanised garrison town, resounding to the sounds of bugles and
+the drilling of soldiers, instead of pilgrim songs and temple bells.
+"But Lord! I must try to make money; for nothing is sure in Japan and I
+am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a
+trip, whether the Government employs me or not."
+
+He began to look back with regret to the days passed at Matsue. "You
+must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find
+out how unutterably different it is from other places,--for instance,
+this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here
+exist."
+
+All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and
+apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has
+nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father,
+wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a
+Buddhist student.
+
+This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is
+nothing in Japan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he
+indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a
+little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all
+up--the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to
+orientals, and an oriental he had now become. His people felt like fish
+out of water, everything surrounding them was so different from their
+primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next yard, "_mezurashii
+kedamono_," filled his little wife with an amused wonder. Some geese and
+a pig also filled her with surprise, such animals did not exist in the
+highlands of Japan.
+
+The Kumamoto Government College was one of the largest in Japan,--came
+next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was
+run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still
+adhered to their Japanese dress, but most of them adopted the military
+uniform now, as a rule, worn in Japanese colleges. There were three
+classes, corresponding with three higher classes of the _Jinjo
+Chugakko_--and two higher classes. He did not now teach on Saturdays.
+There were no stoves--only _hibachi_. The library was small, and the
+English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was
+taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The
+bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the
+same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great
+dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of
+chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum.
+
+Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college,
+except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning
+and evening, and in the intervals between classes sat in a corner to
+himself smoking his pipe.
+
+"You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to
+Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF GODS! What would you do if you
+were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! Japan in Kyushu is like
+Europe--except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking,
+and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an _educated_
+Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. My scholars in
+this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me
+only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the
+college and return after class,--always alone, no mental company but
+books. But at home everything is sweet."
+
+In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence
+of matrimony, here at Kumamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to
+the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so
+many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own
+kindred," he says to his sister.
+
+His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second
+wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had
+died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his
+widow continued their journey to Ireland.
+
+At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls
+were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two
+of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr.
+Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to
+Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own
+half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called.
+
+Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to Japanese affairs.
+Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as
+standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and
+social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their
+way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's
+articles contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_, afterwards published
+under the title of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," had claimed public
+attention.
+
+Miss Lillah Hearn was the first member of the family to write to this
+half-brother, who was becoming so famous, but received no answer. Then
+Mrs. Brown, the other sister, approached him, silence greeted her
+efforts as well. On hearing of his marriage to a Japanese lady, Mrs.
+Atkinson, the youngest sister, wrote. Whether it was that she softened
+the exile's heart in his expatriation by that sympathy and innate tact
+which are two of her distinguished qualities, it is impossible to say,
+but her letter was answered.
+
+This strange relative of theirs who had gone to Japan, adopted Japanese
+dress and habits, and married a Japanese lady, had become somewhat of a
+legendary character to his quiet-going Irish kindred. The arrival of the
+first letter, therefore, was looked upon as quite an event and was
+passed from house to house, and hand to hand, becoming considerably
+mutilated in its journeyings to and fro. The first page is entirely
+gone, and the second page so erased and torn that it is only
+decipherable here and there. We are enabled to put an approximate date
+to it by his reference to Miss Bisland's marriage, of which he had heard
+towards the end of his stay at Matsue.
+
+"I have written other things, but am rather ashamed of them," he adds.
+"So Miss Bisland has married and become Mrs. Wetmore. She is as rich at
+least as she could wish to be, but I have not heard from her for more
+than a year. I suppose friendship ends with marriage. If my sister was
+not married, I think--I only think--I would feel more brotherly.
+
+"Well, I will say _au revoir_. Many thanks for the letter you wrote me.
+I would like                Please give me            you can. Don't
+think busy to write--much            I teach for a week--English and
+Elementary Latin:           the time I study              and write for
+pleasure, not for profit. There isn't much profit in literature unless,
+as a novelist, one happens to please a popular taste,--which isn't good
+taste. Some exceptions there are, like Rudyard Kipling; but your brother
+has not his inborn genius for knowing, seizing and painting human
+nature.           Love to you and yours--from
+
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+    "_Tetorihomnatu_ 34,
+        "_Kumamoto, Kyushu,
+           "Japan._"
+
+Mrs. Atkinson replied immediately, thus beginning a series of delightful
+letters, which alas! relate, so many of them, to intimate family affairs
+that it is impossible to publish them in their original form.
+
+"My sweet little sister," he wrote in answer, "your letter was more than
+personally grateful: it had also an unexpected curious interest for me,
+as a revelation of things I did not know. I don't know anything of my
+relations--their names, places, occupations, or even number: therefore
+your letter interested me in a peculiar way, apart from its amiable
+charm. Before I talk any more, I thank you for the photographs. They
+have made me prouder than I ought to be. I did not know that I had such
+nice kindred and such a fairy niece. My wife stole your picture from me
+almost as soon as I had received it, to caress it, and pray to Buddha
+and all the ancient gods to love the original: she has framed it in a
+funny little Japanese frame, and suspended it in that sacred part of the
+house, called the Toko, a sort of alcove, in which only beautiful things
+are displayed. Formerly the gods were placed there (many hundred years
+ago); but now the gods have a separate shrine in the household, and the
+Toko is only the second Holy place...."
+
+[Illustration: Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn's Half-sister).]
+
+The next letter is dated June 27th, '92, 25th year of Meiji.
+
+"Dear sister, I love you a little bit more on hearing that you are
+little. The smaller you are the more I will be fond of you. As for
+marriage being a damper upon affection between kindred, it is true only
+of Occidental marriages. The Japanese wife is only the shadow of her
+husband, infinitely unselfish and na�ve in all things....
+
+"If you want me to see you soon, you must pray to the Occidental gods to
+make me suddenly rich. However, I doubt if they have half as much
+influence as the gods of Japan,--who are helping me to make a bank
+account as fast as honest work can produce such a result. I have no
+babies; and don't expect to have, and may be able to cross the seas one
+of these days to linger in your country a while. But really I don't
+know. I drift with the current of events.
+
+"As for my book on Japan,--my first book,--there is much to do yet,--it
+ought to be out in the Fall. It will be called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar
+Japan," and will treat of strange things.
+
+"I would like to see you very much; for you are too tantalizing in your
+letters, and tell me nothing about your inner self. I want to find out
+what the angel shut up in your heart is like. No doubt very sweet, but I
+would like to pull it out, and stroke its wings, and make it chipper a
+little. As for the little ones, make them love me; for if they see me
+without previous discipline, they will be afraid of my ugly face when I
+come--I send you a photo of one-half of it, the other is not pleasant, I
+assure you: like the moon, I show only one side of myself. In Spanish
+countries they call me Leucadio--much easier for little folk to
+pronounce. By the way, you never gave me your address,--sign of
+impulsive haste, like my own.
+
+                                           "With best love,
+                                                   "LAFCADIO HEARN."
+
+Then in January, 1903, he writes again, "Your kind sweet letter reached
+me at Christmas time, where there is no Christmas. Don't you know that
+you are very happy to be able to live in England? I am afraid you do
+not. Perhaps you could not know without having lived much elsewhere....
+Your photo has come. The same eyes, the same chin, brow, nose: we are
+strangely alike--excepting that you are very comely, and I very much the
+reverse--partly by exaggeration of the traits which make your face
+beautiful, and partly because I am disfigured by the loss of an
+eye--punched out at school.... Won't you please give my kindest thanks
+to your husband for the pains he has taken to please me! I hope to meet
+him some day, and thank him in person, if I don't leave my bones in some
+quaint and curious Buddhist cemetery out here...."
+
+The wonderful series of letters to Professor Hall Chamberlain, recently
+published by Miss Bisland, are also written from Kumamoto and Kobe, and
+to a great extent run simultaneously with those to his sister. He had a
+habit of repeating himself; the same expressions, the same quotations,
+appear in both series, and sometimes are again repeated in his published
+essays. When struck by an idea or incident, it seems as if he must
+impart it as something noteworthy to every one with whom he was holding
+communion. He gives, for instance, the same account to his sister of the
+routine of his Japanese day as related to Professor Hall Chamberlain and
+Ellwood Hendrik.
+
+We can imagine his rigidly Protestant Irish relations amidst the
+conventional surroundings of an Irish country house, following minutely
+the services of the established church as preached to them by their
+local clergyman, utterly bewildered in reading the description of the
+outlandish cult to which he, their relation, subscribed in Japan. The
+awakening to the rising of the sun with the clapping of hands of
+servants in the garden, the prayers at the _Butsudan_, the putting out
+the food for the dead, all the strange, quaint customs that mark the
+passing of the day in the ancient Empire of Nippon. Not by thousands of
+miles only was he separated from his occidental relations, but by
+immemorial centuries of thought.
+
+On May 21st, 1893, there is another letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
+in which he first announces his expectation of becoming a father. It is
+so characteristic of Lafcadio to take it for granted that the child
+would be a boy, and already to make plans for his education abroad.
+
+                       "_Tsuboi, Nichihorabata_ 35, _Kumamoto,
+                                            "Kyushu, Japan.
+                                                   May_ 21_st_, '93.
+
+"MY DEAR MINNIE:
+
+"(I think 'sister' is too formal, I shall call you by your pet name
+hereafter.) First let me thank you very, very much for the photographs.
+I was extremely pleased with that of your husband;--and thought at once,
+'Ah! the lucky girl!' For your husband, my dear Sis, is no ordinary man.
+There are faces that seen for the first time leave an impression which
+gives the whole of the man, _ineffaceably_. And they are rare. I think I
+know your husband already, admire him and love him,--not simply for your
+sake, but for his own. He [is] all man,--and strong,--a good oak for
+your ivy. I don't mean physical strength, though he seems (from the
+photograph) to have an uncommon amount of it, but strength of character.
+You can feel pretty easy about the future of your little ones with such
+a father. (Don't read all this to him, though,--or he will think I am
+trying to flatter either him or you,--though, of course, you can tell
+him something of the impression his photo gives me, in a milder form.)
+And you don't know what the real impression is,--nor how it is enhanced
+by the fact that I have been for three years isolated from all English
+or European intercourse,--never see an English face, except that of some
+travelling missionary, which is apt to be ignoble. The Oriental face is
+somewhat inscrutable,--like the faces of the Buddhist gods. In youth it
+has quite a queer charm,--the charm of mysterious placidity, of smiling
+calm. (But among the modernised, college-bred Japanese this is lost.)
+What one never--or hardly ever--sees among these Orientals is a face
+showing strong character. The race is strangely impersonal. The women
+are divinely sweet in temper; the men are mysteries, and not altogether
+pleasant. I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only
+make me homesick for English life,--just one plunge into it again.
+
+"--Will I ever see you? Really I don't know. Some day I should like to
+visit England,--provided I could assure myself of sufficient literary
+work there to justify a stay of at least half-a-year, and the expense of
+the voyage. Eventually that might be possible. I would never go as a
+mere guest--not even a sister's; but I should like to be able to chat
+with the sister occasionally on leisure-evenings. I am quite a savage on
+the subject of independence, let me tell you; and would accept no
+kindnesses except those of your company at intervals. But all this is
+not of to-day. I cannot take my wife to Europe, it would be impossible
+to accustom her to Western life,--indeed it would be cruel even to try.
+But I may have to educate my child abroad,--which would be an
+all-powerful reason for the voyage. However, I would prefer an Italian,
+French, or Spanish school-life to an English one.
+
+"--Oh yes, about the book--'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan' is now in
+press. It will appear in two volumes, without illustrations. The
+publishers are Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston,--the best in America.
+Whether you like the book or no, I can't tell. I have an idea you do not
+care much about literary matters;--that you are too much wife and mother
+for that;--that your romances and poetry are in your own home. And such
+romance and poetry is the best of all. However, if you take some
+interest in trying to look at ME between the lines, you may have
+patience to read the work. Don't try to read it, if you don't like.
+
+"--But here is something you might do for me, as I am not asking for
+certain friendly offices. When the book is criticised, you might kindly
+send me a few of the best reviews. Miss Bisland, while in London, wrote
+me the reviews of some of my other books had been very kindly; but she
+never dreamed of supplementing this pleasant information by cutting out
+a few specimens for me.--By the way, she has married well, you
+know,--has become awfully rich and fashionable, and would not even
+condescend to look at me if she passed me in Broadway--I _suppose_. But
+she well deserved her good fortune; for she was certainly one of the
+most gifted girls I ever knew, and has succeeded in everything--against
+immense obstacles--with no help except that of her own will and genius.
+
+"--And now I must give you a lecture. I don't want more than one
+sister,--haven't room in my heart for more. All appear to be as charming
+as they are sweet looking. I am interested to hear how they succeed,
+etc., etc. But don't ask me to write to everybody, and don't show
+everybody my letters. I can't diffuse myself very far. You said you
+would be 'my favourite.' A nice way you go about it! Suppose I tell you
+that I am a very jealous, nasty brother; and that if I can't have one
+sister by herself I don't want any sister at all! Would that be very,
+very naughty? But it is true. And now you can be shocked just as much as
+you please.
+
+"--Yes, I have lost an eye, and look horrible. The operation in Dublin
+did not cause the disfigurement, but a blow, or rather the indirect
+results of a blow, received from a play-fellow.
+
+"--You ask me if I should like a photograph of father. I certainly
+should, if you can procure me one without trouble. I hope--much more
+than to see England,--to visit India, and try to find some tradition of
+him. I did not know positively, until last year, that father had been in
+the West Indies. When I went there, I had the queerest, ghostliest
+sensation of having seen it all before. I think I should experience even
+stranger sensations in India! The climate would be agreeable for me.
+Remember, I passed fourteen years of my life south of winter. The first
+snow I saw from 1876 to 1890 was on my way through Canada to Japan.
+Indeed, if ever I become quite independent, I want to return to the
+tropics.
+
+"Enough to tire your eyes,--isn't it?--for this time.
+
+                                            "Ever affectionately,
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+"In the names of the eight hundred myriads of Gods,--do give me your
+address. The only way I have been able to write you is by finding the
+word _Portadown_ in _Whittaker's Almanac_. You are a careless, naughty
+'Sis.'
+
+"I enclose my name and address in Japanese.
+
+        "YAKUMO KOIZUMI,
+                   "_Tsuboi,
+                      "Nichihorabata 35,
+                           "Kumamoto, Kyushu_."
+
+All the women are making funny little Japanese baby-clothes, and all the
+Buddhist Divinities, who watch over little children, are being prayed
+to.... "Letters of congratulation," he said, "were coming from all
+directions, for the expectation of a child is always a subject of great
+gladness in Japan.... Behind all this there is a universe of new
+sensations, revelations of things in Buddhist faith which are very
+beautiful and touching. About the world an atmosphere of delicious,
+sacred na�vet�,--difficult to describe because resembling nothing in the
+Western world...."
+
+Hearn's account of his home before the birth of his son throws most
+interesting lights on Japanese methods of thought and daily life. He
+refers to the pretty custom of a woman borrowing a baby when she is
+about to become a mother. It is thought an honour to lend it. And it is
+extraordinarily petted in its new home. The one his wife borrowed was
+only six months old, but expressed in a supreme degree all the Japanese
+virtues; docile to the degree of going to sleep when bidden, and of
+laughing when it awakened. The eerie wisdom of its face seemed to
+suggest a memory of all its former lives. The incident he relates also
+of a little Samurai boy whom he and his wife had adopted is interesting
+as showing the Spartan discipline exercised over Japanese children from
+earliest youth, enabling them in later life to display that iron
+self-control that has astonished the world; interesting, also, as
+showing how nothing escaped Hearn's quick observation and assiduous
+intellect. Hearn, at first, wanted to fondle the child, and make much of
+him, but he soon found that it was not in accordance with custom. He
+therefore ceased to take notice of him; and left him under the control
+of the women of the house. Their treatment of him Hearn thought
+peculiar; the little fellow was never praised and rarely scolded. One
+day he let a little cup fall and broke it. No notice was taken of the
+accident for fear of giving him pain. Suddenly, though the face remained
+quite smilingly placid as usual, he could not control his tears. As soon
+as they saw him cry, everybody laughed and said kind things to him, till
+he began to laugh, too. But what followed was more surprising.
+Apparently he had been distantly treated. One day he did not return from
+school until three hours after the usual time; suddenly the women began
+to cry--they were, indeed, more deeply affected than their treatment of
+the boy would have justified. The servants ran hither and thither in
+their anxiety to find him. It turned out that he had only been taken to
+a teacher's house for something relating to school matters. As soon as
+his voice was heard at the door, every one was quiet, cold, and
+distantly polite again.
+
+On September 17th he writes again to his sister, thanking her for a copy
+she had sent him of the _Saturday Review_. "You could send me nothing
+more pleasing, or more useful in a literary way. It is all the more
+welcome as I am really living in a hideous isolation, far away from
+books, and book-shops, and Europeans. When I can get--which I hope is
+the next year--into a more pleasant locality, I shall try to pick out
+some pretty Oriental tales to send to the little ones." He was not able,
+he goes on, to go far from Kumamoto, not liking to leave his little wife
+too long alone; so his vacation was rather monotonous. He travelled only
+as far as Nagasaki. It was quaint and pretty, but hotter than any West
+Indian port in the hot season. He was economising, he said, and had
+saved nearly three thousand five hundred dollars. Once he had provided
+for his wife, he hoped to be able to make a few long voyages to places
+east of Japan. "You are much to be envied," he goes on to his sister,
+"for your chances of travel. What a pity you are not able to devote
+yourself to writing and painting in a place like Algiers--full of
+romance and picturesqueness. If you go there, don't fail to see the old
+Arab part of the city--the Kasbah, I think they call it. How about the
+Continent? Have you tried Southern Italy? And don't you think that one
+gets all the benefit of travel only by keeping away from fashion-resorts
+and places consecrated by conventionalism? Nothing to me is more
+frightful than a fashionable seaside resort--such as those of the
+Atlantic Coast. My happiest sojourns of this sort have been in little
+fishing villages, and little queer old unknown towns, where there are no
+big vulgar hotels, and where one can dress and do exactly as one
+pleases.
+
+"What will you do with your little man when he grows up? Army, or Civil
+Service? Whatever you do, never let him go to America, and lose all his
+traditions. Australia would be far better. I expect he will be
+gloriously well able to take care of himself anywhere,--judging by his
+father, but I have come to the belief that one cannot too soon begin the
+cultivation of a single aim and single talent in life. This is the age
+of specialism. No man can any longer be successful in many things. Even
+the 'general practitioner' in medicine has almost become obsolete.
+
+"Nothing seems to me more important now for a little boy than the
+training of his linguistic faculties,--giving him every encouragement in
+learning languages by ear--(the only natural way); and your travelling
+sometimes with him will help you to notice how his faculties are in that
+direction. But perhaps it will be possible for him to pass all his life
+in England. (For me, England, Ireland and Scotland mean the same thing.)
+That would be pleasant indeed.... When I think of your little man with
+the black eyes, I hope that his life will always be in the circle of
+English traditions, wherever the English Flag flies, there remain.
+
+"I suppose you know that in this Orient the construction of the family
+is totally different to what it is in Europe.... We are too conceitedly
+apt to think that what is good for Englishmen is good for all
+nations,--our ethics, our religion, our costumes, etc. The plain facts
+of the case are that all Eastern races lose, instead of gaining, by
+contact with us. They imitate our vices instead of our virtues, and
+learn all our weaknesses without getting any of our strength. Already
+statistics show an enormous increase of crime in Japan as the result of
+'Christian civilisation'; and the open ports show a demoralisation
+utterly unknown in the interior of the country, and unimaginable in the
+old feudal days before 1840 or 1850...."
+
+In the next letter he gives his sister a minute account of his Japanese
+manner of life on the floor without chairs or tables. It has been
+described so often by visitors to Japan, and by Hearn himself, that it
+is unnecessary to repeat it here. He ends his letter:--
+
+"I am now so used to the Japanese way of living, that when I have to
+remain all day in Western clothes, I feel very unhappy; and I think I
+should not find European life pleasant in summer time. Some day, I will
+send you a photograph of my house.
+
+"I wish you much happiness and good health and pleasant days of travel,
+and thank you much for the paper.
+
+"This letter is rather rambling, but perhaps you will find something
+interesting in it.
+
+                                          "Ever affectionately,
+                                                         "LAFCADIO."
+
+In September comes another letter to Mrs. Atkinson:
+
+"You actually talk about writing too often,--which is strange! There is
+only this difficulty about writing,--that we both know so little of each
+other that topics interesting to both can be only guessed at. That
+should be only a temporary drawback.
+
+"The more I see your face in photos, the more I feel drawn toward you.
+Lillah and the other sister represent different moods and tenses
+pictorially. You seem most near to me,--as I felt on first reading your
+letter. You have strength, too, where I have not. You are certainly very
+sensitive, but also self-repressed. I think you are not inclined to make
+mistakes. I think you can be quickly offended, and quick to forgive--if
+you understand the offence to be only a mistake. You would not forgive
+at all should you discern behind the fault a something much worse than
+mistake,--and in this you would be right. You are inclined to reserve,
+and not to bursts of joy;--you have escaped my extremes of depression
+and extremes of exultation. You see very quickly beyond the present
+relations of a fact--I think all this. But of course you have been
+shaped in certain things by social influences I have never had,--so that
+you must have perfect poise where I would flounder and stumble.
+
+"But imagining won't do always. I should like to know more of you than a
+photograph or a rare letter can tell. I don't know, remember, anything
+_at all_ about you. I do not know where you were born, where you were
+educated,--anything of your life; or what is much more, infinitely more
+important, I don't know your emotions and thoughts and feelings and
+experiences in the past. What you are now, I can guess. But what _were_
+you,--long ago? What memories most haunt you of places and people you
+liked? If you could tell me some of these, how pleasantly we might
+compare notes. Mere facts tell little: the interest of personality lies
+most in the infinitely special way that facts affect the person. I am
+very curious about you,--but, don't take this too seriously; because
+though my wishes are strong, my disinclination to cause you pain is
+stronger; and you have told me that writing is sometimes fatiguing to
+you. It were so much better could we pass a day or two together.
+
+"You must not underrate yourself as you did in your last. Your few lines
+about the scenery,--short as they were,--convinced me that you could do
+something literary of a very nice sort had you the time and chance to
+give yourself to any such work. But I do not wish that you would--except
+to read the result; for literary labour is extremely severe work, even
+after the secret of method is reached. I am only beginning to learn; and
+to produce five pages means to write at least twenty-five. Enthusiasms
+and inspirations have least to do with the matter. The real work is
+condensing, compressing, choosing, changing, shifting words and
+phrases,--studying values of colour and sound and form in words; and
+when all is done, the result satisfies only for a time. What I wrote six
+years ago, I cannot bear the sight of to-day. If I had been a genius, I
+wonder whether I would feel the same.
+
+"Romances are not in novels, but in lives. Can you not tell me some of
+yours when you are feeling very, very well, and don't know what to do?
+What surprised me was your observation about 'sentimental' in your last
+letter,--and that upon such a worthy topic! What can you think of me?
+And here in this Orient, where the spirit of more ancient faiths enters
+into one's blood with the sense of the doctrine of filial piety, and the
+meaning of ancestor worship,--how very, very strange and cruel it seems
+to me that my little sister should be afraid of being thought
+_sentimental_ about the photograph of her father! What self-repression
+does all this mean, and what iron influences in Western life--English
+life that I have almost forgotten! However, character loses nothing:
+under the exterior ice, the Western could only gain warmth and depth if
+it be of the right sort. I hope, nevertheless, my little sister will be
+just as 'sentimental' as she possibly can when she writes to Japan,--and
+feel sure of more than sympathy and gratitude. Unless she means by
+'sentimental' only something in regard to style of writing--in which
+case I assure her that she cannot err. If she is afraid of being thought
+really sentimental, I should be much more afraid of meeting her,--for I
+should wish to say sweet things and to hear them, too, should I deserve.
+
+"At all events remember that you have given me something very
+precious,--not only in itself,--but precious because precious to you.
+And it shall never be lost,--in spite of earthquakes and possible
+fires."
+
+(The something he alludes to as "very precious" was a photograph of
+their father, Charles Hearn, that Mrs. Atkinson had sent him.)
+
+"--I wish I could talk to you more about Father and India. I wish to ask
+a hundred thousand questions. But on paper it is difficult to express
+all one wishes to say. And letters of mere questions carry no joy with
+them, and no sympathy. So I shall not ask _now_ any more. And you must
+not tire your dear little aching head to write when you do not feel
+well. I shall write again soon. For a little while good-bye, with love
+and all sweet hope to you ever,
+
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+    "_Kumamoto,
+       "Kyushu, Japan.
+          "Jan_. 30, '94."
+
+On November 17th, 1893, at one o'clock in the morning, Hearn's eldest
+son, Leopold Kazuo Koizumi, was born.
+
+He declared that the strangest and strongest sensation of his life was
+hearing for the first time the cry of his own child. There was a strange
+feeling of being double; something more, also, impossible to
+analyse--the echo in a man's heart of all the sensations felt by all the
+fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the past.
+
+A few weeks later he writes to his sister, giving her news about his
+son. "The physician says that from the character of his bones he ought
+to become very tall. He is very dark. He has my nose and promises to
+have the Hearn eyebrows; but he has the Oriental eye. Whether he will be
+handsome or ugly, I can't tell: his little face changes every day;--he
+has already looked like five different people. When first born, I
+thought him the prettiest creature I ever saw. But that did not last. I
+am so inexperienced in the matter of children that I cannot trust myself
+to make any predictions. Of course I find the whole world changed about
+me....
+
+"My wife," he goes on, "is quite well. Happily the old military caste to
+which she belongs is a strong one, but how sacred and terrible a thing
+is maternity. When it was all over I felt very humble and grateful to
+the Unknowable Power which had treated us so kindly. The possibility of
+men being cruel to the women who bear their children seemed at the
+moment to darken existence.
+
+"I have received your last beautiful photograph--or I should say
+two:--the vignette is, of course, the most lovable, but both are very,
+very nice. I gave the full-figure one to Setsu. She would like to have
+her boy grow up looking either like you or like Posey--but most like
+you. (Thanks also for the pretty photo of yourself and Posey: Posey is
+decidedly handsome.) But I fear my son can never be like either of you.
+He is altogether Oriental so far,--looks at me with the still calm
+Buddhist eyes of the Far East, and the soul of another race. Even his
+nose will never declare his Western blood; for the finest class of the
+Japanese offer many strongly aquiline faces. Setsu is a Samurai, and
+though her own features are the reverse of aquiline, there are aquiline
+faces among the kindred.
+
+"I am awfully anxious that the boy should get to be like you. I have had
+your most beautiful photograph copied by a clever photographer here and
+have sent the copies to friends, saying, 'this is my sister; and this is
+the boy. I want him to look like her.' You see I am proud of you,--not
+only as to the ghostly, but also as to the material part of you.
+Physiologically I am all Latin and Pagan,--even though my little boy's
+eyes are bright blue.
+
+"... It is really nonsense, sending such a thing as his photo at
+fifty-five days old, because the child changes so much every week. But
+you are my little sister. I have called him Leopold Kazuo Hearn--for
+European use and custom. Kazuo, in Japanese, signifies 'First of the
+Excellent.' I have not registered him under that name, however; because
+by the law, if I registered my wife or son in the Consulate, both become
+English citizens, and lose the right to hold any property, or do any
+business in Japan, or even to live in the interior without a passport. I
+have, therefore, stopped at the Japanese marriage ceremony, and a
+publication of the fact abroad. In the present order I dare not deprive
+my folks of their nationality."
+
+Then some time later he writes:--
+
+"You ask for all kinds of news about Kajiwo. Well, he is now able to
+stand well, and is tremendously strong to all appearance. He tries to
+speak. 'Aba' is the first _word_ spoken by Japanese babes: it means
+'good-bye.' Here is a curious example of the contrast between West and
+East,--the child comes into the world saying farewell. But this would be
+in accordance with Buddhist philosophy,--saying farewell to the previous
+life.
+
+"You are right about supposing that the birth of a son in Japan is an
+occasion of special rejoicing. All the baby clothes are ready long
+before birth--(except the ornamental ones)--as the _Kimono_ or little
+robe is the same shape for either sex (_of children_). But, when the
+child is born, if it be a girl, very beautiful clothes of bright
+colours, covered with wonderful pictures, are made for it. If it be a
+boy the colours are darker, and the designs different. My little
+fellow's silken Kimono is covered with pictures of tortoises, storks,
+pine, and other objects typical of long life, prosperity, steadfastness,
+etc. This subject is enormously elaborate and complicated,--so that I
+cannot tell you all about it in a letter.
+
+"After the child is born, all friends and relatives bring presents,--and
+everybody comes to see and congratulate the mother. You would think this
+were a trial. I was afraid it would tire Setsu. But she was walking
+about again on the seventh day after birth. The strength of the boy is
+hers,--not mine.
+
+"I was also worried about the physician. I wanted the chief surgeon of
+the garrison,--because I was afraid. He was a friend, and laughed at me.
+He said: 'If anything terrible should happen, call me, but otherwise
+don't worry about a doctor. The Japanese have managed these things in
+their own way for thousands of years without doctors: a woman or two
+will do.' So two women came, and all was well. I hated the old women
+first, but after their success, I became very fond of them, and hugged
+them in English style, which they could not understand."
+
+The kind dull veil that nature keeps stretched between mankind and the
+Unknown was drawn again. The world became to Hearn nearly the same as it
+had been before the birth of his child, and he could plan, he said, for
+the boy's future. He was afraid he might be near-sighted, and wondered
+if he would be intellectual. "He was so proud of him," his wife says,
+"that whenever a guest, a student, or a fellow-professor called, he
+would begin talking about him and his perfections without allowing his
+friend to get a word in. He perfectly frightened me with a hundred toys
+he brought home when he returned."
+
+After his son's birth, Hearn naturally became still more anxious to have
+Setsu registered legally as his wife, but he was always met by official
+excuses and delays. He was told that if he wished the boy to remain a
+Japanese citizen he must register him in the mother's name only. If he
+registered him in his own name his son became a foreigner. On the other
+hand, Hearn knew that if he nationalised himself his salary would be
+reduced to a Japanese level.
+
+[Illustration: Kazuo (Hearn's Son) and his Nurse.]
+
+"I don't quite see the morality of the reduction," he says, "for
+services should be paid according to the market value at least;--but
+there is no doubt it would be made. As for America, and my relatives in
+England, I am married: that has been duly announced. Perhaps I had
+better wait a few years and then become a citizen. Being a Japanese
+citizen would, of course, make no difference whatever as to my relations
+in any civilised countries abroad. It would only make some difference in
+an uncivilised country,--such as revolutionary South America, where
+English or French, or American protection is a good thing to have. But
+the long and the short of the matter is that I am anxious about Setsu's
+and the boy's interests: my own being concerned only at that point where
+their injury would be Setsu's injury."
+
+The only way out of the difficulty, he concluded, was to abandon his
+English nationality and adopt his wife's family name, Koizumi. As a
+prefix for his own personal use he selected the appellation of the
+Province of Izumo "Yakumo" ("Eight clouds," or the "Place of the Issuing
+of Clouds," the first word of the ancient, Japanese song "Ya-he-gaki").
+
+On one of his letters he shows his sister how his name is written in
+Japanese.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson's youngest child, Dorothy, was born in March, 1894. There
+is an interval of exactly four months between her and her cousin Kazuo.
+It is in reference to this event that the following letter was
+written:--
+
+"How sweet of you to get Mrs. or Miss Weatherall to write me the dear
+news! You will be well by the time this reaches you, so that I may
+venture to write more than congratulations.
+
+"I was quite anxious about you,--feeling as if you were the only real
+_fellow-soul_ in my world but one:--and birth is a thing so much more
+terrible than all else in the universe--more so than death itself--that
+the black border round the envelope made my heart cold for a moment. I
+had forgotten the why. Now I hope you will not have any more sons or
+daughters; you have three,--and I trust you will have no more pain or
+trouble. As for me, I am very resolved not to become a father again.
+
+"You will laugh at me, and perhaps think it very strange that when only
+thirty-five I began to feel a kind of envy of friends with children. I
+knew their troubles, anxieties, struggles; but I saw their sons grow up,
+beautiful and gifted men, and I used to whisper to myself,--'But I never
+shall have a child.' Then it used to seem to me that no man died so
+utterly as the man without children: for him I fancied (like some folk
+still really think in other lands) that death would be utter eternal
+blackness. When I did, however, hear the first cry of my boy--_my_ boy,
+dreamed about in forgotten years--I had for that instant the ghostly
+sensation of being _double_. Just then, and only then, I did not
+think,--but _felt_, 'I am TWO.' It was weird but gave me thoughts that
+changed all pre-existing thoughts. My boy's gaze still seems to me a
+queerly beautiful thing: I still feel I am looking at myself when he
+looks at me. Only the thought has become infinitely more complicated.
+For I think about all the dead who live in the little heart of
+him--races and memories diverse as East and West. But who made his eyes
+blue and his hair brown? And will he be like you? And will he ever see
+the little cousin who has just entered the world? The other day, for one
+moment, he looked just like your boy in the picture."
+
+Mrs. Atkinson about this time went through private trials upon which it
+is unnecessary to touch here. The following letter of consolation and
+encouragement was written to her by her half-brother:--
+
+"Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One
+must pay a terrible price to see and to know. Still, the purchase is
+worth making. You know the Emerson lines:--
+
+                    "Though thou love her as thyself,
+                     As a self of purer clay;
+                     Though her parting dims the day,
+                     Stealing grace from all alive,
+                         Heartily know
+                         When half-Gods go,
+                          The Gods arrive!...
+
+"Reverse the condition: the moral is the same,--and it is eternal. By
+light alone one cannot see; there must be shadows in multitude to help.
+What we love is good, and exists, but often exists only in _us_,--then
+we become angry at others, not knowing the illusion was the work of the
+Gods. The Gods are always right. They make us sometimes imagine that
+something we love ever so much is in others, while it is only in our own
+hearts. The reason they do this to some, like you and me, is to teach us
+what terrible long, long mistakes we might have made without their help.
+Sometimes they really cause a great deal of more serious trouble, and we
+can't tell why. We must wait and believe and be quite sure the Gods are
+good.
+
+"What is not always good is the tender teaching we get at home. We are
+told of things so beautiful that we believe everybody must believe
+them,--truth, and love, and duty, and honour of soul, etc. We are even
+taught the enormous lie that the world is entirely regulated by these
+beliefs. I wonder if it would not be much better to teach children the
+adult truth:--'The world is thus and so:--those beliefs are ideal only
+which do not influence the intellectual life, nor the industrial life,
+nor the social life. The world is a carnival-ball; and you must wear a
+mask thereat,--and never, _never_ doff it;--except to the woman or the
+man you must love always. Learn to wear your mask with grace--only keep
+your heart fresh in spite of all bitter knowledge.' Wouldn't this be the
+best advice? As a mere commonplace fact,--the whole battle of life is
+fought in disguise by those who win. No man knows the heart of another
+man. No woman knows the heart of another woman. Only the woman can learn
+the man, and the man the woman;--and this only after years! What a great
+problem it is; and how utterly it is neglected in teaching the little
+human flowers that we set out in the world's cold without a thought!
+
+"You are more and more like me in every letter; but you are better far.
+I have not learned reserve with friends yet: I supply the lack by a
+retreating disposition,--a disinclination to make acquaintances. I love
+very quickly and strongly; but just as quickly dislike what I loved--if
+deceived, and the dislike does not die. My general experience has been
+that the loveable souls are but rarely lodged in the forms which most
+attract us: there _are_ such exceptions on the woman's side as my dear
+little Sis,--and there are exceptions on the male side of a particular
+order, and rare. But the rule remains. I wonder if all these jokes are
+not played on us by the Gods, who think,--'No!--you want the infinite!
+That can be reached later only,--after innumerable births. First learn,
+for a million years or so, just to love only _souls_. You _must_! for
+you will be punished if you try to obtain all perfections in one.' I
+think the Gods talk to us about that way; and when we leave the Spring
+season of life behind, we find the Gods were right after all.
+
+"--Still, the great puzzle is in all these things there are no general
+rules solid enough to trust in. I fancy the best teaching for a heart
+would be,--'Always caution,--but--believe the tendency of the world is
+to good.' And _largeness_ seems to be necessary,--never to suffer
+oneself to see only one charm; but to train oneself to study
+combinations and understand them. Any modern human nature is too complex
+to be otherwise judged.
+
+"Music,--yes! If I were near you I would be always teasing you to
+play:--and would bring you all kinds of queer exotic melodies to make
+variations on: strange melodies from Spanish America and the Creole
+Islands, and Japan, and China, and all sorts of strange places. We
+should try to do very curious things in the way of ballads and songs,
+and you would teach me all sorts of musical things I don't know. By the
+way, you will be shocked to learn, perhaps, that I have never been able
+to appreciate the superiority of the new German music: The Italian still
+seems to me the divine: but that may be because I have never had time to
+train myself to appreciate.
+
+"--You do not know how much I sympathise with all your anxieties and
+troubles, and how much I wish for your strength and happiness. Would I
+not like to be travelling with you to countries where you would find all
+the rest and light and warmth you could enjoy! Perhaps, some day that
+may be. Pray to the Gods for my good fortune; and we shall share the
+pleasure together if They listen. If They do not, we must wait as the
+Buddhists say until the future birth. Then I want to be a very rich man,
+or woman, and you a very dear little sister or brother;--and I want to
+have a steam yacht of 30,000 horse-power.
+
+"--Your sweetest little daughter, may you live to see her happiness in
+all things! I am glad I have no daughter. A boy can fight--must fight
+his way; but a daughter is the luxury of a rich man. Had I a daughter,
+she would be too dear; and I should feel inclined to say if dying:--'My
+child, I am unable to guard you longer, and the world is difficult: you
+would do better to come to Shadowland with me.' But your Marjory will be
+well guarded and petted, and have the world made sweet for her; and you
+will have no more grief. You have had all your disappointments and
+troubles in girlhood--childhood;--the future must be kind to you. As for
+me, I really think the Gods owe me some favours; they have ignored me so
+long that I am now all expectation."
+
+Then again:--
+
+
+"MY VERY SWEET LITTLE SISTER,
+
+"Your dear letter came yesterday, and filled us all with gladness. You
+see I say US;--for my folks prayed very hard for you to the ancient Gods
+and to the Buddhas,--that I might not lose that little sister of
+mine.--And now to answer questions.
+
+"Indeed, Setsu got the photos, and wondered at them, for she had never
+seen a carriage before of that kind, or a room like your room; and very
+childishly asked me to make her a room like yours. To which I
+said:--'The cost of such a room would buy for you a whole street in your
+native city of Matsue; and besides, you would be very unhappy and
+uncomfortable in such a room.' And when I explained, she wondered still
+more. (A very large Japanese house could be bought with the grounds for
+about �30--I mean a big, big merchant's house--in Izumo.) Another wonder
+was the donkey in the other photo, for none had ever seen such an
+animal.
+
+"--As for your ever coming to Japan, my dear, if you do, you shall have
+a chair. But I fear--indeed I am almost certain--that the day is not
+very far away when I must leave Setsu and Kajiwo to the care of the
+ancient Gods, and go away and work bravely for them elsewhere, till
+Kajiwo is old enough to go abroad. The days of foreign influence and of
+foreign teaching in Japan are rapidly drawing to a close. Japan is
+learning to do well without us; and we have not been kind enough to her
+to win her love. We have persecuted her with hordes of fanatical
+missionaries, robbed her by unjust treaties, forced her to pay monstrous
+indemnities for trifling wrongs;--we have forced her to become strong,
+and she is going to do without us presently, the future is dark. Happily
+my folks will be provided for; and I expect to be able, if I must go, to
+return in a few years. It is barely possible that I might get into
+journalism in Japan,--but not at all sure. I suppose you know that is my
+living profession: I understand all kinds of newspaper work. But as I am
+no believer in conventions, I am not likely to get any of the big
+sinecures. To do that one must be a ladies' man, a member of some
+church, a social figure. I am no ladies' man: I am known to the world as
+an 'infidel,' and I hate society unutterably. Were I rich enough to live
+where I please, I should certainly (if unable to live in Japan) return
+to the tropics. Indeed, I have a faint hope of passing at least the
+winters of my old age near the Equator. Where the means are to come from
+I don't know; but I have a kind of faith in Goethe's saying, that
+whatever a man most desires in youth, he will have an excess of in his
+old age. Leisure to write books in a warm climate is all I ask. Pray to
+the Gods, if you believe in any Gods, to help the dream to be realised.
+
+"Kajiwo is my nightmare. I am tortured all day and all night by the
+problem of how to set him going in life before I become dust. Sometimes
+I think how bad it was of me to have had a child at all. Yet before
+that, I did not really know what life was; and I would not lose the
+knowledge for any terms of gifts of years. Besides, I am beginning to
+think I am really a tolerably good sort of fellow,--for if I had been
+really such a monster of depravity as the religious fanatics declared,
+how could I have got such a fine boy. There must be some good in me
+anyhow. Nobody shall make a 'Christian' of Kajiwo if I can help it--by
+'Christian' I mean a believer in absurd and cruel dogmas. The world
+talks much about Christianity, but no one teaches it.
+
+"--So glad to hear you are able to go out a little again. Perhaps a long
+period of strong solid calm health is preparing for you. After the
+trials and worries of maternity such happy conditions often come as a
+reward. I hope to chat with you by a fire when we are both old, and Kaji
+has shot up into a man,--looking like his aunt a little--with a delicate
+aquiline face. But only the Eternities know what his face will be like.
+It is changeable as water now. I won't send another photo of him till he
+looks pretty again.
+
+                                              "With best love,
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+    "_June_ 24, '94.
+
+"I must go off travelling in a couple of weeks. Perhaps there will be a
+little delay before my next letter reaches you."
+
+[Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).]
+
+In the next letter he touches upon these travels undertaken with his
+wife, mother-in-law, and Kaji (an abbreviation of Kazuo, or Kajiwo, as
+Hearn was in the habit of calling him at first).
+
+"How sweet of you," he says, "to send that charming photo of the
+children. It delighted us all. Setsu never saw a donkey--there are none
+in Japan; and all wondered at the strange animal. What I wondered at was
+to see what a perfect pretty little woman the charming Marjory is. As
+for the boy, he is certainly what every parent wants a boy to be as to
+good looks; but I also think he must have a very sweet temper. I trust
+that you won't allow the world to spoil it for him. They do spoil
+tempers at some of the great public schools. I cannot believe it is
+necessary to let young lads be subjected to the brutality of places like
+Eton and Harrow. It hardens them too much. The answer is that the great
+school turns out the conquerors of the world,--the subalterns of
+Kipling,--the Clives,--the daring admirals and great captains, etc.
+Perhaps in this militant age it is necessary. But I notice the great
+thinkers generally come from other places. However, this is the
+_practical_ age,--there is nothing for philosophers, poets, or painters
+to succeed in, unless they are independently situated. I shall try to
+make a good doctor out of Kaji, if I can. I could never afford to do
+more for him. And if possible I shall take him to Europe, and stay there
+with him for a couple of years. But that is a far-away matter."
+
+Characteristically with that apprehensive mind of his, his son's future,
+as Hearn himself confesses, became a perfect nightmare.
+
+"I must make an Englishman of him, I fear. His hair has turned bright
+brown. He is so strong that I expect him to become a very powerful man:
+he is very deep-chested and thick-built and so heavy now, that people
+think I am not telling the truth about his age.
+
+"Kajiwo's soul seems to be so English that I fancy his memory of former
+births would scarcely refer much to Japan. How about the real compound
+race-soul, though? One would have to recollect having been two at the
+same time. This seems to me a defect in the popular theory--still the
+Japanese hold, or used to hold, that the soul is itself a multiple--that
+each person has a _number of souls_. That would give an explanation.
+Scientifically it is true. We are all compounds of innumerable
+lives--each a sum in an infinite addition--the dead are not dead--they
+live in all of us and move us,--and stir faintly in every heart-beat.
+And there are ghostly interlinkings. Something of _you_ must be in _me_,
+and of both of us in Kajiwo.
+
+"--I wonder if this also be true of little Dorothy. It is a curious
+thing that you tell me about the change in colour of the eyes. I only
+saw that happen in hot climates. Creole children are not uncommonly born
+with gold hair and bright blue eyes. A few years later the skin, eyes,
+hair seem to have entirely changed,--the first to brown, the two last to
+coal-black.
+
+"--I am writing all this dreamy stuff just to amuse my sweet little
+sister,--because I can't be near to pet her and make her feel very
+happy. Well, a little Oriental theory may have some caressing charm for
+you. It is a very gentle faith--though also very deep; and you will find
+in my book how much it interests me.
+
+"Take very, very, _very_ good care of your precious little self,--and do
+not try to write till you feel immensely strong. Setsu sends sweet words
+and wishes. And I----!
+
+                                     "With love,
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+    "_Kumamoto, June_ 2, '94."
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XX
+                            OUT OF THE EAST
+
+     "So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in
+     life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole
+     business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind
+     of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced
+     shadows were the sole product of Western civilisation, and
+     bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows
+     of machinery and chimneys and telegraph poles; and at the
+     shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the
+     hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of
+     houses twenty storeys high, and of hunger begging under them;
+     and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty;
+     and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and the
+     shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and
+     the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for
+     the purpose of an auto-da-fe. Whereat Japan became rather
+     serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes.
+     Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first
+     matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her
+     own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still cling to
+     her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never
+     again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did
+     before."
+
+
+After the lapse of a certain amount of time Hearn gradually became more
+reconciled to Kumamoto. The climate agreed with him, he put on flesh,
+all his Japanese clothes, he declared, even his _kimono_, had become too
+small. "I cannot say whether this be the climate, the diet, or what.
+Setsu says it is because I have a good wife: but she might be
+prejudiced, you know."
+
+It is more likely that his well-being at this time arose from his having
+given up the experiment of living exclusively on a Japanese regimen.
+After his bout of illness at Matsue, he found that he could not
+recuperate on the fare of the country, even when reinforced with eggs.
+Having lived for ten months thus, horribly ashamed as he was to confess
+his weakness, he found himself obliged to return to the flesh-pots of
+Egypt, and devoured enormous quantities of beef and fowl, and drank
+terrific quantities of beer. "The fault is neither mine nor that of the
+Japanese: it is the fault of my ancestors, the ferocious, wolfish
+hereditary instincts and tendencies of boreal mankind. The sins of the
+fathers, etc."
+
+Meantime, his knowledge of the strange people amongst whom his lot was
+cast was deepening and expanding. "Out of the East," the collection of
+essays--essence of experiences accumulated at this time, and the book,
+next perhaps to "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," by which he is best
+known--is typical of his genius at its best and at its worst. The first
+sketch, entitled, "The Dream of a Summer's Day," is simply a bundle of
+impressions of the journey to which he alludes when writing to his
+sister, made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland
+Sea. This journey, through some of the most beautiful scenery of Japan,
+after the horrors of a foreign hotel at an open port, was one of those
+experiences that form an epoch in an artist's life, touching him with
+the magic wand of inspiration. All the delightful impressions made by
+the poetry and the elusive beauty of old Japan seem concentrated into
+six pages of poetic prose. To the world it is known as "The Dream of a
+Summer's Day."[24] To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate
+beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the
+indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful
+memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its
+picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of
+sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote
+in the warm air. Like a bubbling spring the sense of beauty broke forth
+from the caverns of ancient memory, where, according to Lafcadio, it had
+lain imprisoned for years, to ripple and murmur sweet music in his ears.
+He went back to the days of his childhood, back to dreams lying in the
+past in what had become for him an alien land; the fragrance of a most
+dear memory swept over his senses. The gnat of the soul of him flitted
+out into the gleam of blue 'twixt sea and sun, back to the cedarn
+balcony pillars of the Japanese hotel, whence he could see the opening
+of the bay and the horizon, haunted by mountain shapes, faint as old
+memories, and then again to distant and almost forgotten memories of his
+youth by Lough Corrib, in the West of Ireland, the result being as
+beautiful a prose poem as Hearn ever wrote.
+
+[24] "Out of the East," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+[Illustration: Dorothy Atkinson.]
+
+The last essay in the collection is called "Yuko," a reminiscence.
+
+There are many of Lafcadio Hearn's critics who say that, in consequence
+of his ignorance of the Japanese language, and the isolation in which he
+lived, he never could have known anything really of the innermost
+thoughts and feelings of the people to whom he professed to act as
+interpreter. Sometimes they maintain that his views are unfavourable to
+an exaggerated extent, at another too laudatory. His essay entitled
+"Yuko" might certainly be taken as an example of the manner in which he
+selected certain superficial manifestations as typical of the inner life
+of the Japanese--a people as reserved, as secretive, as difficult to
+follow in their emotional aspects as the hidden currents to which he
+compares them, quoting the words of Kipling's pilot: "And if any man
+comes to you, and says, 'I know the Javva currents,' don't you listen to
+him; for those currents is never yet known to mortal man!"
+
+Yuko was a servant-maid in a wealthy family at Kinegawa. She had read in
+the daily newspaper the account of the attempt on the life of the
+Czarevitch during his visit to Japan in 1891. Being an hysterical,
+excitable girl, she was apparently wound up to the pitch of temporary
+insanity. Leaving her employer's home, she made her way to Kyoto, and
+there, buying a razor, she cut her throat opposite the gate of the
+Mikado's palace. Hearn writes of the incident as if the girl were a Joan
+of Arc, obeying the dictates of the most fervent patriotism. He goes to
+the extent of describing the Mikado, "The Son of Heaven," hearing of the
+girl's death, and "augustly ceasing to mourn for the crime that had been
+committed because of the manifestations of the great love his people
+bore him."
+
+Afterwards, Hearn admitted that his enthusiasm was perhaps exaggerated,
+for revelations showed that Yuko, in a letter she had left, had spoken
+of "a family claim." Under the raw strong light of these commonplace
+revelations, he confessed that his little sketch seemed for the moment
+much too romantic, and yet the real poetry of the event remained
+unlessened--the pure ideal that impelled a girl to take her own life
+merely to give proof of the love and loyalty of a nation. No small,
+mean, dry facts could ever belittle that large fact.
+
+Let those, however, who say that Hearn did not understand the
+enigmatical people amongst whom his lines were cast, read his article on
+"Jiu-jitsu" in this same volume. It is headed by a quotation from the
+"Tao-Te-King." "Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm
+and strong. So is it with all things.... Firmness and strength are the
+concomitants of death; softness and weakness are the concomitants of
+life. Hence he who relies upon his own strength shall not conquer."
+Preaching from this text, Hearn writes a masterly article, showing how
+Japan, though apparently adopting western inventions, preserves her own
+genius and mode of thought in all vital questions absolutely unchanged.
+The essay ends with a significant paragraph, showing how we occidentals,
+who have exterminated feebler races by merely over-living them, may be
+at last exterminated ourselves by races capable of under-living us, more
+self-denying, more fertile, and less expensive for nature to support.
+Inheriting, doubtless, our wisdom, adopting our more useful inventions,
+continuing the best of our industries--perhaps even perpetuating what is
+most worthy to endure in our sciences and our arts; pushing us out of
+the progress of the world, as the dinotherium, or the ichthyosaurus,
+were pushed out before us.
+
+Towards the end of his stay at Kumamoto, he wrote one of his delightful,
+whimsically affectionate letters to his old friend, Mr. Watkin, in
+answer apparently to one from him, recalling their talks and expeditions
+in the old days at Cincinnati, and expressing his gratitude for the
+infinite patience and wisdom shown in his treatment of his naughty,
+superhumanly foolish, detestable little friend. "Well, I wish I were
+near you to love you, and make up for all old troubles." He then tells
+his "dad" that he has been able to save between $3,500 and $4,000, that
+he has placed in custody in his wife's name. The reaction, he said,
+against foreign influence was very strong, and the future looked more
+gloomy every day. Eventually, he supposed, he must leave Japan and work
+elsewhere, and he ends, "When I first met you I was nineteen. I am now
+forty-four--well, I suppose I must have lots more trouble before I go to
+Nirvana."
+
+Towards the end of the Chinese-Japanese War Hearn was worried with
+anxiety on the subject of the noncontinuance of his appointment at the
+Kumamoto College. "Government Service," he writes to Amenomori, "is
+uncertain to the degree of terror,--a sword of Damocles; and Government
+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
+kindness,--instead of being made to feel that he is the servant of petty
+political clerks." He approached Page Baker, his old New Orleans friend,
+asking him if he could get him anything if he started in the spring for
+America. Something good enough to save money at, not only for himself,
+but something that would enable him to send money to Japan; he was not
+desirous of seeing Boston, New York or Philadelphia, but would rather be
+in Memphis, Charleston, or glorious Florida. Page Baker had apparently
+been sending him help, for on June 2nd Hearn writes acknowledging a
+draft for one hundred and sixty-three pounds, thanking him ten thousand
+times from the bottom of his much scarified heart. "I am now
+forty-four," he adds, "and as grey as a badger. Unless I can make enough
+to educate my boy well, I don't know what I'm worth,--but I feel that I
+shall have precious little time to do it in; add twenty to forty-four,
+and how much is left of a man?"
+
+In another letter he again alludes to the manner in which the government
+are cutting down the number of employ�s: "My contract runs only until
+March," he ends, "and my chances are 0."
+
+At last, after many hesitations, he definitely decided to leave
+government service, and in the autumn of 1894 accepted the offer of a
+position on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_ made by Mr. Robert Young,
+proprietor and editor of the newspaper.
+
+To his sister he wrote from the _Kobe Chronicle_ office, Kobe, Japan:--
+
+
+"MY DEAR MINNIE,
+
+"I am too much in a whirl just now to write a good letter to you (whose
+was the little curl in your last?--you never told me). I am writing only
+to say that I have left the Government Service to edit a paper in one of
+the open ports. This is returning to my old profession, and is pleasant
+enough,--though not just now very lucrative.
+
+"Best love to you. Perhaps we shall meet in a few years. My boy is well,
+beginning to walk a little. My book was to be issued on the 29th Sept.
+
+                          "Ever affectionately,
+                                          "LAFCADIO."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXI
+                                  KOBE
+
+
+Last spring I journeyed to Japan with Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio Hearn's
+half-sister, and her daughter. Mrs. Atkinson was anxious to make the
+acquaintance of her Japanese half-sister-in-law to ascertain the
+circumstances surrounding the family, also if it were possible to carry
+out her half-brother's wishes with regard to educating his eldest son,
+Kazuo--his Benjamin--in England.
+
+The first place at which we landed was Kobe, situated on the eastern end
+of the Inland Sea, opposite Osaka, the Manchester of Japan.
+
+Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's
+flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number
+of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed
+to reside in the city under Japanese law.
+
+During the six weeks on board the P. & O. coming out, I had been reading
+Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden
+soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji--gateway of the Inland Sea--it had
+blown a gale, and the Japanese steamer, the _Chikugo Maru_, to which we
+had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the
+headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all
+night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea,
+made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our
+deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes,
+and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm
+of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept
+between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here
+and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by
+symbolic _Torii_ leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing
+villages that seemed to have grown on the shore, their thatched roofs
+covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "_Yane-shobu_."
+At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the
+enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked
+gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in
+_geta_ and _kimono_, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene
+of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic
+of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,--a magic
+that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions,
+telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile
+as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of
+heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and
+China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men
+who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their
+country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the
+death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields
+of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur.
+
+A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself
+from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we
+crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the
+eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then
+paled to green.
+
+There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead.
+And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy
+peculiar to Japan, we dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the
+Ghost of Waters. We saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the
+water grasses that bend in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the
+falling dew was the spray from the herdsman's oar. And the heavens
+"seemed very near, and warm, and human; and the silence about us was
+filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning
+and for ever young, and for ever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom
+of the Gods."
+
+The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream.
+It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen
+and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick
+erections, factory chimneys, and plate-glass shop-fronts; easy was it to
+understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country.
+
+Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short
+_kuruma_ journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again
+in the era of Kusimoki Marahige.
+
+Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea
+coast,--Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;--ancient Nippon keeps
+them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by
+woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual
+life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface
+of a mirror is changed by passing reflections, as says their
+interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+Next to the hotel--as if to emphasise its nationality--was an ancient
+pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood;
+while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of
+tiles, a cedar world of _engawa_ and _shoji_, indescribable
+whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and
+grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects that a
+strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you passed
+along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity--another race soul,
+charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated itself to
+your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the arrangement of
+flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns with
+marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery rhymes
+in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman with
+elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and rouged
+and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter, while
+behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were
+squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes
+writing on long strips of paper from right to left.
+
+Enigmatical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing
+displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in
+the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross,
+red-faced women; no coarse, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling.
+Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge
+a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to
+be found in European cities.
+
+The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not
+satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the
+victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season,
+about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres
+that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from
+the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the
+cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen--about half a dollar
+in American money at the present rate of exchange."
+
+From the upper balcony of his house the Japanese street, with its rows
+of little shops, was visible to the bay; from thence he watched the
+cholera patients being taken away, and the bereaved, as soon as the law
+allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered abodes, while the ordinary
+life of the street went on day and night, as if nothing particular had
+happened. The itinerant vendors with their bamboo poles, and baskets or
+buckets, passed the empty houses, and uttered their accustomed cry; the
+blind shampooer blew his melancholy whistle; the private watchman made
+his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; and the children chased one
+another as usual with screams and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished,
+but the survivors continued their play as if nothing had happened,
+according to the wisdom of the ancient East.
+
+A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the
+depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries
+and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of
+1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of
+inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been
+worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he
+or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great
+deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will
+be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which
+the said Lafcadio never deserved, and never will deserve."
+
+Death had no terrors for Lafcadio Hearn, but the premonitions of
+physical shipwreck that beset him now depressed him heart and soul
+because of the work still left undone.
+
+He would like nothing so much, he said, as to get killed, if he had no
+one but himself in the world to take care of--which is just why he
+wouldn't get killed. He couldn't afford luxuries until his work was
+done.
+
+To his sister he writes:--
+
+"I have been on my back in a dark room for a month with inflammation of
+the eyes, and cannot write much. Thanks for sweet letter. I received a
+_Daily News_ from you,--many, many thanks. Did not receive the other
+papers you spoke of--probably they were stolen in Kumamoto. I fear I
+cannot do much newspaper work for some time. The climate does not seem
+to suit my eyes,--a hot climate would be better. I may be able to make a
+trip next winter to some tropical place, if I make any money out of my
+books. My new book--"Out of the East"--will be published soon after this
+letter reaches you.
+
+"Future looks doubtful--don't feel very jolly about it. The mere
+question of living is the chief annoyance. I am offered some further
+work in Kobe, that would leave me leisure (they promise) for my own
+literary work, but I am not sure. However, the darkest hour is before
+the dawn, perhaps.
+
+"Kaji is well able to walk now, and talks a little. Every day his hair
+is growing brighter; a thorough English boy.
+
+"Excuse bad eyes.
+                                             "Love to you,
+                                                     "LAFCADIO."
+
+Although more than twelve years had elapsed between our visit and the
+period when Hearn had resided in Kobe, nearly every one remembered the
+odd little journalist, who might be seen daily making his way, in his
+shy, near-sighted fashion, from his house in Kitinagasa Dori, to the
+office of the _Kobe Chronicle_.
+
+Dr. Papellier of Kobe, who attended Hearn in a professional capacity at
+this time, was full of reminiscences. Long before meeting him at Kobe
+Dr. Papellier had been a great admirer of his genius, had, indeed, when
+surgeon on board a German vessel, translated "Chita" for a Nuremburg
+paper.
+
+Being an oculist, one of his first injunctions, as soon as he examined
+Hearn's eyes, was cessation from all work and rest in a darkened room if
+he wished to escape total blindness. The right eye was myopic to an
+extent seldom seen, and at the moment was so severely inflamed by
+neuritis that the danger of an affection to the retina seemed
+imminent,--the left was entirely blind. For the purpose of keeping up
+his spirits, under this unwonted constraint, Dr. Papellier, in spite of
+his professional engagements, went out of his way to visit the little
+man frequently, and would stop hours chatting; showed him, indeed, a
+kindness and consideration that, we were told, were quite exceptional.
+Hearn, Dr. Papellier relates, was a good and fluent talker, content to
+keep the ball rolling himself, and preferred an attentive listener
+rather than a person who stated his own opinions.
+
+Their topics of conversations circled round the characteristics of the
+civilisation in which they were living. Hearn's emotional enthusiasm for
+the Japanese, the doctor said, had cooled; he had received several
+shocks in dealing with officials at Kumamoto, and said his illusions
+were vanishing, and he wanted to leave the country; France, China, or
+the South Sea Islands seemed each in turn to attract his wayward fancy.
+
+The account of Stevenson's life in Samoa had made a great impression on
+him. He declared that if he had not his Japanese family to look after he
+would pack up his books of reference and start at once for Samoa.
+
+"His wife, who understood no English at all, seldom appeared, a servant
+girl usually attending to his wants when I was present.
+
+"It struck me at the time that his knowledge of the Japanese vernacular
+was very poor for a man of his intelligence, who, for nearly four years,
+had lived almost entirely in the interior, surrounded by those who could
+only talk the language of the country.
+
+"It was plain that what he knew about Japan must have been gained
+through the medium of interpreters. I was still more surprised when I
+discovered how extremely near-sighted he was. His impressions of scenery
+or Japanese works of art could never have been obtained as ordinary
+people obtain them. The details had to be studied piece by piece with a
+small telescope, and then described as a whole."
+
+His mode of life, Dr. Papellier said, was almost penurious, although he
+must have been receiving a good salary from the _Kobe Chronicle_, and
+was making something by his books. At home he dressed invariably in
+Japanese style; his clothes being very clean and neat. The furniture of
+his small house was scanty. His food, which was partly Japanese and
+partly so-called "foreign," was prepared in a small restaurant somewhere
+in the town. In his position as medical attendant Papellier regarded it
+as his duty to remonstrate on this point, impressing upon him that he
+ought to remember the drain on his constitution of the amount of brain
+work that he was doing, both at the _Kobe Chronicle_ office and writing
+at home.
+
+There were reasons for this that Hearn would not care to tell Papellier.
+Mrs. Koizumi was in delicate health, expecting her second child, and
+Hearn doubtless, with that consideration that invariably distinguished
+him in his treatment of his wife, had his food brought from outside so
+as to save her the trouble and exertion of cooking it at home. Only in
+one way, Papellier said, did he allow himself any indulgence, and that
+was in the amount he smoked. Although he seldom took spirits, he smoked
+incessantly--not cigars, but a small Japanese pipe--a _kiseru_--which he
+handled in a skilful way, lighting one tiny tobacco pellet in the
+glowing ashes of the one just consumed. One of his hobbies was
+collecting pipes, the other was collecting books. He had already got
+together a valuable library at New Orleans, he did the same in Japan. He
+was able to exercise these hobbies inexpensively, but they needed
+knowledge, time and patience. At his death he possessed more than two
+hundred pipes, all shapes and sizes.
+
+Every one whom we met when we arrived at Kobe advised us to call on the
+editor of the _Kobe Chronicle_ if we wanted information on the subject
+of Lafcadio Hearn. We therefore made our way to the _Kobe Chronicle_
+office as soon as we could. Mr. Young as well as Mrs. Young, whose
+acquaintance we made subsequently, were both full of reminiscences of
+the odd little genius.
+
+He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday
+for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events,
+the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding--a
+plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as
+Hearn was in Kobe. "The Japanese," he was wont to say, "are a very
+clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding."
+
+Absence of mind, and inattention to events passing around him, was very
+noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to
+find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the identity of the
+individual with whom he was conversing.
+
+Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely
+agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For
+some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in Japanese. At last
+one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not Japanese." "Oh,
+really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised the
+fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English.
+
+Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's
+editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of
+the _Kobe Chronicle_. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's
+opinions and conclusions, with regard to the Japanese and their
+religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far
+as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his
+contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary
+qualities. The flint-edged space of the newspaper column cramped and
+hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but
+writing for money an impossibility.
+
+Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment
+he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the
+special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became nobody again;
+and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a
+fool. So he had to sit and wait for the gods. His mind, however, ate
+itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His
+thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant
+things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things
+were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to
+work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional,
+romantic--and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and
+rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result
+was an essay that the editor of the _Atlantic_ declared was a veritable
+illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even
+he himself.
+
+Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated considerably
+against his being an effective newspaper correspondent, were his
+personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must, above all
+things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did not
+possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of
+life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he
+thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of
+wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of
+human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!--why not
+collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends
+and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to
+see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the
+same doom."
+
+No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary
+reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted
+the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an
+artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,--a
+wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes
+the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in
+Japan.
+
+"For myself," he says in one of the _Kobe Chronicle_ leaders, "I could
+sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause.
+Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a
+destroyer,--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they
+break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent
+the edge,--the _acies_,--to use the Roman word--of Occidental
+aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful
+and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in
+many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and
+the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the
+Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and
+this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by
+the 'noble army.'"
+
+Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at
+this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He
+summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial
+element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the
+interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The
+Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and
+homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the
+life in Old Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every
+way, with only the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury
+and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant
+was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever
+learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against
+carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churches! and white
+shirts! and "_yofuku_"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of
+civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away
+permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call
+civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have
+conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan--the only civilised
+country that existed since Antiquity."
+
+"Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly
+so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated,
+from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things,
+the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of
+divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most
+enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says
+in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of
+Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro'
+(Heart)."
+
+Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the
+emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and
+inner meaning--just as we say in English, "the heart of things."
+
+It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one
+can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of
+Japan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is
+contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist
+who told him before she came to Japan she had read Hearn's books and
+thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a
+disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his
+descriptions!"
+
+The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's principal book on
+Japan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan." The conditions and people that he describes are
+certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western
+civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps
+exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange
+people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of
+the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for
+instance, said that he once showed him a report in the _Kobe Chronicle_,
+describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway
+tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in
+"Out of the East," which Papellier declared to be an entirely distorted
+account of the facts as they really occurred. It is the old story of
+imaginative genius and ordinary commonplace folk. In discussing the
+question, Hearn insisted that every artist should carry out the theory
+of selection. A photograph would give the unessential and the essential;
+an artist picks out important aspects; the portrait-painter's work,
+though manifestly less exact, is incomparably finer because of its
+spirituality; though less technically correct, it has acquired the
+imaginative sentiment of the mind of the artist. When depicting the
+Japanese he felt justified in emphasising certain excellent qualities,
+putting these forward and ignoring the rest; choosing the grander
+qualities, as portrait-painters do, and passing over the petty
+frailties, the mean characteristics that might impress the casual
+observer. Nothing is more lovely, for instance, than a Japanese village
+amongst the hills, when seen just after sunrise--through the mists of a
+spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the
+enchantment passes with the vapours: in the raw clear light he can find
+no palace of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood
+and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks.
+
+He attained to a certainty and precision of form in these "Kokoro"
+essays that places them above any previous work. Now we can see the
+benefit of his concentration of mind, of his earnestness of purpose and
+monastic withdrawal from things of the world; no outside influences
+disturbed his communing with himself, and it is this communing that
+imparts a vague and visionary atmosphere, a ghostly thrill to every page
+of the volume.
+
+Yet here was he, in the forty-fifth year of his age, a master amongst
+masters, arguing with solemn earnestness upon the use or mis-use of the
+word "shall" and "will," begging Professor Hall Chamberlain for
+information and guidance.
+
+"You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine, but I must confess
+that your letter on 'shall' and 'will' is a sort of revelation in one
+sense--it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of
+fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the
+sight and sound of the words 'will' and 'shall.' I confess also that I
+never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been
+guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of 'will' as softer and
+gentler than 'shall.' The word 'shall' in the second person especially
+has for me a queer identification with English harshness and
+menace,--memories of school perhaps. I shall study the differences by
+your teaching and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be
+able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything--the word
+nothing."
+
+The best essays in "Kokoro" were inspired, not by Kobe, but by Kyoto,
+one of the most beautiful cities in Japan, seat of the ancient
+government and stronghold of the ancient creeds. It lies only a short
+distance from Kobe, and many were the days and hours that Hearn spent
+dreaming in the charming old-fashioned hotel and picking up impressions
+amidst the Buddhist shrines and gardens of the surrounding country.
+"Notes from a Travelling Diary," "Pre-existence," and the charming
+sketch "Kimiko," written on the text "To wish to be forgotten by the
+beloved is a soul-task harder far than trying not to forget," all
+originated in Kyoto.
+
+In a letter to his sister dated March 11th, 1895, he alludes to his book
+"Kokoro."
+
+"My sweet little beautiful sister, since my book is being so long
+delayed I may anticipate matters by telling you something of the
+so-called Ancestor-Worship of which I spoke in my last letter. The
+subject is not in any popular work on Japan, and I think should interest
+you, if for no other reason than that you are yourself such a sweet
+little mother.
+
+"When a person dies in Japan, a little tablet is made which stands upon
+a pedestal, and is about a foot high. On this narrow tablet is inscribed
+either the real name of the dead, or the Buddhist name given to the
+soul. This is the Mortuary Tablet, or as you have sometimes seen it
+called in books, the Ancestral Tablet.
+
+"If children die they also have tablets in the home, but they are not
+prayed to,--but prayed _for_. Nightly the Mother talks to her dead
+child, advising, reminding, with words of caress,--just as if the little
+one were alive, and a tiny lamp is lighted to guide the little ghostly
+feet home.
+
+"Well, I do not want to write a dry essay for you, but in view of all
+the unkind things said about Japanese beliefs, I thought you might like
+to hear this, for I think you will feel there is something beautiful in
+the rule of reverence to the dead.
+
+"I hope, though I am not at all sure, that you will receive some fairy
+tales by this same mail,--as I have trusted the sending of them to a
+Yokohama friend. Here there are no book-houses at all--only shops for
+the sale of school texts. Should you get the stories, I want you to read
+the 'Matsuyama Mirror' first. There is a ghostly beauty that I think you
+will feel deeply. After all, the simplest stories are the best.
+
+"I wanted to say many more things; but the mail is about to leave, and I
+must stop to-day.
+
+"My little fellow is trying hard to talk and to walk. He is now very
+fair and strong.
+
+"Tell me, dear little beautiful sister, how you are always,--give me
+good news of yourself,--and love me a little bit. I will write soon
+again.
+
+                                               "LAFCADIO HEARN."
+
+In November, 1895, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited him at Kobe,
+and then probably the possibility was discussed of Hearn's re-entering
+the government service as professor of English in the Imperial
+University at Tokyo. But as late as April, 1896, he still seemed
+uncertain that his engagement under government was assured.
+
+Professor Toyama wrote to him, saying that his becoming a Japanese
+citizen had raised a difficulty, which he hoped might be surmounted.
+Hearn replied, that he was not worried about the matter, and had never
+allowed himself to consider it very seriously--hinting, at the same
+time, that he would not accept a lower salary. If Matsue only had been a
+little warmer in the winter, he would rather be teaching there than in
+Tokyo, in any event he hoped some day to make a home there.
+
+About this time comes Hearn's last letter to his sister:--
+
+"MY DEAR LITTLE SIS,
+
+"What you say about writing for English papers, etc., is interesting,
+but innocent. Men do not get opportunities to dispose of any MS. to
+advantage without one of two conditions. Either they must have struck a
+popular vein--become popular as writers; or they must have _social_
+influence. I am not likely to become popular, and I have no social
+influence. No good post would be given me,--as I am not a man of
+conventions, and I am highly offensive to the Orthodoxies who have
+always tried to starve me to death--without success, happily, as yet. I
+am looking, however, for an English publisher, and hope some day to get
+a hearing in some London print. But for the time being, it is not what I
+wish that I can get, but what I can. Perhaps your eyes will open wide
+with surprise to hear that I shall get nothing, or almost nothing for my
+books. The contracts deprive me of all but a nominal percentage on the
+2nd thousand.
+
+"Well, this is only a line to thank you for your sweet little letter. I
+have Marjory's too, and shall write her soon. Love,
+
+                                                      "LAFCADIO.
+
+"Excuse eyes.
+
+"P.S.--I reopened this letter to add a few lines on second thought.
+
+"You wrote in your last about Sir F. Ball. His expression of pleasure
+about my books may have been merely politeness to a pretty lady,--my
+sweet little sister. But it may have been genuine--probably was partly
+so. He could very easily say a good word for me to the Editors of the
+great Reviews,--the _Fortnightly_, _Nineteenth Century_, etc.--though I
+am not sure whether his influence would weigh with them very greatly.
+
+"At all events what I need is 'a friend at Court,'--and need badly.
+Perhaps, perhaps only, my little sis could help me in that direction. I
+think I might ask you,--when possible, to try. The help an earnest man
+wants isn't money: it is opportunity.
+
+"We have a cozy little home in Kobe, and Kobe is pretty, but I fear I
+shall have to leave it by the time this reaches you. Therefore perhaps
+it will be better to address me: 'c/o James E. Beale, _Japan Daily
+Mail_, Yokohama, Japan.' I shall soon send Kajiwo's last photo with some
+more fairy tales written by myself for your 'bairns.'
+
+                                                   "Love to you,
+                                                             "L. H."
+
+
+As Lafcadio Hearn's biographer, I almost shrink from saying that this
+was the last letter of the series written to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson.
+It somehow was so satisfactory to think of the exile having resumed
+intercourse with his own people, and with his native land; but with
+however deep a feeling of regret, the fact must be acknowledged that he
+suddenly put an end to the intercourse for some unaccountable reason. He
+not only never wrote again, but returned her envelope, empty of its
+contents, without a line of explanation. Mrs. Atkinson has puzzled over
+the enigma many times, but has never been able to fathom the reason for
+such an action on the part of her eccentric half-brother. There was
+nothing, she declares, in her letter to wound even his irritable nerves.
+At one time she thought it might have been in consequence of the
+attempts of various other members of the family to open a correspondence
+with him; he reiterated several times to Mrs. Atkinson the statement
+that "one sister was enough." I, on the other hand, think the key may
+with more probability be found in a passage from one of his letters
+written at this time, saying he had received letters from relatives in
+England that had made his thoughts not blue, but indigo blue. A longing
+had entered his heart that each year henceforward became stronger, to
+return to his native land, to hold communion with those of his own race;
+this nostalgia was rendered acute by his sister's letters, his literary
+work was interfered with and his nerves upset; he therefore made up his
+mind suddenly to stop the correspondence.
+
+The person who behaved thus was the same erratic creature, who, having
+previously made an appointment, on going to keep it, rang the bell and
+then, seized with nervous panic--ran away; or had fits of nervous
+depression lasting for days because a printer had put a few commas in
+the wrong place or misspelt some Japanese words. Hearn possessed supreme
+intellectual courage, would stick to his artistic "pedestal of faith"
+with a determination that was heroic, but where his nerves were
+concerned he was an arrant coward. If letters, or arguments with
+friends, flurried him, or awakened uncongenial thoughts or memories, he
+was capable of putting the letters away unread, and breaking off a
+friendship that had lasted for years.
+
+Thinking his silence might be caused by ill-health, Mrs. Atkinson wrote
+several times. The only answer she received was from Mr. James Beale of
+the _Japan Mail_:--
+
+                                         "Japan Mail _Office_,
+                                              "_Yokohama_,
+                                                 "_July_ 9_th_, 1896.
+
+"Dear Madam,
+
+"I hasten to relieve your anxiety in regard to your brother's health. I
+have just returned from an expedition in the North, and previous to
+leaving about a month ago, was on the point of asking Hearn if he could
+accompany me, because it was a part of the country which he has never
+visited, but about that time I received a letter from him in which he
+stated that he was very busy (I believe he has another book on the
+stocks), and I did not mention the matter when I wrote. His letter was
+written in a very cheerful strain and indicated no illness or trouble
+with his eyes. In regard to the latter I have heard nothing since the
+spring of '95, when, through rest from study, they had recovered their
+normal condition. As Hearn once lived in a very isolated town on the
+West Coast I used to receive letters and other postal matter for him and
+do little commissions for him here, and I remember at times English
+letters passing through my hands. These were all carefully reposted to
+him as they came, and I should say that your letters had undoubtedly
+reached him.
+
+"No apology is necessary on your part, as I am pleased to afford you
+whatever consolation you may find in the knowledge of the fact that your
+brother is alive and well. I think I may venture to say that if he has
+neglected his friends it is due to being busy.
+
+"I send you his address below.
+
+                                  "Yours faithfully,
+                                                "JAS. ELLACOTT BEALE.
+
+    "_No. 16, Zashiki,
+        "Shichi-chome, Bangai,
+            "Naka Zamate-dori,
+               "Kobe, Japan._
+
+"MRS. M. C. BUCKLEY-ATKINSON.
+
+"Since writing the foregoing I have learned that your brother has been
+appointed to a post in the University. The announcement will appear in
+to-morrow's _Mail_.
+
+"This appointment will necessitate Hearn's removal to the capital, and
+as the vacation expires on September 15, the address at Kobe I have
+given will not find him. As soon as his Tokyo address reaches me I will
+send it to you.
+
+                                                          "J. E. B."
+
+
+As a set-off to this unaccountable break in his correspondence with his
+sister, I would like to end this chapter with a touching and pathetic
+letter, addressed to Mrs. Watkin at Cincinnati, and another to his "Old
+Dad," friends of over twenty years' standing, but unfortunately am not
+able to do so. Hitherto Hearn's affection had been given to Mr. Watkin;
+of his female belongings he had seen but little. Now apparently, Mrs.
+and Miss Effie Watkin ventured to address the "great man," as their
+husband's and father's eccentric Bohemian little friend had become. To
+Mrs. Watkin he touches on the mysteries of spiritualism which were
+scarcely mysteries in the Far East; some day he hoped to drop in on all
+the circle he loved and talk ghostliness. Some hints of it appeared, he
+said, in a little book of his, "Out of the East." He imagined Mr. Watkin
+to be more like Homer than ever. He himself had become grey and
+wrinkled, fat, too, and disinclined for violent exercise. In other
+words, he was getting down the shady side of the hill, the horizon
+before him was already darkening, and the winds blowing out of it cold.
+He was not in the least concerned about the enigmas, he said, except
+that he wondered what his boy would do if he were to die. To his "Old
+Dad" he writes a whimsically affectionate letter, his old and dearest
+friend, he calls him. Practical, material people predicted that he was
+to end in gaol, or at the termination of a rope, but his "Old Dad"
+always predicted he would be able to do something. He was anxious for as
+much success as he could get for his son's sake. To have the future of
+others to care for certainly changed the face of life; he worked and
+hoped, the best and only thing to do.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXII
+                                 TOKYO
+
+     "... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of
+     circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line
+     of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always
+     too much for my own peace of mind,--places, things, and
+     persons,--and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and
+     becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a
+     great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an
+     All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil
+     falls, himself in each and all."
+
+
+One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,--and he made many
+for the sake of his wife and family--was the giving up of his life in
+the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its _Yashikis_ and
+ancient shrines--to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The
+comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high
+salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing
+was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the _Kobe
+Chronicle_, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the
+ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate
+horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling
+surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have
+been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place
+pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle.
+
+His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as
+Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of
+the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind;
+she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.
+
+Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the
+beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would
+do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description
+of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived
+ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing fa�ade, a structure that
+would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or
+London.
+
+After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the
+capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21,
+Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was
+the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house
+with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a
+"rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so
+beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.
+
+In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to
+remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at
+Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary
+work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.
+
+When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of
+the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo
+suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in
+dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the
+quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a
+_sake_-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the
+neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where
+Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great
+trees, dreaming out of space, out of time.
+
+The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university.
+One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one
+joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any
+one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must
+have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!"
+
+Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his
+celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the
+Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly
+realistic--the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here
+the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted
+American suburb--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several
+centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor;
+then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and
+bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the
+shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which
+burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and
+bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in
+them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or
+time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess,
+was difficult. But Setsu was happy--like a bird making its nest, she was
+fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly
+weather it was.
+
+In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo,
+there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively
+tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the
+Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor,
+seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable
+and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him
+by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner
+in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at
+variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers.
+
+His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and
+delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals,
+and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a
+people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if
+England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an
+impossible task.
+
+In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his
+interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while
+professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be
+forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and
+Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo
+University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students.
+Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They
+are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their
+intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the
+surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal,
+therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical
+explanation of technique and style.
+
+The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in
+which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in
+a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the
+order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where
+intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the
+adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy
+and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form,
+through every condition of society, and almost into every household.
+Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was
+influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea
+off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling
+round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with
+fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation
+about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from
+dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he
+would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part
+would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and
+confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or
+clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted
+for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."
+
+The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship
+were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.
+
+Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to
+dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a
+university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official
+banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty
+invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical
+colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.
+
+No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he
+exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first
+the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold
+at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of
+gold--luckily for themselves.
+
+He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the
+university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that
+inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on you!" All the
+professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow--no overcoats
+allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted
+to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more
+for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far
+East--'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was
+beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife
+tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you
+upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to
+you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the
+privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest.
+There is a reason for things--for anything except--a plug hat...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during
+the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn,
+representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful
+memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he
+alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who
+had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five
+years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the
+Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about
+them."
+
+With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever
+seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of
+French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic.
+Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the
+Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only
+because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original
+owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested,
+looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient
+art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the
+other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and
+ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of
+Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in
+Japan. He describes his landlord, the old _sake_-brewer, coming to
+definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught
+sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,--you ought to have been a
+girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his
+father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at
+seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that
+he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that
+really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to
+imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under
+civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think
+superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."
+
+He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion
+one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as
+a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century
+false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and
+Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies
+in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and
+recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.
+
+After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn
+retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was
+dedicated:--
+
+                                 TOKYO
+                             "to my friend
+                          Amenomori Nobushige
+                      poet, scholar and patriot."
+
+We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he
+left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that
+Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous
+correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on
+the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To
+Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial
+surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the
+place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the
+approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new
+sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead
+sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to
+feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for
+me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality?
+Alas! I don't know...."
+
+Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little
+genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and
+apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese,
+however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all
+occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm
+of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own
+world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.
+
+Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at
+Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm
+human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.
+
+In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she
+mentions McDonald of Yokohama--in brown boots and corduroys--as
+escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in
+Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction
+of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost
+immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one
+of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar
+Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.
+
+"After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most
+peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a
+certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the
+ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio."
+
+Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that
+above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in
+uniform,--a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up
+till midnight, talking about things.
+
+The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of
+Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour
+wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never
+seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for
+the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Ant�us I feel
+always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality,
+not so much of a _literary_ man however."
+
+The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the
+breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks,
+the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had
+touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him
+material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"--only real
+facts--not names or dates--real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy.
+He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there
+were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this
+world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in
+Japan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible--"especially hidden
+from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn."
+
+If he could get together a book of short stories--six would be
+enough--he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he
+could.
+
+Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his
+friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past
+life--that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the
+outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying
+that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you
+can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for
+twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the
+disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?"
+
+The communion between these two was more like that between some popular,
+athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by
+the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two
+middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official
+capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first
+letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an
+audacious proceeding that few ventured upon.
+
+Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to
+his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street--the charming
+way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his
+interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs.
+
+In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's
+visits. A rocking-chair,--rare piece of furniture in a Japanese
+establishment--a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder.
+
+McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn
+was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and
+lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was
+doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald,
+therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of
+all sorts.
+
+"With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man!
+How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have
+only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'"
+
+They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed
+and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their
+dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and
+"blue soul"--names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at
+the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was
+tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at
+Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed
+with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable
+in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years.
+
+"What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall
+ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,--with
+philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher
+(Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is
+altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the
+world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in
+these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the
+little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an
+indefinite way that some divine attribute was his.
+
+McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief
+in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti.
+Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to
+try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his
+intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he
+wished him to write fiction--he wanted him to make some profit out of
+his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really
+paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write
+more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that
+very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which
+alone can furnish the material. They can _divine_, but must have some
+chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like
+Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them
+and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who
+think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social
+existence."
+
+Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or
+even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to
+officialdom--but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take
+care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy
+to college there must remain merely a possibility.
+
+The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two
+friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental
+tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession,
+and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary
+tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get
+behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.
+
+He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen
+from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at
+his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.
+
+He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him,
+who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you
+would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her
+'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"
+
+The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind
+of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged
+calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if
+not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite
+subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories
+of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and
+their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.
+
+But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work,
+believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings
+and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly.
+Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him
+they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the
+sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be
+forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come."
+
+Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or
+cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet
+here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and
+brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I
+right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought
+never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these
+protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and
+again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink
+good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with
+characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald
+wrapped him up in his own to send him home--an incident which Hearn
+declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died.
+Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy
+doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a
+humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home
+the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest
+and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius,
+the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the
+seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination.
+
+It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to
+the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings
+seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When
+he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least
+notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper
+again--treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his
+attacks of temper at Cincinnati.
+
+So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's,
+lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally
+stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed
+duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the
+sale of the copyright of his books in the United States.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIII
+
+                                USHIGOME
+
+     "Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye
+     can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed,
+     although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we
+     betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door
+     opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all
+     Dopplegangers?--and is not the invisible the only life we
+     really enjoy?"
+
+
+In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at
+Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other
+sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue.
+
+To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things,
+sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that
+rustled through the bamboo-grove.
+
+Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could
+indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's
+Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else.
+
+This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and
+humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time
+he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's
+"Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised,
+also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but
+in England.
+
+The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his
+pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that
+"he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada
+that could not sing."
+
+No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of
+hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking
+that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit
+of the public.
+
+Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors,
+and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University,
+at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a
+Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything
+was favourable to absorption in his work.
+
+He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one
+hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling
+well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write."
+Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a
+new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes
+he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a
+month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his
+drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many
+stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the
+drawer of his mind when he passed away.
+
+Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of
+excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and
+though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was
+slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign
+husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss
+might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's
+common-sense.
+
+"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years
+after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely
+Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light,
+things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so
+impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I
+have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned
+to prize some of them at their weight in gold."
+
+Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese
+union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various
+letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching
+home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not
+bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the
+valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't
+you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"
+
+On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his
+face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got
+possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next
+day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He
+acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."
+
+She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one
+day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy
+sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the
+murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden
+and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the
+Japanese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals.
+"He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish
+sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a
+catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he
+laughed the whole household laughed, too."
+
+His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was
+kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with
+them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his
+merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's
+nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude
+towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the
+cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would
+play "_onigokko_," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in
+the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in
+learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song,
+for instance--
+
+                              "Yu-yake!
+                               Ko-yake!
+                         Ashita wa tenki ni nare."
+
+                              "Evening-burning!
+                               Little-burning!
+                         Weather, be fair to-morrow!"
+
+or the Song of "Urashima Taro."
+
+He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating
+quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these
+which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming,
+distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In
+one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse
+has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of
+storm and impending disaster which is wonderful.
+
+He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling,
+crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle
+severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see.
+But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the
+district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he
+walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb
+his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya,
+Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little
+note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as
+they passed along.
+
+An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite
+resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this
+piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so
+miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for
+some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the
+university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly
+stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and
+contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore,
+smoking his Japanese pipe.
+
+Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his
+professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half
+of his stay at Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the
+indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the
+club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one
+at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make
+jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond:
+"Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."
+
+Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and
+smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the
+twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with
+fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse,
+though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I
+think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided
+the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and
+in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine,
+the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to
+recall."
+
+Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough
+to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese
+books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept
+them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and
+more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He
+imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim
+of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas
+were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal
+mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden
+fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers,
+ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.
+
+We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune,
+which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were
+fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony
+blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese
+hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination
+with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found
+frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows
+not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection
+with the incident.
+
+But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast,
+where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for
+sea-bathing, that he was in his element.
+
+The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and
+during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as
+they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred
+the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than
+that of college professors.
+
+As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi,
+who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every
+description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's
+description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting
+boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw
+sandals, gourds for holding _sake_, and bottles of lemonade, while
+surmounting all was the _kamidana_--the shelf of the gods--with its
+_Daruma_, or household divinity.
+
+Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at
+Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim
+relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the
+gale--floating in the mists--shuddering in the leaf--flickering in the
+light of waters--or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf,
+to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a
+boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and
+imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating
+round him.
+
+It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at
+Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published
+after his appointment as professor of English at the university was
+"Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East."
+Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said
+to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work
+was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at
+Matsue, Kobe, Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of
+reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary
+mill.
+
+Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha
+Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on
+"Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous
+statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for
+substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: _and the outer-man
+is the ghost_."
+
+In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions
+and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and
+substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and
+over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy.
+
+In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that
+the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West.
+Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of
+words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he
+fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of
+occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is
+far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much
+of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much
+prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound
+by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first
+moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous,
+and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on
+the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove
+that he is incapable of feeling them.
+
+All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and
+suggestive instead of detailed. "_Ittakkiri_" (entirely vanished, in the
+sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who,
+instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words.
+
+The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom
+consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs,
+panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies,
+curtains and women's cr�pe silk underwear, they are written by every one
+and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes
+poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his
+thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple
+poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you
+can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The
+translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street,"
+contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep
+feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island
+Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them
+are charming.
+
+     "To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going;
+      Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.
+
+     "Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:
+      The flowing of water, the Way of Love."
+
+His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating
+this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to
+Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so,
+as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character.
+Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant
+Friendship."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this
+time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific
+imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of
+Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life
+is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and
+thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my
+cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of
+a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define."
+
+The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful
+a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry
+of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a
+hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with
+faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the
+mighty day.
+
+The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory
+of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad
+millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme
+of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour
+when thought itself must fade.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated
+
+                                   to
+                       Mrs. Alice von Behrens
+                         for auld lang syne.
+
+We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was
+one of his New York acquaintances.
+
+"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of
+this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the
+Japanese poem on the first page.
+
+To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to
+do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he says, he has been and
+gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly
+packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to
+Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods. To save himself further
+trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased
+about terms--and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a
+man liberated from prison--smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring
+day.
+
+In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the
+fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement
+of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The
+splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness
+to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the
+Now,--a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that
+maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of
+Heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.... Thus and only
+thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes--the spectral
+past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and
+the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one
+soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory."
+
+"Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs.
+Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang
+Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book
+is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written,
+and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches,
+inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a p�an, as it
+were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because
+of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems.
+
+     "Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf.
+        ... Ah! the autumn rains!"
+
+And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing
+butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:--
+
+     "Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone
+         to-day."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXIV
+                              NISHI OKUBO
+
+     "From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending
+     in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold
+     the selfsame Moon."--_Buddhist poem translated by_ Lafcadio
+     Hearn.
+
+
+It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from
+21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo.
+
+Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his
+wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan.
+It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain
+Fujisaki--one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate
+friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners'
+Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show
+of azaleas is held once a year.
+
+After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as
+it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi
+for her occupation.
+
+Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike
+acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow
+now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most
+of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a
+considerable circulation in England.
+
+There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary
+knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for
+the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given
+up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content
+to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my
+notions of things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald.
+
+On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,--assisted by his
+wife,--he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he
+suddenly heard an _uguisu_ (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove
+outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his
+wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made
+enough for you and the children."
+
+During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his
+eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was
+obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the
+paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as
+copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of
+setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers
+of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any
+necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in
+conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully.
+
+The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would
+have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float
+round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding.
+Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the
+practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical
+life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity
+flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most
+probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his
+Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought,"
+he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove
+of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and
+regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a
+year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging,
+kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then
+pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and
+pleased."
+
+"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no
+two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of
+each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can,
+without reference to nationalities or schools."
+
+Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the
+highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his
+strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole
+song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and
+religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people.
+
+At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had
+suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental an�mia
+common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things,"
+as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not."
+Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance.
+Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it
+already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he
+did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead
+of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain
+thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency
+was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly
+apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude
+of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into
+the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library,
+weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his
+work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the
+rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent
+scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down,
+while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with
+uplifted hand and enigmatic smile.
+
+Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from
+memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and
+realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his
+curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his
+house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath
+his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his
+wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of
+Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky
+and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac
+spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natal�_, the
+flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the
+growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey
+sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir
+under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs,
+that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and
+the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.
+
+Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the
+social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have
+Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers'
+ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's
+incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by
+any of our English essayists.
+
+Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems
+suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After
+some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies
+when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on
+the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained
+after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent
+inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small
+things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his
+window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising
+above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.
+
+In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully,
+almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject
+of human desire and attainment.
+
+"He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual
+recurrence--he asked me for the Moon.
+
+"Unwisely I protested:--
+
+"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach
+it.'
+
+"He answered:--
+
+"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock
+it down.'
+
+"... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately
+truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.
+
+"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that
+brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and
+fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some
+inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to
+freedom....
+
+"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish
+could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children
+of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings
+that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the
+continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which
+once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often
+subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?
+
+"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the
+child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us
+to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun,
+and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."
+
+He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife
+tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became
+more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings,
+supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He
+had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now
+the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and
+become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with
+the rapture of wind and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was
+so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of
+life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.
+
+"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch
+myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three!
+I shall see the sun again!
+
+"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will
+come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of
+the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,--doubt right and wrong,
+friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of
+horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one
+infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to
+remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void,
+has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and
+destruction hath no covering.
+
+"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that
+I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But--
+
+"_Must I believe that I really exist?..._"
+
+Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and
+ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have
+been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost
+circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but
+seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without
+shore I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face
+of my depth....
+
+"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of
+things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly
+lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and
+multiplied. And the dimness flushed.
+
+"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty
+Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also
+mine!..."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn
+describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he
+moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal
+intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of
+pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination
+almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night,
+the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere.
+
+"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the
+policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be
+painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her
+back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that
+she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of
+Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful
+Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side;
+and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight
+hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_
+(vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or
+more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog;
+but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.
+
+His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of
+newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the
+garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the
+little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on
+"Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?
+
+"The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from
+the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the
+neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises
+the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the
+South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies
+of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing;
+wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy
+repairing their damaged habitations....
+
+"... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy.
+They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great
+trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads
+washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other
+visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean
+town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to
+attempt an essay on Ants."
+
+After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful
+woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants,
+and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his
+ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants'
+talk, he would hear of something to his advantage--
+
+"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes
+with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things
+inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."
+
+After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a
+still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic
+law, he thus ends his essay:--
+
+"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures
+capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.
+
+"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power
+supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no
+gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would
+seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency'
+in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems
+nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics
+fundamentally opposed to human egoism."
+
+In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect
+Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of
+"things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of
+keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records
+to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time
+of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and
+improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every
+detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels
+half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh
+food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the
+insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal
+comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest
+poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the
+voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of
+forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in
+whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms
+of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in
+the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties
+of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of
+the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet
+perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has
+wasted and sterilised their paradise,--substituting everywhere for
+beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly
+hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend
+the charm of that which we destroyed."
+
+During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect
+musicians," a grass-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was
+exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so
+small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides
+of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about
+the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antenn� much longer
+than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished
+against the light.
+
+"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than
+his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...
+
+"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber
+... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the
+room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness,
+a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric
+bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes
+swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish
+resonance....
+
+"Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and
+unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known
+in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many
+generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the
+fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in
+a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt
+thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was
+sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the
+exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
+It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions
+of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses
+of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has
+forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he
+sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust
+of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of
+time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it.
+They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere
+shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he
+goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the
+unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant,
+never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy
+music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold
+in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I
+have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a
+barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm
+of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon
+my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,--telling me
+also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost
+within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the
+vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and
+thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of
+his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely,
+nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had
+eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,--especially Hana the
+housemaid!
+
+"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst
+that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human
+crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."
+
+During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight,
+every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the
+polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title
+"Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the
+crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the
+country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which
+is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long
+years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."
+
+Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these
+Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product
+of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the
+work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk
+again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion
+he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so
+big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or
+lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing
+at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off
+him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a
+little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the
+sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The
+privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be
+his.
+
+In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and
+comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation."
+It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were
+fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving
+descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXV
+                               HIS DEATH
+
+     "... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper
+     and a dimmer sea, and ever separating farther and farther one
+     from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon
+     the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor
+     frames, and all that is left of their once fair colours, must
+     melt forever into the colourless Void...."
+
+
+Ten years after his arrival in Japan the lode-star of Lafcadio Hearn's
+life and genius rose above the far eastern horizon, to cast her clear
+and serene radiance on the shadowed path that henceforth was but a
+descent towards the end. We conclude that "The Lady of a Myriad Souls"
+had written an appreciative letter on the subject of his work, and his,
+dated January, 1900, was in answer to hers.
+
+The thread was taken up where it had been dropped, the old affection and
+friendship reopened, unchanged, unimpaired.
+
+Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion
+of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people,
+his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy--his
+Benjamin--in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is
+only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly
+he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of
+the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight."
+"I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as
+the Japanese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of
+strong men, there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins."
+With intense longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western
+lands from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so
+isolated that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst
+Englishmen again ... with all their prejudices and conventions."
+
+The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he
+has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited
+civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but--such a
+stubborn thing is human nature--sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of
+the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that
+Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born,
+let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love,
+worship as they worship."
+
+At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might
+wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was
+during the period of his enthusiasm for "things Japanese." When he came
+to issue with the officials at Kumamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change
+was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an
+occidental--one of his own people.
+
+All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life
+he had passed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different
+standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad,
+to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in
+the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had
+forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action
+in nationalising himself a Japanese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his
+son is a Japanese, born in Japan under Japanese conditions, and unless
+he throws off all family ties and responsibilities, which, being the
+eldest son, are--according to communal law in Japan--considerable, he
+must submit to this inexorable destiny. In his father's adopted country
+the military or naval profession is closed to him, however, in
+consequence of his defective eyesight, and both would have been closed
+to him also in England.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had
+expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son,
+made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same
+answer was given on every side. He is a Japanese, and must conform to
+the dictates of the Japanese authorities. They might permit him to go
+away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his
+father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality.
+Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-class education at the Waseda
+University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to
+separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart
+if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested.
+
+In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had anticipated, he was forced out of the
+Imperial University, on the pretext that as a Japanese citizen he was
+not entitled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone
+Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was
+offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible
+for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to
+professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet
+he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The
+long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during
+thirteen years for Japan, and sacrificed everything for Japan, I have
+been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the
+country. For while the politico-religious combination that has
+engineered this matter remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any
+position in any educational establishment here for even six months."
+
+In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this
+juncture, it is well to remember that Japan was struggling for
+existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied
+powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be
+soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one
+official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind
+to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the
+possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the
+means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking
+into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard,
+perhaps, but the Japanese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or
+they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been
+set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia
+was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to
+the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible
+privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost
+impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been
+accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation
+rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must
+also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the
+Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign
+teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier
+for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed
+at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the
+ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his
+disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and
+guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls?
+and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the
+uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of
+years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him
+to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far
+from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,--sturdy and not likely
+to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I
+must devote the rest of my life to looking after him."
+
+And she--his wise friend--knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's
+isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that
+awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action
+and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself."
+
+"Very true," was Hearn's answer--and well did he know, for had not he,
+the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the
+position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day?
+"No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid:
+the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,--and I flee, and
+bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might
+be, that a man should not be,--except as to bodily strength.... I taught
+him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit
+of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil--what
+chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly
+pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?"
+
+The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:--
+
+               "Sense with keenest edge unused,
+                  Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire;
+                Lovely feet as yet unbruised,
+                  On the ways of dark desire;
+                Sweetest hope that lookest smiling
+                O'er the wilderness defiling!
+
+               "Why such beauty, to be blighted,
+                  By the swarm of foul destruction?
+                Why such innocence delighted,
+                  When sin stalks to thy seduction?
+                All the litanies e'er chanted,
+                Shall not keep thy faith undaunted.
+
+               "I have pray'd the Sainted Morning
+                  To unclasp her hands to hold thee;
+                From resignful Eve's adorning
+                  Stol'n a robe of peace to enfold thee;
+                With all charms of man's contriving
+                Arm'd thee for thy lonely striving.
+
+               "Me too once unthinking Nature,
+                  --Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,--
+                Fashion'd so divine a creature,
+                  Yes, and like a beast forsook me.
+                I forgave, but tell the measure,
+                Of her crime in thee, my treasure."
+
+It seems as if he were haunted by memories of his own thwarted childhood
+and shipwrecked youth. If possible he wished to guard and protect his
+Benjamin from the pitfalls that had beset his path, knowing that the
+same dangers might prevail in Kazuo's case as in his own, and that there
+might be no one to protect and guard him.
+
+A charming piece of prose, from which I give a few extracts, was found
+amongst Hearn's papers after his death. The manuscript, lent to me by
+Mrs. Atkinson, lies by my hand as I write; it is entitled "Fear."
+
+"An old, old sea-wall, stretching between two boundless levels, green
+and blue. Everything is steeped in white sun; and I am standing on the
+wall. Along its broad and grass-grown top a boy is running towards
+me,--running in sandals of wood,--the sea-breeze blowing aside the long
+sleeves of his robe as he runs.... With what sudden incommunicable pang
+do I watch the gracious little figure leaping in the light.... A
+delicate boy, with the blended charm of two races.... And how softly
+vivid all things under this milky radiance,--the smiling child-face with
+lips apart,--the twinkle of the light quick feet,--the shadows of
+grasses and of little stones!...
+
+"But quickly as he runs, the child will come no nearer to me,--the slim
+brown hand will never cling to mine. For this light is the light of a
+Japanese sun that set long years ago.... Never, dearest!--never shall we
+meet,--not even when the stars are dead!"
+
+By the exercise of a considerable amount of diplomacy Mrs. Wetmore
+succeeded at this time in inducing Jacob Gould Schurmann, president of
+Cornell University, to enter into an arrangement with Hearn for a series
+of lectures on Japan.
+
+As of old, she believed him capable of conquering Fate, in spite of the
+despotism of fact as exemplified in the loss of eyesight and broken
+health; she felt sure he could interest an American audience by the
+material he had to offer, and the scholarly way in which he knew how to
+utilise it.
+
+His answer to the suggestion of the lectures is characteristic:--
+
+"O fairy! what have you dared to say? I am quite sure that I do _not_
+know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or
+politics, or history. (You did not say 'politics' or 'history,' however,
+and that seems to be what is wanted.) But perhaps you know _what_ I know
+better than I myself know,--or perhaps you can give me to eat a Fairy
+Apple of Knowledge. At present I have no acquaintance even with the
+Japanese language: I cannot read a Japanese newspaper: and I have
+learned only enough, even of the _kana_, to write a letter home. I
+cannot lie--to my Fairy; therefore it is essential that I make the
+following declaration:--"
+
+Then he repeats the statement made in the preface of "Japan, an
+Interpretation." For these lectures prepared with so much industry and
+care were destined ultimately to go to the making of that beautiful and
+lucid exposition of the history and thought of a great people.
+
+The world has to be grateful to President Schurmann for withdrawing from
+his contract, and cancelling the offer made to Hearn for the delivery of
+lectures at the university.
+
+The excuse that illness had broken out at Cornell was hardly a
+sufficient one. There is little doubt that unfavourable reports of
+Hearn's state of health, and doubts as to the possibility of his being
+able to lecture in public, had drifted to Cornell, and the president,
+acting for the best interests of his university, did not feel justified
+in abiding by his proposals.
+
+With that extraordinary mental elasticity that characterised him all his
+life, Hearn made the best of the situation, and set to work, polishing
+and repolishing his twenty-two lectures until they reached the high
+level of style that distinguishes "Japan, an Interpretation." His
+courage was the more extraordinary as, filled with the idea that he was
+at last going to America, he had gone into every detail of meeting his
+friend. "I would go straight to your Palace of Fairy before going
+elsewhere," he writes to Mrs. Wetmore, "only to see you again--even for
+a moment--and to hear you speak in some one of the myriad voices would
+be such a memory for me, and you would let me 'walk about gently
+touching things.'..." Then in another letter comes a sigh of regret,
+and as it were farewell. "But your gifts, O Faery Queen have faded away,
+even as in the Song ... and I am also fading away."
+
+After the failure of his projected visit to America, a suggestion was
+made by the University of London that he should give a series of
+lectures there. But here was the "Ah-ness" of things. Had Hearn's health
+permitted he would probably have been in England in 1905, where he would
+have been received with honour. The Japanese had fought Russia and
+beaten her. People became wildly enthusiastic about Japan: the libraries
+were besieged with inquiries for Hearn's books,--just at the eleventh
+hour, when he had become a name, he died!
+
+All his life his dream had been to be independent, to be able to travel.
+Referring to a gentleman who was in Japan, he once said, "I envy him his
+independence. Think of being able to live where one pleases, nobody's
+servant,--able to choose one's own studies and friends and books."
+
+The offer of an easy post was made to Hearn about this time as professor
+of English in the Waseda University founded by Count Okuma. He closed
+with it at once, thus putting an end to all negotiations with the
+University of London.
+
+His youngest child, Setsu-ko, was born this year, and all idea of
+leaving Japan was henceforth abandoned.
+
+In his last letter to Mrs. Wetmore, dated September, 1904--the month in
+which he died--he touches on the dedication he had made to her in his
+book, "A Japanese Miscellany." To the last the same sympathy and
+understanding reigned between them. Patiently she exhorted, comforted.
+Her wise counsel and advice soothed his torn nerves and aching heart to
+the end. So this affection, untouched by the moth and rust of worldly
+intercourse, went down with him "into the dust of death."
+
+Slowly but surely the years with their chequered story were drawing to
+an end. The sum of endeavour was complete, the secrets Death had in its
+keeping were there for the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit.
+
+Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some
+of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same
+impression--a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine
+consideration for others, the thought of the future of his wife and
+children, triumphing over suffering and death.
+
+He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he
+was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say
+my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep
+thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was
+strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I
+made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our
+house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.'
+
+"'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither
+in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said."
+
+While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up
+and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he
+died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her
+_tokonoma_ she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a
+moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I
+could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had
+passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve
+hours were over!
+
+Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the
+daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree
+in the garden,--not much to look at--but it was a blossom blooming out
+of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant
+Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi.
+
+"I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at
+it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is
+here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful,
+but will soon die under the approaching cold.'
+
+"You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking
+that the _Kaerizaki_, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid
+farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...."
+
+In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's
+death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of
+September 26th, after supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he
+was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The
+pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he
+wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in
+bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a
+little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the
+world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXVI
+                              HIS FUNERAL
+
+     "If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong,
+     as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange
+     possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal
+     records in the Universal life,--every thought of good or ill
+     or aspiration,--and the Buddhistic Karma would be a
+     scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the
+     thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds
+     would be forever acting invisibly on us."
+
+
+Perhaps of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with
+Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than
+his funeral.
+
+It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a
+Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no
+religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the
+last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions"
+in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any
+boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all
+fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were
+swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious
+palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space.
+
+Yet--Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien
+to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his
+latter years--at his death his body was taken possession of by priests,
+who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over,
+and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of
+Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple!
+
+A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss
+Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration
+for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him
+lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama
+paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession
+would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on
+September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in
+Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held.
+
+It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired
+the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the
+pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a
+"ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and
+hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little
+children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of
+shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under
+the relentless light of the afternoon sun.
+
+He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and
+unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest
+ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper
+_gohei_; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge
+bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas
+carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the
+grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne,
+palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office
+it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing
+what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination of
+good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed
+into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two
+groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little
+daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while
+the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son,
+Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university
+professors, went to the right.
+
+Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial
+service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments
+chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo.
+
+After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and
+led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse,
+touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of
+incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife,
+when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven,
+in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped
+some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the
+brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the
+ceremony ended and the congregation left the church.
+
+Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body
+would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of
+cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students
+were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of
+the day was at an end.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+                             VISIT TO JAPAN
+
+     "Every dwelling in which a thinker lives certainly acquires a
+     sort of soul. There are Lares and Penates more subtle than
+     those of the antique world; these make the peace and rest of
+     a home."
+
+
+On the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss
+Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening.
+Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law,
+announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi
+Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the
+red tape--the bales of red tape--that surround social as well as
+official transactions in Japan.
+
+Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of
+introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's
+coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the
+Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club
+library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had
+recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for
+delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter.
+
+To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and,
+though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system
+leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters;
+in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do
+with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason also reminded us that Mrs.
+Koizumi did not understand a word of English; she must have recourse to
+an interpreter before communicating with her Irish sister-in-law, but,
+above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs. Atkinson had addressed her
+letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by which no properly constituted
+Japanese postman would find himself justified in recognising Hearn's
+widow. By nationalising himself a Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as
+his occidental inheritance went, had vanished forever. He and his wife
+were only known at Tokyo as Mr. and Mrs. Koizumi.
+
+Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about
+Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been
+extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the
+friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in
+consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on
+sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on
+Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses
+from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that
+his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to
+Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami
+was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her,
+and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs,
+and insisted on his visitors doing the same.
+
+The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is
+"another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese;
+it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything
+unexpected--all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised
+country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a
+Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately
+in a jinrikisha to see her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have
+fallen into one another's arms, and a close intimacy would have been
+begun. Not so in Japan.
+
+[Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).]
+
+"Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr.
+Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful
+sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a
+letter will turn up."
+
+Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in
+consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's
+advice.
+
+I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first
+pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's
+interview with the old Buddhist priest.
+
+Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where,
+embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of
+pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine.
+
+From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a
+pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I
+experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression,
+common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a
+dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a
+special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic
+light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering
+eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to
+the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range
+of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through
+the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its
+familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese
+picture-books--the sacred, the matchless mountain--Fuji-no-yama.
+
+There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned from out
+the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision of the
+old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three hundred
+volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the interpreter
+Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise between them,
+while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat, and the song of
+the _uguisu_ from the plum-tree grove, we heard the murmur of their
+voices.
+
+"That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been....
+Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best
+painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any
+action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits
+outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such
+progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach
+such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force
+also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves
+increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last
+that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation
+have no existence."
+
+Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while
+seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures
+pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady,
+dressed in the national Japanese costume--a kimono of dark iron-grey
+silk--the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed
+also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his
+feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of
+the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese
+half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but
+the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles.
+
+Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas,
+good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced,
+Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik,
+of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished
+dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her
+person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible
+honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and
+elaborate coiffure--the usual erection worn by her country-women--she
+might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large
+English establishment.
+
+The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a
+shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried,
+instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally
+used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and
+indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of
+memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it
+had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and
+from the Imperial University.
+
+After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision,
+leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He
+was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the
+background.
+
+At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he
+laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another
+race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic
+changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he
+was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton
+Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and
+near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered
+his father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown
+hair and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a
+queer little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to
+learn by heart."
+
+Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary
+likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese
+expression--a mask of reserve as it were--fell like a curtain over his
+face,--he was Japanese again.
+
+He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible;
+his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a
+sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic
+in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative
+understand what he wished to say.
+
+It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have
+been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the
+Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely
+forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason,
+who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves
+considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly
+possessed--that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had
+been so sensitive--a soft and musical voice.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England,
+and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's
+father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain
+round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her
+bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then
+told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese
+woman to wear any article of jewellery.
+
+[Illustration: CARLETON ATKINSON.]
+
+Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable
+time--Japanese visits usually do--Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for
+the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised
+that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this
+invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save
+Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next
+day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo.
+
+The M�tropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the
+hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where
+Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn,"
+describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making
+for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of
+Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room.
+
+Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi
+Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the
+Spring Equinox (_Shunki Korei-sai_). There is an autumn and a spring
+equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating
+population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren,
+into the streets. The ladies were in their best _kimonos_, their hair
+elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them
+bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler
+hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying
+American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features
+that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and
+woman. A pretty _musum�'s_ ivory-coloured oval face against the
+cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a
+delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically
+picturesque than a Tokyo street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry
+of rain when hundreds of these ineffective shelters with their quaint
+designs of chrysanthemums, cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly
+opened. Alas! in ten years' time, like many other quaint and beautiful
+Japanese productions, these oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away
+into the region of faintly-remembered things.
+
+The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of
+the men had a little too much _sake_ on board, their tipsiness was only
+betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes,
+indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple
+walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling
+of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of _sake_, smells of seaweed soup,
+smells of _daikon_ (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a
+sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows
+behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky
+arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of
+sunshine.
+
+Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams,
+and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an
+interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges,
+down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams,
+we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with
+babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their
+mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of
+Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male
+children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was
+there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen.
+
+Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas,
+and still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed _kuruma_ men,
+did our journey last, through the quarter of the foreign legations,
+past government offices and military stations, beside the moat
+surrounding the mikado's palace, with its grass slopes and pine-clad
+fosse, down declivities and up others, through endless lanes, bordered
+by one-storeyed houses standing in shrubberies behind bamboo fences.
+At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose _kuruma_ led the way, halted before a
+small gateway, surmounted by a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we
+understood afterwards, with Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs.
+Passing through, we found ourselves opposite the entrance of a
+lightly-built two-story house, rather resembling a suburban bungalow
+in England. Directly we entered we were transported into a different
+era. Here no modern Japan was visible. On the threshold, waiting to
+receive us, was an "august residence maid," kneeling, palms extended
+on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head touching the matting, and
+wondered if it belonged to Hana, the unsympathetic Hana who had let
+the grass-lark die. Beside her was Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child,
+in a brilliantly-coloured _kimono_, while on the step above stood
+Professor Tanabe, who had been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an
+intimate friend of the Koizumi family, living near by, and acting
+occasionally as interpreter for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture--as an
+eastern philosopher, for instance--he would have made for Moroni or
+Velasquez, with the delicate grey and cream background of the Japanese
+_tatami_ and paper _shoji_. He had the clear olive complexion and
+intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and
+thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood
+above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to
+his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he
+receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us
+welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of
+his own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a
+presence, and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was
+trying; for the little girl had raised her forehead from the matting,
+and, with hands on knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us
+sideways like a bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential
+liftings of the eyes and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals
+from a row that stood close by, helped us to take off our boots and put
+on the sandals. We then remarked that she was not at all
+unsympathetic-looking, but a nice, chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We
+hoped devoutly we had no holes in our stockings, and after a
+considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got through the ordeal in time
+to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who appeared beside Professor Tanabe
+on the step above us, softly inviting us to "honourably deign to enter
+her unworthy abode."
+
+The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so
+arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the
+_engawa_ (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been
+Hearn's study. The _fusima_ or paper screens separating the two rooms
+were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and
+stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it
+was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus
+flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase,
+but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the _Butsudan_, or
+family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner.
+
+Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the
+spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped.
+
+At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and
+sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an
+Interpretation," and so many other wonderful books, and I felt as I
+looked at that room of Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive
+than the quick. The walls--or rather the paper panels and wood laths
+that did duty for walls--were haunted with memories.
+
+I pictured the odd little figure--dressed in the _kimono_ given him by
+Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems--"Surely just the
+kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"--with the
+prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in
+the ancient, patient manner" on his _zabuton_--smoking his _kiseru_, or
+standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets
+and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning
+over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's
+Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk.
+
+There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a
+sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie
+stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and
+clamour of the city outside--it gave an impression of restfulness, of
+calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless
+matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the
+Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels
+that, like the _fusima_, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room.
+I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study
+and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for
+paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before
+that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese
+houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had
+occupied the corner where now stands the _Butsudan_, contaminating that
+wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent,
+crystalline atmosphere" unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke.
+These hardy folk told us that they were always catching coughs and colds
+when they had the stove and glass windows, so they took both out, and
+put back the paper _shoji_ and the charcoal brazier.
+
+It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which
+Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his
+study. The _andon_--tallow-candle--stuck in a paper shade--national
+means of lighting a room--had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's
+reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little
+table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber
+tube.
+
+Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single _kakemono_, or
+piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making
+room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought
+and life--that Hearn blended so deftly in his work--joined hands. Round
+the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were
+placed, filled with books, English most of them--De Quincey, Herbert
+Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against
+the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the
+_Butsudan_ rested volumes of Browning and Kipling.
+
+I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old
+prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had
+been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a
+Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as
+hanging on the ceiling?
+
+It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a
+depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay _godong_ given to
+the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all
+valuable and artistic objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing
+of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from
+fire, earthquakes and floods.
+
+Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the
+ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate
+grey ground.
+
+On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a _kakemono_ or scroll-picture
+representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs
+clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese
+ideographs in the corner--by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present
+from Kazuo to his father.
+
+Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard,
+was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were
+Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl.
+
+Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour
+had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one.
+Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the
+hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance
+of some sort.
+
+Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to
+go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo
+that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's
+study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond
+measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They
+own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like
+our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a
+climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as
+crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful
+circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves
+uncomfortable in what seemed to me such an irritating and futile way.
+That any sane people should eat a succession of horrible concoctions
+made up of raw fish, lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted
+of Pears' soap, whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an
+afterthought, eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed
+on Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at
+least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a
+courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy.
+
+The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain
+dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage
+stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of
+the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our
+trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins
+it was an omen of death.
+
+I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when
+I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use
+knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a
+story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the
+professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet
+under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him,
+could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position
+intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing
+into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch
+your legs and be comfortable."
+
+After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell
+athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a
+bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the
+right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was
+a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the
+bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a
+mass of snowy white bloom.
+
+But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the
+cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and
+within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs.
+Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that
+Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them.
+Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to
+his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's
+life.
+
+Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies,"
+daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to
+smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the
+daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough
+Corrib.
+
+          "Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas,
+           Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these,
+           Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land--
+           Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVIII
+                       SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO
+
+     "Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the
+     magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It
+     lingers now in patches only, and bands,--like those long
+     bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of
+     Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour
+     you still can find Horai--but not elsewhere.... Remember that
+     Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,--the
+     Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,--never
+     again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...."
+
+
+Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi--through the medium of
+Professor Tanabe--asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on
+Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had
+died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks
+and the lamp were lighted before the _Butsudan_ and a repast laid out in
+honour of the dead.
+
+That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya
+Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the
+flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted,
+and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to
+spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to
+the M�tropole Hotel.
+
+The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they
+went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility
+was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit
+one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a
+europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any
+other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of
+a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No
+sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was
+connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked
+upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.
+
+The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us
+in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as
+encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally
+different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions
+of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their
+charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an
+expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me,
+reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts
+of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by
+European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic
+meaning. A _Shirabyoshi_ lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara
+quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district
+of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of
+their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead
+kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the
+streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered
+in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese
+maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread,
+instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there,
+seated on _zabutons_ in a little shop, as large--or rather as small--as
+life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little
+_musum�s_, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I
+passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising
+_otherness_ of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary
+land of Nippon.
+
+I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese
+houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who
+had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.
+
+Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her
+"Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn
+had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I
+thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and
+any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow
+and children.
+
+A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and
+cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens,
+and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a
+_zabuton_ (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense
+silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at
+intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance
+of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys
+and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a
+manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of
+irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the
+tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The
+moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was
+as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too
+courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a
+dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what
+communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and
+left a will--Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his
+contemptible abode to smoke a pipe--further than that he knew nothing.
+The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku),
+where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the
+heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received
+also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was
+distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct
+me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's
+favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste
+exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about
+the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any
+sort of favour by his colleagues.
+
+In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent
+their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided
+between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the
+temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were
+provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an
+extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the
+northern coast.
+
+A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with
+these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering
+up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the
+dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible
+lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures
+of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the
+heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into
+insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai
+Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by
+the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image
+that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian
+had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister
+legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both.
+Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and
+people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this
+Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire
+destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus,
+contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable
+smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of
+this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but
+here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of
+time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a
+master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the
+great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image
+of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to
+incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and
+vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of
+centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite
+base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea
+round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still
+as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal
+truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will
+pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the
+only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human
+life--infinite calm, infinite rest.
+
+"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on
+Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound
+and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he
+attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented,
+with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he
+had hitherto subscribed?
+
+It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the
+shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its _shoji_ was comforting
+after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come
+prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning
+among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August
+One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows,
+genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit,
+while on the upper step of the _genkan_ (entrance-room) with extended
+hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first,
+when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove
+occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was
+moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom
+she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels
+in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present
+always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even
+though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely."
+Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to
+hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us,
+when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and
+pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental
+widows when referring to the departed.
+
+The doors of the _Butsudan_ were set wide open, and on the _kamidan_, or
+shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and
+burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast
+of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were
+placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a
+bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that
+had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was
+Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to
+Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third
+had been buried with the writer of _Japan_, beneath his tombstone in the
+Zoshigaya Cemetery.
+
+As we stood in the study opposite the _Butsudan_ the ghostly charm, the
+emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded
+the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of
+children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection,
+crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.
+
+Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo,
+describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as
+though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without
+saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that
+hangs in the study.
+
+Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste,
+subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit.
+Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that
+gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy
+the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling
+down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out
+a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had
+belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter
+Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and
+curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one
+representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the
+donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment--a donkey
+being an unknown animal in Japan--when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another
+represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and
+groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple
+people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.
+
+It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for
+a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the
+brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not
+perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur
+attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon
+the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of
+difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some
+sort--everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good
+or bad omen.
+
+Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because
+her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson
+was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same
+respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys,
+were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance
+recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the
+subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he
+had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to
+the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of
+the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese,
+declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in
+mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many
+others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted
+by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine
+race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially,
+indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and
+intelligent.
+
+What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_
+and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish
+smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of
+their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English
+books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese _kakemonos_ and ideographs.
+
+Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely
+have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up.
+The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days
+"freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone
+down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."
+
+I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of
+unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a
+household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her
+knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for
+Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient,
+indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the
+_Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern
+education as a material weakness?
+
+"The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says
+Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and
+naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the
+further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As
+the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right,
+the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the
+opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."
+
+After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of
+"tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)--his Papa San's
+favourite cake, Kazuo told us--had been handed round and partaken of,
+jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery.
+As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight
+fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove,
+stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was
+the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo
+parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were
+going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh
+ponies--along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by
+evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean
+inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an
+unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind
+whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the
+horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but
+little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of
+exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather
+distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots,
+enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the
+impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by
+government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was
+volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking
+along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last
+reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same
+shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the
+top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo
+garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the
+stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two
+smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On
+either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab
+was the inscription--
+
+"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"--"Believing Man Similar to
+Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in
+Mansion of Right Enlightenment."
+
+The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside
+the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the
+background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the
+thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the
+cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness
+characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin
+coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the
+plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in
+front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn
+wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand,
+as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman,
+Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the
+moment, buried--an alien amongst aliens--in a Buddhist grave, under a
+Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own
+people.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONCLUSION
+
+
+LAFCADIO HEARN'S was a personality and genius which people will always
+judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary
+common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an
+odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and
+rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised
+the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human
+morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi,
+or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of
+his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who
+consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow
+his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst
+the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme
+prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages";
+while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in
+locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament.
+
+If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the
+worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities
+behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature,
+would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology"
+that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may
+have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of
+a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the
+whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that
+he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically
+proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could
+recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to
+cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap
+wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we
+patch up things."
+
+Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal,
+will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on
+which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary
+interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's
+work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute.
+
+He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of
+absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it.
+Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more,
+discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the
+ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries:
+oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more
+elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and
+self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in
+exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many
+a day by cultured readers and thinkers.
+
+Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique
+place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and
+because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the
+eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of
+enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does
+in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques
+Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of
+the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social
+and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own
+day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never
+entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental
+horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and
+pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his
+deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of
+occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so
+because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so,
+and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared
+to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it
+out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was
+quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own,
+and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the
+spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another,
+he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform
+himself of details before discussing them.
+
+As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely
+conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the
+modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in
+the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of
+Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature
+in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan
+was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan
+rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive
+sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of
+all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that
+"he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents
+inventions shall be killed!"
+
+Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his
+political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever
+camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again
+whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival
+Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a
+season.
+
+It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in
+his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the
+banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He
+dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the
+Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than
+Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous
+interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison
+between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque
+whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the
+dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when
+he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty,
+the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes
+hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones
+bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for
+a shadow and lost it."
+
+Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to
+the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower
+stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness
+found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of
+such experience--from a literary point of view--is proved by the force
+of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are
+remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with
+its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness,
+breathes the very essence of Romanticism.
+
+Literary brother to Loti and R�nan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their
+sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic
+longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with
+longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on
+the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to
+return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the
+slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had
+quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to
+long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he
+regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and
+towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the
+sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his
+acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the
+appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the
+memory of his Japanese home--the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan
+and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might
+catch a butterfly.
+
+Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited,
+without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes,
+he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the
+borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for
+the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this
+strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that
+is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very
+strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it
+made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting
+dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories.
+
+His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a
+literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that
+awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"...
+The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in
+the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought
+nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking
+exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work
+is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of
+his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental
+hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical
+narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that
+flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art
+was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental
+wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain
+healthy habit of thought and life.
+
+It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his
+capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true,
+he had forfeited his birthright to produce a _P�cheur d'Islande_; but on
+most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed.
+He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain
+he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were
+apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a
+certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he
+found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and
+tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and
+epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The
+Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The
+subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken
+from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue,"
+probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of
+small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own
+characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul
+of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he
+went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses
+of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet
+Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on Japan, afterwards published
+in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by
+Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling.
+
+As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously
+exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to
+admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori,
+all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession
+of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper
+significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He
+endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the
+emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his
+genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations
+and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at
+times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk
+surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain
+coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms,
+and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the
+wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the
+talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent
+circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the
+cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism.
+
+Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that
+they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of
+the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his
+outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too pronounced to please the
+matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in
+the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes
+impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without
+finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic
+phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his
+picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic
+episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a
+country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing
+the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and
+visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality
+and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie
+in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the
+enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal
+mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure
+of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands
+would be needed to mould the figure--an unpractical and extravagant
+sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than
+merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul
+of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it
+feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion;
+then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about
+the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on
+their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into
+their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these
+memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display
+in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We
+human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and
+the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the
+faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with
+that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he
+interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a
+susceptible people.
+
+As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by
+some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was
+drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to
+Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing
+his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to
+those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the
+primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint
+villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open
+ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American
+clothes--then and then only will they be able to understand what an
+artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation
+being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his
+opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view,
+over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to
+accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have
+stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially
+subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward
+vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed,
+if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and
+appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and
+dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in
+his expressions of literary and political opinion.
+
+In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to
+the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the
+tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances
+were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most
+salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved
+him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable
+nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his
+mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New
+Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good
+fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen
+years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been
+swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in
+the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless
+cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his
+means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for
+him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was
+his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last
+years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst
+the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness
+of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with
+his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending
+his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest
+surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him.
+
+An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His
+work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed
+by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is,
+indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and
+persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses
+it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach, by the Divine
+Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that the more
+appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct for art,
+the smaller will be his success with the general public. But never was
+his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of pecuniary gain.
+From the earliest years of his literary career, his delight in
+composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity, rather than
+delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in the working.
+According to him, nothing was less important than worldly prosperity, to
+write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most damnable,
+infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug.
+
+To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this
+short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that
+matters, and "the only success in life."
+
+Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life.
+To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted.
+
+                    "One minute's work to thee denied
+                       Stands all Eternity's offence"--
+
+he quotes from Kipling.
+
+This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite
+the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange
+contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never
+was at issue either with himself or destiny.
+
+Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent
+of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through
+hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning
+neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease,
+Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one
+object, his thoughts fixed on one aim.
+
+In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a
+spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of
+the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy,
+when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable
+is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ...
+her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life
+and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad
+generations that have arisen and passed away.
+
+What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap
+publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and
+invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on
+the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing
+of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work
+aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the
+exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that
+the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out.
+
+As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the
+beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things,
+emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and
+passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life,
+making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were
+beautiful to die for."
+
+
+
+
+                                 INDEX
+
+
+    AKIRA, 168, 170, 316.
+
+    Alma Tadema, 57.
+
+    Amenomori Nobushige, 168, 184, 235, 267.
+
+    American criticism, an, 145.
+
+    Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, 143, 144, 149.
+
+    Ancestral tablet, the, 253.
+
+    "Ants," essay on, 293.
+
+    Arnold, Matthew, 59.
+
+    Arnoux, Leopold, 154.
+
+    Asama-Yama, 144.
+
+    Atkinson, Mrs., 4, 13, 217, 301, 304, 313;
+      letters to, 31-48, 56, 67, 68, 86, 100, 112, 204, 221, 252;
+      visits Japan, 313 _et seq._
+
+    Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, 202.
+
+    Atkinson, Carleton, 4, 49.
+
+    Atkinson, Dorothy, 313, 317.
+
+    Avatars, 4.
+
+
+    BAKER, CONSTANCE, 334.
+
+    Baker, Page M., 106, 109, 236, 242.
+
+    Ball, Sir F., 255.
+
+    Bangor, 26.
+
+    Baudelaire, 63.
+
+    Beale, Mr. James, 256, 257.
+
+    Behrens, Mrs., 284.
+
+    Berry, Rev. H. F., 43.
+
+    Bisland, Miss Elizabeth, 110, 111, 125, 133, 151, 267;
+      marriage of, 188, 203;
+      letters to, 158, 180;
+      joint-editor of _Cosmopolitan_, 130.
+
+    Borrow, George, 274.
+
+    Boston, 261.
+
+    Brenane, Mrs. Justin, 2, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 30.
+
+    Bridges, Robert, quoted, 303.
+
+    British Museum, image of Buddha in, 57.
+
+    Bronner, Milton, 61.
+
+    Brown, Mr., 202.
+
+    Brownings, the, 59, 324.
+
+    Buddha of Enoshima, 331, 332.
+
+    Buddhism, 42, 141, 144.
+
+    Butcher, Miss, 16.
+
+
+    CALIDAS, 146.
+
+    Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 112, 165, 206;
+      letters to, 116, 169, 177, 191.
+
+    "Chinese Ghosts," 109.
+
+    "Chita," 35, 36.
+
+    Cholera at Kobe, 241.
+
+    Cincinnati, 53, 65 _et seq._
+
+    Cincinnati Brotherhood, 114.
+
+    Civilisation, attack on, 249.
+
+    Cockerill, Colonel John, 74.
+
+    Collins, Wilkie, 60.
+
+    _Commercial, The_, Hearn joins, 86.
+
+    "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn" (G. M. Gould), 69.
+
+    Conventual Orders, 2.
+
+    Corbishly, Monsignor, 41, 42, 44.
+
+    Corfu, 6-9.
+
+    Correagh, 2, 8.
+
+    Crawford, Mrs., 18, 21.
+
+    Crescent City, 94.
+
+    Crosby, Lieutenant, 133.
+
+    Cullinane, Mr. and Mrs., 53, 64.
+
+
+    "DAD." _See_ Watkin.
+
+    Dai Batsu of Enoshima, 331.
+
+    Dai Batsu of Kamakura, 142.
+
+    "Dancing Girl, The," 194.
+
+    Darwin, Charles, 59, 60, 140.
+
+    Daunt, Mr. Achilles, 46, 48, 52.
+
+    Delaney, Catherine, 53, 58.
+
+    Dengue fever, 100.
+
+    De Quincey, 289.
+
+    "Dragon Flies," 285.
+
+    "Dream of a Summer's Day," 24.
+
+    Dublin, 5, 10, _et seq._
+
+    Du Maurier, 63.
+
+    "Dust," Hearn's essay on, 49.
+
+
+    ELWOOD, FRANK, 25.
+
+    Elwood, Mrs., 24.
+
+    Elwood, Robert, 24, 25.
+
+    Emerson, Miss Margaret, 311.
+
+    _Enquirer, The_, Hearn on staff of, 74-79.
+
+    "Eternal Feminine," article on, 281.
+
+    "Exotics and Retrospectives," 282, 283, 294.
+
+
+    "FANTASTICS," 126.
+
+    "First Principles," Spencer's, 141.
+
+    Flaubert, Gustave, 43.
+
+    Foley, Althea, 81, 83, 180.
+
+    Ford Castle, 3.
+
+    Formosa, 200.
+
+    Forrest, General, funeral of, 90.
+
+    Foxwell, Professor, 120, 278.
+
+    Franco-Prussian War, 62.
+
+    Froude, James, 153.
+
+    Fuji, first sight of, 162.
+
+    Fuji-no-Yama, 144, 311.
+
+    Fujisaki, Captain, 286.
+
+
+    "GARDEN FOLK LORE," 189.
+
+    Gautier, Theophile, 62.
+
+    "Ghostly Japan," 283, 284.
+
+    "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," 273, 280.
+
+    "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 163, 172, 268, 329.
+
+    Gould, Dr. George Milbury, 69, 149, 158.
+
+    Greek culture, 342.
+
+    Gulf winds, 35.
+
+
+    HALL, H. H., 282.
+
+    Halstead, Mr., 88.
+
+    Hamamura, cemetery of, 9.
+
+    Hana, 297.
+
+    _Harper's Weekly_, 137.
+
+    Harrison, Frederic, 143.
+
+    Hawkins, Armand, 104.
+
+    Hearn, Lafcadio, birth, 1, 9;
+      Hibernian ancestors, 2;
+      English origin, 2;
+      the interpreter of Buddhism, 4;
+      maternal lineage, 4, 5;
+      Hellenic associations of birthplace, 9;
+      memories of Malta, 10;
+      reminiscences of childhood, 17;
+      separation of his parents, 20;
+      adopted by Mrs. Brenane, 21;
+      his defective eyesight, 29, 45, 48;
+      relations with Mr. Molyneux, 30;
+      views of ideal beauty, 36;
+      at Tramore, 37;
+      at school at Ushaw, 40;
+      literary tastes at school, 43;
+      unattractive appearance, 49;
+      in London, 52 _et seq._;
+      literary vocation, 55;
+      Paris, 62;
+      Cincinnati, 65;
+      his shyness, 66;
+      reaches the depths, 68;
+      servant in boarding-house, 69;
+      secretaryship, 74;
+      on staff of _Enquirer_, 74;
+      ascends Cincinnati church spire, 76;
+      his translations, 76;
+      and Althea Foley, 81;
+      and Marie Levaux, 85;
+      joins staff of _The Commercial_, 85;
+      at Memphis, 88;
+      destitution, 94;
+      fever, 100;
+      _Times Democrat_, 105;
+      method of argument, 112;
+      intellectual isolation, 112;
+      intolerance of amateur art, 114;
+      characteristics, 120;
+      visits West Indies, 131;
+      letters, 135;
+      marriage, 134, 179-186;
+      arrangement with Harpers, 137;
+      political opinions, 142;
+      visits Mr. Watkin, 148;
+      the Krehbiels, 148, 149;
+      musical sense, 151;
+      arrives in Yokohama, 160;
+      terminates contract with Harpers, 164;
+      Professor Chamberlain, 165;
+      philosophical opinions and character, 167;
+      appointment in Matsue, 168;
+      Japanese estimate of, 176;
+      passion for work, 184;
+      family, 200;
+      naturalisation, 220;
+      symptoms of physical failure, 242;
+      devotion to family, 260;
+      emotional trances, 288;
+      love of animals, 292;
+      death, 299, _et seq._;
+      his religion, 310;
+      funeral, 310;
+      children, 336;
+      personality, 339;
+      biassed deductions, 341;
+      literary judgments, 342;
+      his romanticism, 343;
+      quotations from, 346;
+      his opinion of Japanese, 347;
+      estimate of his work, 348, 349.
+
+    Hearn, Charles Bush, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 22, 202.
+
+    Hearn, Mrs. Charles, 4, 10, 12, 14, 21.
+
+    Hearn, Mrs., 150;
+      "Reminiscences" of, 276.
+
+    Hearn, Rev. Daniel, 2, 16, 61, 202.
+
+    Hearn, Leopold Kazuo, 219.
+
+    Hearn, Rev. Thomas, 2.
+
+    Hearn, Miss, 3.
+
+    Hearn, Miss Lillah, 202, 203.
+
+    Hearn, Richard, 10 _et seq._, 150.
+
+    Hearn, Susan, 10 _et seq._
+
+    Hearn family in Waterford, 2.
+
+    Henderson, Mr. Edmund, 74, 76.
+
+    Hendrik, Ellwood, 125, 263;
+      letters to, 154, 177, 261.
+
+    Heron, Francis, 3.
+
+    Heron, Sir Hugh de, 3.
+
+    Hijo, 189.
+
+    Hirn, Professor, letter to, 67.
+
+    Holmes, Elizabeth, 5.
+
+    Hugo, Victor, 62.
+
+    Huxley, Professor, 60, 141.
+
+
+    ICHIGAYA, 311.
+
+    "Idolatry," 37.
+
+    Imperial University, Japanese, 330.
+
+    "In Ghostly Japan," 145.
+
+    "Insect Studies," 293.
+
+    "Intuition," 71.
+
+    Ionian Islands, 5.
+
+    Izumo, 262.
+
+
+    JAPAN,
+      discipline of official life in, 54;
+      spirit of, 229;
+      old Japan, 347.
+
+    "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation," 297.
+
+    Japanese character, analysis of, 176.
+
+    Japanese constitution promulgated, 158.
+
+    Japanese day, a, 206.
+
+    Japanese funeral, a, 312.
+
+    "Japanese Miscellany, A," 284.
+
+    Japanese regimen, 231.
+
+    Japanese school classes, 201.
+
+    Japanese training of children, 211.
+
+    Jefferies, Richard, 289.
+
+    Jitom Kobduera Temple, 311.
+
+    Jiu-jitsu, 201.
+
+    Jizo-Do Temple, 315.
+
+
+    KENTUCKY, 72.
+
+    Keogh, Miss Agnes, 50.
+
+    Kinegawa, 233.
+
+    Kingsley, Charles, 277.
+
+    Kinjuro, 189, 191.
+
+    Kipling, Rudyard, 233, 271, 324, 345.
+
+    Kitinagasa, Dori, 243.
+
+    Kobduera, Temple of, 261.
+
+    Kobe, 168, 193.
+
+    _Kobe Chronicle_, 168, 248.
+
+    Koizumi, Mrs. Setsu, 3, 27, 60, 286, 300, 308, 314 _et seq._, 334;
+      "Reminiscences" of, 122;
+      letter of, 309.
+
+    Koizumi, Idaho, 325.
+
+    Koizumi, Iwayo, 325.
+
+    Koizumi, Kazuo, 4, 217, 277, 300, 312, 317 _et seq._, 337.
+
+    Koizumi, Setsu-ko, 307, 321, 325, 335.
+
+    "Kokoro," 65, 109, 249, 251, 266.
+
+    Krehbiel, Henry, 5, 26, 74, 78, 79, 104, 112, 114, 152.
+
+    Kumamoto, 13, 65, 193, 199.
+
+    Kusa-Hibari (grass-lark), 295.
+
+    Kusimoki marahige, 240.
+
+    "Kwaidan," 24.
+
+    Kyoto, 252.
+
+    Kyushu, 200.
+
+
+    "LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS" (Miss Bisland), 113, 124-136.
+
+    Lamb, Charles, 289.
+
+    Levaux, Marie, 85.
+
+    "Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn" (Wetmore), 263.
+
+    Literary College, Tokyo, 3.
+
+    Loti, Pierre, 29, 84.
+
+    Lough Corrib, 25, 233.
+
+    Louisiana, 92.
+
+    Lowell, Percival, 345.
+
+    "Luck of Roaring Camp" (Bret Harte), 77.
+
+
+    MALTA, 5, 10.
+
+    Martinique, 155.
+
+    Mason, Mr. W. B., 122, 143, 287, 313, 315.
+
+    Matas, Dr. Rudolf, 102, 152.
+
+    Matsue, 142, 168, 172-178.
+
+    McDermott, Mr., 73.
+
+    McDonald, Capt. Mitchell, 108, 126, 168, 267, 271, 276, 284, 287,
+      299, 324, 333.
+
+    Memphis, 88-92.
+
+    "Midwinter, Ozias," 60, 89, 98.
+
+    Mifflin, Houghton & Co., 208.
+
+    Millet, Fran�ois, 62.
+
+    Mionoseki, ironclads at, 341.
+
+    Moje, 238.
+
+    Molyneux, Henry, and Mrs., 2, 23, 28, 30, 50, 69.
+
+    Montreal, 160.
+
+    "Moon Desire," 290.
+
+    Morris, William, 59.
+
+    "Mountain of Skulls," 145.
+
+    "My First Romance," 67.
+
+    "My Guardian Angel," 29.
+
+    Mythen, Kate, 28, 36.
+
+
+    NAGASAKI, 212, 232.
+
+    New Orleans, 60, 85, 93-101;
+      yellow fever at, 100;
+      Exposition at, 137.
+
+    New York, 131.
+
+    "Nightmare Touch," 28.
+
+    Nishi Okubo, 261, 269, 286 _et seq._
+
+    Nishida Sentaro, 168, 181, 184, 265, 345.
+
+
+    OKUMA, COUNT, 307.
+
+    Osaka, 238.
+
+    O Saki, 308.
+
+    Otani, 323.
+
+    Otokichi, 280, 308.
+
+    "Out of the East," 232, 243, 315.
+
+
+    PAPELLIER, DR., 243, 250, 270.
+
+    Pater, Walter, 59, 349.
+
+    Philadelphia, 131, 261.
+
+    Pre-Raphaelites, aims of, 59.
+
+    "Principles of Ethics" (Spencer), cited, 140.
+
+
+    RACHEL, picture of, 71, 72.
+
+    "Raven, The," 73.
+
+    Redhill, 30, 45.
+
+    "Romance of the Milky Way, A," 298.
+
+    Rossetti, D. G., 59.
+
+    Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 340.
+
+    Ruskin, 59, 288.
+
+
+    SACKVILLE, LIONEL, DUKE OF DORSET, 2.
+
+    "St. Ronite," 44.
+
+    Santa Maura, 1, 9.
+
+    Schurmann, J. G., 305, 306.
+
+    Seaton, Viscount, 7.
+
+    "Serenade, A," 146.
+
+    Setsu-ko (Koizumi), 307, 321.
+
+    "Shadowings," 284.
+
+    Shinto worship, 41, 144, 168.
+
+    "Shirabzoshi" or "Dancing Girl," 193.
+
+    Shunki Korei-sai, 319.
+
+    Spencer, Herbert, cited, 60, 139-143, 168, 324, 335.
+
+    Steinmetz, General, 118.
+
+    Stevenson, R. L., 28, 63, 289.
+
+    "Stray Leaves," 109, 126.
+
+    Suruga, 34.
+
+    "Sylvestre Bonnard," 43.
+
+
+    TAKATA, 25.
+
+    Tanabe, Professor, 312, 321 _et seq._, 328.
+
+    Tennyson, 59.
+
+    Thomson, Francis, 40.
+
+    "Toko, The," 204.
+
+    Tokyo, 67, 260 _et seq._, 313.
+
+    "Torn Letters," 129.
+
+    Toyama, Professor, 254.
+
+    Tramore, 2, 20, 28, 31, 33-39.
+
+    Treves, Sir Frederick, 153.
+
+    "Trilby," 63.
+
+    Tunison, Mr. Joseph, 22, 45, 61, 79, 152.
+
+    "Two Years in the French West Indies," 108, 152.
+
+    Tyndall, 60.
+
+
+    "UJO," 189.
+
+    Ume, Professor, 330.
+
+    Ushaw, 28, 29, 36, 40-51.
+
+    Ushigome, 274-285.
+
+
+    VICKERS, THOMAS, 74.
+
+    "Voodoo Queen," 85.
+
+
+    WASEDA UNIVERSITY, 301, 307.
+
+    Waterford, 34.
+
+    Watkin, Henry ("Dad"), 44, 65, 66, 70, 73, 90, 100, 112, 147, 162,
+      235, 258.
+
+    Watkin, Miss Effie, 258.
+
+    Weatherall, Mrs., quoted, 18, 19, 221.
+
+    Weldon, Charles, 159.
+
+    West Indies, Hearn in, 148 _et seq._
+
+    Westmeath, 2, 8.
+
+    Wetmore, Mrs. (Miss Bisland q. v.), 273, 282, 299, 305, 307.
+
+    Wexford, 36.
+
+    Whistler, James, 59, 63.
+
+    Wiseman, Cardinal, at Ushaw, 40.
+
+    Worthington, Mr., 106.
+
+    Wrennal, Father William, 46.
+
+
+    YAIDZU, 34, 279, 290.
+
+    "Yakumo," 221.
+
+    Yashiki garden, 260.
+
+    Yokohama, 270, 313.
+
+    Yone Noguchi, 185, 263, 301, 318, 334.
+
+    Young, Mr. Robert, 143, 247, 313.
+
+    Young, Mrs., 246.
+
+    "Yuko," 233.
+
+    Yvetot, 61.
+
+
+    ZOSHIGAYA, 278.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes.
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_.
+
+Passages in small caps are replaced by either Title case or ALL CAPS,
+depending on how the words were used.
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation preserved as in the original.
+
+The List of Illustrations was changed to match the captions of the
+illustrations.
+
+On page 51, the comma after "indirectly does me a right" was replaced
+with a period.
+
+On page 52, in the footnote "Lafacadio" was changed to "Lafcadio".
+
+On page 65, the [OE] ligature was replaced with "OE".
+
+On page 71, "acquiline" was changed to "aquiline".
+
+On page 82, "Marysville" was changed to "Maysville".
+
+On page 83, "indigant" was changed to "indignant".
+
+On page 118, the period inside the quote was changed to a comma.
+
+On page 120, "important person that" was changed to "important person
+than".
+
+On page 138, "Houkousai" was changed to "Hokusai".
+
+On page 145, "pyschological" was changed to "psychological".
+
+On page 163, "Hokousai" was changed to "Hokusai".
+
+On page 177, "adoped" was changed to "adopted".
+
+On page 202, "Lillian" was changed to "Lilliah".
+
+On page 203, the added spaces were in the original, to indicate missing
+words. Those missing spaces have been retained here.
+
+On page 210, "KOIZUME" was changed to "KOIZUMI".
+
+On page 245, "kizeru" was changed to "kiseru".
+
+On page 260, "bad" was changed to "had".
+
+On page 264, "spead" was changed to "spread".
+
+On page 275, "library,." was changed to "library,".
+
+On page 282, "Ultitimately" was changed to "Ultimately".
+
+On page 291, "condi tions" was changed to "conditions".
+
+On page 315, "out" was changed to "our".
+
+On page 334, "portaits" was changed to "portraits".
+
+On page 336, a closing quotation mark was places after "Finis:
+sweetness and sympathy."
+
+On page 353, "Th�ophile" was changed to "Theophile".
+
+On page 355, in the Index, the "Sackville" entry was moved to the "S"
+section and was identified with small caps as the first "S" word,
+instead of "St. Ronite", and "Shirabzoshi" was replaced with
+"Shirabyoshi".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lafcadio Hearn
+
+Author: Nina H. Kennard
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2010 [EBook #33345]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAFCADIO HEARN ***
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+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>LAFCADIO HEARN</h1>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+<p class="center">
+The Hearn crest is "on<br />
+a mount vert a heron<br />
+arg.," and the motto<br />
+"Ardua petit ardea."
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 484px;">
+<a name="frontis" id="frontis">
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="484" height="700" alt="Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife."
+title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+<h1>LAFCADIO HEARN</h1>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">by</span></p>
+
+<h3>NINA H. KENNARD</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i><span class="smcap">containing some letters from lafcadio hearn<br />
+to his half-sister, mrs. atkinson</span></i></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 326px;">
+<img src="images/005.jpg" width="326" height="392" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+NEW YORK<br />
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br />
+MCMXII</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1912, <span class="smcap">By</span><br />
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>REMEMBRANCE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the
+thread,&mdash;softer than moonshine, thinner than fragrance, stronger
+than death,&mdash;the Gleipnir-chain of the Greater Memory.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg vii]</span></p>
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> Death has set his seal on an eminent
+man's career, there is a not unnatural curiosity to know something of
+his life, as revealed by himself, particularly in letters to intimate
+friends. "All biography ought, as much as possible, to be
+autobiography," says Stevenson, and of all autobiographical material,
+letters are the most satisfactory. Generally written on the impulse of
+the moment, with no idea of subsequent publication, they come, as it
+were, like butter fresh from the churning with the impress of the mind
+of the writer stamped distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's
+written to Flaubert, or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend
+Stilling, is worth pages of embellished reminiscences.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a
+particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he
+himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon
+with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate
+sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of
+his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek
+an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence
+the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs.
+Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to
+Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary
+period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years
+of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting,
+giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and
+passionately enthusiastic nature.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg viii]</span></p>
+
+<p>During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to
+Chamberlain were written, he initiated a correspondence with his
+half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His
+erratic nature, tamed and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo,
+turned with yearning towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years,
+and these Atkinson letters, though not boasting the high intellectual
+level of those to Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate
+playfulness, and in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under
+a new and delightful aspect.</p>
+
+<p>There has been a certain amount of friction with his American
+editress, owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use
+these letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to
+criticisms and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual
+outspoken fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original
+form, to allow them to pass into the hands of any one but a person
+intimately connected with the Hearn family; but I can assure Mrs.
+Wetmore and Captain Mitchell McDonald&mdash;those kind friends who have
+done so much for the sake of Hearn's children and widow&mdash;that Mrs.
+Koizumi, financially, suffers nothing from the fact of the letters not
+having crossed the Atlantic.</p>
+
+<p>Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to
+make extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss
+Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also
+to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests' House, Ferbane, for having put me
+in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to
+Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently
+Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to
+give me much information concerning his college career.</p>
+
+<p>I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan,
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg ix]</span>
+to Mr. W. B. Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson,
+her daughter and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert
+Young, who gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn
+during the period of his engagement as sub-editor to the <i>Kobe
+Chronicle and Japan Mail</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers
+of Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs.
+Macmillan &amp; Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and
+"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown &amp;
+Co., Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives,"
+"In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to
+Messrs. Gay &amp; Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to
+Messrs. Harper for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French
+West Indies"; and, above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co. for
+permission to quote from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's
+"Letters," for without quoting from his letters it would be an almost
+futile task to attempt to write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn.</p>
+
+<p>What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn
+became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a
+Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached
+England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound
+of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was
+animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the
+Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will
+be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in
+England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great
+deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere."</p>
+
+<p>How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed
+amongst the nineteenth century's best-known <span class="pagenum"><a
+name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> prose writers, to whom he
+looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in
+that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually
+growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day
+stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be
+studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the
+subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in
+exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and
+interest&mdash;the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold
+undisputed sway in the Far East.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Southmead</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><i>Farnham Royal</i>, 1911.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p><span style="font-variant: small-caps; margin-left: 5%">chap.</span> <span class="ralignsc">page</span></p>
+
+<ul class="TOCR">
+<li><span class="smcap">Early Years</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">1</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Boyhood</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">23</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Tramore</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">33</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Ushaw</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">40</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">London</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">52</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Cincinnati</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">65</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Vagabondage</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">81</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Memphis</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">88</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">New Orleans</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">93</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Wider Horizons</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">102</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Letters and Personal Characteristics</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">111</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Lady of A Myriad Souls</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">124</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Religion And Science</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">137</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">West Indies</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">148</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Japan</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">160</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Matsue</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">172</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Marriage</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">179</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Katchiu-Yashiki</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">187</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Kumamoto</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">199</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Out of the East</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">231</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Kobe</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">238</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Tokyo</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">260</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Ushigome</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">274</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Nishi Okubo</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">286</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">His Death</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">299</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">His Funeral</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">310</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Visit To Japan</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">313</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Second Visit To Nishi Okubo</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">328</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="TOCU">
+<li><span class="smcap">Conclusion</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#CONCLUSION">339</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Index</span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#INDEX">351</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+<hr />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="ralignsc">facing</span><br />
+<span class="ralignsc">page</span></p>
+
+<ul class="TOCU">
+<li><span class="smcap">Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#frontis"><i>Frontispiece</i></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp16">17</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn's Half-sister).</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp204">204</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Kazuo (Hearn's Son) and His Nurse.</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp220">220</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Kazuo (Hearn's Son, Aged about Seven).</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp228">228</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Dorothy Atkinson.</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp232">232</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Kazuo (Hearn's Son, Aged about Seventeen).</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp314">314</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Carleton Atkinson.</span>
+  <span class="ralign"><a href="#fp318">318</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>LAFCADIO HEARN</h1>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>EARLY YEARS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of
+that other microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more,
+indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless
+ultimates&mdash;imaging sky, and land, and life&mdash;filled with
+perpetual mysterious shudderings&mdash;and responding in some wise to
+every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In each of a
+trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of
+atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless
+pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there
+are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the
+ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that
+appears to be is but the thrilling of it&mdash;sun, moon, and
+stars&mdash;earth, sky, and sea&mdash;and mind and man, and space and
+time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker
+shapes for ever."</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible,
+given to Charles Hearn by his grandmother, the following entry may be
+read: "Patricio, Lafcadio, Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa
+Maura."</p>
+
+<p>The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the
+ink faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or
+mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the
+appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and
+remarkable figures of the end of the last century.</p>
+
+<p>Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of <span
+class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+tracing the origin of genius will find few instances offering more
+striking coincidences or curious ancestral inheritances than that
+afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.</p>
+
+<p>On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian
+stock&mdash;mixture of Saxon and Celt&mdash;which has produced poets,
+orators, soldiers, signal lights in the political, literary, and
+military history of the United Kingdom for the last two centuries. We
+have no proof that Lafcadio's grandfather&mdash;as has been
+stated&mdash;came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, when he
+was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The Rev. Daniel Hearn
+undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace, and about the same
+time&mdash;as recognition for services done, we conclude&mdash;became
+possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of Westmeath.</p>
+
+<p>A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County
+Waterford&mdash;has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the
+seaside place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several
+summers at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the
+Rev. Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman
+Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present
+cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of
+the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is
+through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship
+with the County Westmeath portion of the family.</p>
+
+<p>As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an
+impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records
+certainly of several Daniel Hearns&mdash;it is the Christian name that
+furnishes the clue&mdash;occur in ecclesiastical documents both in
+Wiltshire and Somersetshire.</p>
+
+<p>In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given <span
+class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+of a branch of Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia
+about fifty years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was
+originally "cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county
+belonged to the Herons&mdash;pronounced Hearn&mdash;to which belonged
+Sir Hugh de Heron, a well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir
+Walter Scott's "Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant
+branch of Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the
+Heights."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his
+name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'&mdash;heron with wings
+down&mdash;for the design which he made to accompany his name and number
+at the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that
+the place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various
+countries, are of different, often entirely distinct origin.
+Nevertheless, the various modifications of the word&mdash;namely, Erne,
+Horne, Hearn, Hern, Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one
+root. In the Teutonic languages it is <i>irren</i>, to wander, stray,
+err or become outlaw. <i>Hirn</i>, the brain or organ of the wandering
+spirit or ghost, the Latin <i>errare</i> and Frankish <i>errant</i>,
+with the Celtic <i>err</i> names are related, though the derivation
+comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West Country in
+England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in the
+"Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies of
+note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or
+gipsies, is referred to.</p>
+
+<p>I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly
+maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their
+veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of
+gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered
+to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her
+head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+her palm with her finger said, "You are one of us, the proof is here."
+Needless to say that Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than
+all the archdeacons and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his
+pedigree, and was wont to show with much pride the mark on his thumb
+supposed to be the infallible sign of Romany descent.</p>
+
+<p>Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many
+members of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark
+complexion, and black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance
+from his mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children
+by his second wife, and again in their children. This exotic
+element&mdash;quite distinct from the Japanese type&mdash;is so strong
+as to have impressed itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife,
+creating a most remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs.
+Atkinson's son. The near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark
+brown hair, the soft voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned
+by both Carleton Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the
+original birthplace of the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country
+claimed by the gipsies themselves as the place where their race
+originated, the native gipsy is not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo.
+Curious to think that Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and
+oriental legend to the West, may, on his father's side, have been
+descended from Avatars, whose souls were looked upon as gods, centuries
+ago, in India.</p>
+
+<p>On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more
+full of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible
+to state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles
+Hearn belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was
+Greek; Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other
+hand, maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to
+the agricultural richness of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Jews, and Maltese had all
+taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at various times and seasons.
+Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his mother's maiden-name, and is one
+that figures continually in Maltese census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs.
+Hearn separated from her husband to return to her own family she went to
+Malta, not to the Ionian Islands. The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he
+could only stammer half Italian, half Romaic, when he first arrived in
+Dublin, rather points to a Maltese origin. What wild Arabic blood may he
+not, therefore, have inherited on his mother's side? For, as is
+well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes, migrating from the deserts of
+Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the Mediterranean and settled in
+Malta, intermarrying with the original Venetian Maltese.</p>
+
+<p>"We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite
+addition&mdash;the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move
+us, stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an
+exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life
+all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested
+themselves&mdash;the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the
+revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the
+oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited
+from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.</p>
+
+<p>From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country
+for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel
+of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in
+the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family
+distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she
+bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father
+Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to
+see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while
+quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He
+never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by
+the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He
+was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic
+and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew&mdash;"Veritable blunderers," as
+Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world."</p>
+
+<p>Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some
+photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to
+represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good
+deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have
+never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked
+something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother.
+I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of
+soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the
+'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my
+firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular
+directions&mdash;guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the
+directions most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong
+characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a
+resemblance in his children by two different mothers&mdash;and I want so
+much to find out if the resemblance is also psychological."</p>
+
+<p>Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as
+his father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's
+"Army List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as
+assistant surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on
+the Medical Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over
+Europe in 1849 infected the Ionian
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At Cephalonia they nominated
+a regent of their own nationality, and strenuous efforts were made to
+shake off the yoke of the English government. At the request of Viscount
+Seaton, the then governor, additional troops were sent from England to
+restore order. When they arrived, they, and the other regiments
+stationed at Corfu, were quartered on the inhabitants of the various
+islands.</p>
+
+<p>Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this
+half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the
+entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many
+stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in
+their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female
+portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes
+this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to
+join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics
+were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not
+return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore,
+necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep;
+the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous
+ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.</p>
+
+<p>But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima,
+there is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost
+pathways. Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or
+guitar with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with
+a melodious tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the
+qualifications for the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all
+accounts he had never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for
+want of use.</p>
+
+<p>Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish
+country house with a friend. Amongst them
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+we came across a poem by Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the
+Hearns' place in County Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very
+beautiful and an heiress. A lock of hair was enclosed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"Dearest and nearest to my heart,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Thou art fairer than the silver moon,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">And I trust to see thee soon."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up
+with the following:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">And evermore will beat for thee!!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The
+power of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.</p>
+
+<p>Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a
+countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and
+she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still
+smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa
+Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they
+met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo,
+but communication between the islands was frequent.</p>
+
+<p>As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in
+Ireland, of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles
+Hearn in consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it
+is more than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no
+exalted opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for
+imaginary wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her
+dowry, as in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged,
+when a daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the
+settlement she
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount
+of friction.</p>
+
+<p>Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient
+Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there
+by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island,
+excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern
+extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock
+whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends."
+Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled
+together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the
+altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that
+clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the
+divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling
+down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known
+as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a
+glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous
+haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having
+been born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic
+world&mdash;the world that represented for him the ideal of supreme
+artistic beauty&mdash;impressed itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often,
+later, amidst the god-haunted shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries
+of Japan, vague ancestral dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the
+distant Greek island with its classic memories, stirred dimly within
+him. After seeing, for instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in
+Izumo, he pictures a dream of a woman, sitting in a temple
+court&mdash;his mother, presumably&mdash;chanting a Celtic dirge, and a
+vague vision of the celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the
+ilex-groves and temples of the ancient Leucadia....
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+Awakening, he heard, in the night, the moaning of the real sea&mdash;the
+muttering of the Tide of the Returning Ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military
+occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were
+withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his
+regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight
+typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son
+should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his
+service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta.
+How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had
+left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.</p>
+
+<p>Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of
+having been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the
+queer things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story
+about a monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind
+to paint the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the
+little boy may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain
+could have been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two
+years old. He must have been told it later by his father, or read a
+description of the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta
+Mrs. Hearn proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist
+brother, Richard. Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging
+him to smooth the way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother
+"Dick"&mdash;indeed, all his belongings&mdash;were devoted to
+good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it was with many qualms and much
+hesitation that Richard undertook the task entrusted to him.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin
+at Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always
+referred to by the present generation
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 11]</span>
+of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready pen. A novel of hers entitled
+"Felicia" is still extant in manuscript; the melodramatic imagination,
+lack of construction, grammar and punctuation, peculiar to the feminine
+amateur novelist of that day, are very much in evidence. She also kept a
+diary recording the monotonous routine usual to the life of a
+middle-aged spinster in the backwater of social circles in Dublin; the
+arrival and departure of servants, the interchange of visits with
+relations and friends; each day marked by a text from the Gospels and
+Epistles.</p>
+
+<p>Because of the political and religious animus existing between
+Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more
+prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England.
+All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were
+members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious
+movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial
+functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with
+which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a
+Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious
+observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard
+Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation,
+thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in
+Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate
+opinions.</p>
+
+<p>On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard
+arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7
+o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a
+day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless
+and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady!
+Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition
+to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter
+from
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear, beloved
+fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears of his
+wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us." Then
+on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by our
+beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as attendant.
+Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an interesting,
+darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs. Hearn, as
+attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the
+misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later,
+in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a
+word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to
+perfectly harmless actions and statements.</p>
+
+<p>Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son,
+having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves
+and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is
+easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding
+herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the
+murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major
+portion of the capital of Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather
+divests Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her
+memory. She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but
+ill-tempered and unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too
+indolent to cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she
+lived the life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa,
+complaining of the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of
+Ireland, of the impossibility of learning the language. To her children
+she was capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe
+castigation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in
+imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he
+imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from
+their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them.
+In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to
+dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.</p>
+
+<p>When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child,
+the idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually
+became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission
+of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He
+then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the
+sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the
+eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another
+time, another heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if
+he does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over
+his cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers,
+after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name
+of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."</p>
+
+<p>When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here,
+he felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was
+perpetuated, with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same
+resolves as his own.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his
+sister, Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for
+this reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and
+dark, with large black eyes&mdash;very large. A childish impulse came to
+me to slap it. I slapped it&mdash;simply to see the result, perhaps. The
+result was immediate severe castigation, and I remember
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+both crying and feeling I deserved what I got. I felt no resentment,
+although the aggressor in such cases is usually the most indignant at
+consequences."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<p>The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have
+forgathered amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin
+Brenane&mdash;"Sally Brenane," Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal
+side. She had married a Mr. Justin Brenane&mdash;a Roman Catholic
+gentleman of considerable means&mdash;and had adopted his religion with
+all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak, bigoted, kindly old soul! She
+and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in common of belonging to a religion
+antagonistic to the prejudices of the people with whom their lot was
+cast; she also, at that time, was devoted to her nephew Charles. Never
+having had a child of her own, she longed for something young on which
+to lavish the warmth of her affection. The delicate, eerie little
+black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime favourite in the
+Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady was immediately
+fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman Catholic school,
+and of making him heir to the ample fortune and property in the County
+of Wexford left to her by her husband.</p>
+
+<p>In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn
+found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands,
+something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent
+fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which
+the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she
+was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for
+Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes,
+accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in
+strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance
+as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons"
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+who crowded round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in
+marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was
+allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably
+laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman,
+when she went for her daily drive.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's
+diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies.
+Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles
+had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on
+August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great
+hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the
+latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an
+entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton."</p>
+
+<p>The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was
+apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of
+storm!</p>
+
+<p>Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace
+and charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the
+light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and
+unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and
+ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about
+the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by
+chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the
+only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free
+again, and was living as a widow in Dublin.</p>
+
+<p>What took place between husband and wife these fateful
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+days can only be surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan
+Hearn's diary. "October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect
+health, looking well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God,
+my eyes once more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife,
+and little boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy.
+That night we were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and
+dangerous illness of Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but
+hopes are entertained of her recovery." After this entry the diary
+breaks off abruptly, and we are left to fill in details by family
+statements and hearsay.</p>
+
+<p>An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins.
+We are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies,
+whilst stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to
+throw herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania.
+Now, whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern
+nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person,"
+Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we
+only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people
+on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of
+silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that
+the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack
+was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year
+later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at
+the battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and
+returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some
+little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the
+scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+at this time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their
+spurred feet under the dinner-table.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 413px;"> <a name="fp16" id="fp16">
+<img src="images/fp16.jpg" width="413" height="700" alt="Major Charles
+Bush Hearn (Hearn&#39;s Father)." title="" /></a> <span class="caption">
+Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn&#39;s Father).</span></div>
+
+<p>It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow
+knew, or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened
+these years&mdash;the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of
+his father and mother; and the cloud that at various periods
+overshadowed his mother's brain.</p>
+
+<p>In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
+which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety,
+strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says,
+"remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin
+soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order
+for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy
+with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of
+brotherhood, I was totally indifferent&mdash;especially for the reason
+that he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately.
+I followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw
+him downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior.
+What afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I
+was scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again."</p>
+
+<p>The following reminiscence requires little comment:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was
+afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds
+above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way.
+Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and
+knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady
+came to meet us. She seemed to me tall&mdash;but a child cannot judge
+stature well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that
+she seemed to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+stooped down and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand
+still. Then I found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book
+she had given me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and
+told me never to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't
+remember whether I told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so
+angry that I was frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture
+book, in which I remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath.
+Auntie did not tell me why she was angry for more than ten years
+after."</p>
+
+<p>The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be
+Lafcadio's stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The
+Hearn and Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at
+this time in Dublin.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more
+uncanny, odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be
+difficult to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of
+age. Long, lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his
+prominent, myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his
+arms he tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take
+it from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells
+of&mdash;the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from
+Japan to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have
+been the same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one
+hand on her hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you
+run?' I said angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was
+badly beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my
+face hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we
+wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+threw me down easily. 'Ah!' she said:&mdash;'now you must do what I tell
+you.' She tied my hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage
+where there was a large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot
+seize my hair. When I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled
+savagely. Then I cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in
+her silk dress, and rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to
+see. I hoped her mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also
+laughed, and went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little
+girl again. I think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me
+to feel like a grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her
+because she was cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But
+<i>how</i> I would love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of
+men to-day&mdash;great huge men, perhaps generals, certainly
+colonels.</p>
+
+<p>"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a
+little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together
+like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then
+much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than
+now. I rather think I should like to see her."</p>
+
+<p>Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the
+sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more
+wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at
+Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his
+life.</p>
+
+<p>In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from
+Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea
+is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma,
+the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a
+magical time and place "in which the sun and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+the moon were larger, and the sky much more blue and nearer to the
+world," and he recalls the love that he had cherished for one whom he
+does not name, but who I know to be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly
+ruled his world and thought only of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood
+was an elder sister of Charles Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of
+a beautiful place, situated on Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was
+a most delightful and clever person, beloved by her children and all her
+family connections, especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often
+in the habit of stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We
+can imagine her telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of
+the light before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put
+him to sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told
+me of a charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it
+would keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned.
+And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and
+had become ridiculously old."
+<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+"Out of the East," Gay &amp; Hancock.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>"The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his
+half-sister, when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked
+leave to see me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and
+father had become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the
+top of his head was all covered with little drops of water. He said:
+'She is very angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I
+never saw him again.</p>
+
+<p>"I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big
+beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him
+by some tale told her about his life in Paris."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+Rosa Hearn's luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says
+that after her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had
+protected her interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but
+we have no proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by
+some members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later
+to see her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know
+of Rosa Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the
+vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and
+misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the
+tablets of her memory.</p>
+
+<p>After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage,
+Charles Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met
+Rosa Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the
+record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major
+Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn
+proceeded with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the
+care of Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on
+condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic
+faith.</p>
+
+<p>Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that
+was housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind
+that made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a
+boy at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the
+hands of those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from
+his grand-aunt.</p>
+
+<p>Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle
+Richard in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+In an article written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his
+Cincinnati friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who
+had wrecked his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his
+mother. His father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs.
+Atkinson, "printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it.
+I remember he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I
+never wrote to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I
+do not forbid you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look
+as though she wished me to, and I was lazy."</p>
+
+<p>Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866,
+on his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died
+of Indian fever, on board the English steamship <i>Mula</i> at Suez,
+thus ending a distinguished career, and a military service of
+twenty-four years.</p>
+
+<p>With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an
+end. We now have to follow the development of this strange,
+undisciplined nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to
+fame, remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a
+father's advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness&mdash;that
+tenderness generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to
+conquer in the arena of life.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum">
+<a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>BOYHOOD</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"You speak about that feeling of fulness of
+the heart with which we look at a thing&mdash;half-angered by inability
+to analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think the
+feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says, 'the doors
+have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt in looking at that
+tree, was it only your pleasure, no,&mdash;many who would have loved
+you, were looking through you and remembering happier things. The
+different ways in which different places and things thus make appeal
+would be partly explained;&mdash;the supreme charm referring to
+reminiscences reaching through the longest chain of life, and the
+highest. But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as
+that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then how much dead
+love lives again, how many ecstasies of the childhoods of a hundred
+years must revive!"</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Most</span> of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs.
+Brenane seems to have been passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper
+Leeson Street; at Tramore, a seaside place on the coast of Waterford in
+Ireland; at Linkfield Place, Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry
+Molyneux, a Roman Catholic friend of Mrs. Brenane's&mdash;destined to
+play a considerable part in the boy's life&mdash;and in visiting about
+among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose name was legion.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house,
+Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have
+records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his
+sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio
+stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+money, and Kiltrea was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there
+now.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to
+have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from
+thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous
+idea&mdash;common to most of Hearn's biographers&mdash;has originated
+from Hearn himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England
+and Wales, but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive,
+capricious genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he
+therefore preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial
+atmosphere. Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the
+descriptions of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De
+Quincey's "Wanderings in Wales."</p>
+
+<p>Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a
+delightful dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan,"
+<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+one of Hearn's last books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari"
+(Sunflower), the scene of which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the
+Elwoods' place; and "the dearest and fairest being in his little world,"
+alluded to here, and in his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs.
+Elwood. Beautiful as any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly
+limned against the forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates
+Ireland from his memory, and calls them "Welsh hills."</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> The
+publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin &amp;
+Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood,
+who ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China,
+when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the
+allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real
+Robert must long ago have suffered a sea
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+change into something rich and strange." "Greater love hath no man than
+this, that a man lay down his life for a friend."</p>
+
+<p>The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes,
+under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known
+character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if
+all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied
+her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the
+audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong.</p>
+
+<p>Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village
+of Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the
+pungent resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough
+Corrib, his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the
+harper place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">
+  "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">
+  Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who
+was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles
+Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for
+her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a
+coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance
+of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke
+suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and
+everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose
+to his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he
+thus alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign
+in the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a
+child.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I forget
+when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been eight or
+nine years old&mdash;I might have been twelve. And that's all."</p>
+
+<p>It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people,
+who could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer
+holiday.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These
+visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's
+life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered,
+spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon
+Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience
+of the artistic productions of the Far East.</p>
+
+<p>One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a
+sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in
+every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient
+gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence
+these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a
+lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid
+description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the
+midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather
+beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the
+roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the
+Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.</p>
+
+<p>By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to
+manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it
+would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought
+to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much
+alike as little ones to have loved each other properly;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+and I was, moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an
+incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same
+feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except
+when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is
+finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only
+learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their
+opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of
+life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so
+as a child; I was a perfect imp."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his
+children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself
+was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to
+taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild
+imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for
+mischief&mdash;traps arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when
+the door was opened, the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently,
+was the object he selected for playing off most of his practical jokes.
+"She was a hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head
+gently, and said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her,
+'Osekimono' (flatterer) and run away and hide myself."</p>
+
+<p>He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when
+she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days
+after, she would discover it half-rotten.</p>
+
+<p>Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and
+touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the
+charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally
+Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an
+old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a
+lap-dog."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was
+one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore,
+and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great
+extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison
+Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys,
+and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that
+was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was
+staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book
+Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he
+left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion
+with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy,
+of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the
+transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs.
+Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling,
+whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled,
+for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared
+himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion
+over the Celtic mind.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was
+a prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled
+"Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung
+and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy.</p>
+
+<p>He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by
+himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had
+children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings,
+ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried
+with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not
+forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind
+the folds of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier there than at
+home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the greater part
+of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not "ghosts."</p>
+
+<p>The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning
+Lafcadio Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an
+oculist, he maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital
+eyestrain, brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood,
+long before the accident at Ushaw.</p>
+
+<p>The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish
+glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the
+ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from
+beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from
+eyestrain.</p>
+
+<p>After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen
+envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his
+small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a
+book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre
+de la Piti� et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on
+his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to
+the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen
+through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant
+incidents made too important.</p>
+
+<p>"Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall
+scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial
+self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in
+me&mdash;thus producing obvious incongruities."</p>
+
+<p>"My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish
+mind by a certain cousin Jane&mdash;apparently one of the Molyneux clan,
+a convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow
+intensely unhappy by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell fire if he did not
+believe in God.</p>
+
+<p>When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by
+fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later,
+dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him
+a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It
+included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss
+Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint
+translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human
+Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological
+book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were
+apparently uninfluenced by her religious views.</p>
+
+<p>In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield
+Lane, Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and
+mortar, its smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and
+Roman Catholic churches, is a very different place from the straggling
+village that it was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were
+occupied by business men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway
+being the first in England to run fast morning and evening trains for
+the convenience of those who wanted to come and go daily to London.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over
+periodically to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife.
+She had, at various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by
+her husband in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in
+Watling Street.</p>
+
+<p>When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt&mdash;we see his name assigned by
+the Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866&mdash;the house at
+Redhill was given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane,
+settled permanently
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to leave college,
+Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time had become a
+permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment.</p>
+
+<p>Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn
+knew of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the
+second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the
+incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance.</p>
+
+<p>Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction&mdash;but was
+not sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be
+relatives of Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for
+Molyneux, on the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the
+Hearns and called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that
+husband," he goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing.
+When he was dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with
+the property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond
+the reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just
+what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she
+was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands
+of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was
+suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been
+brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four
+or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt
+told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was
+soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on
+the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in
+having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an
+annuity of (I think, but am not sure) �500. 'Henry,' who had 'made
+himself the darling,'
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 32]</span>
+was not satisfied. He desired to get the property into his hands during
+Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own, as well as Aunty's,
+ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into the hands of
+receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards sent to America,
+to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them in the shape of
+five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told to go to the
+devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon after. Henry
+Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many things to be
+sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor, but told me
+nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find out about it,
+please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled his digestion,
+as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a daughter, however,
+quite attractive. 'My first love'&mdash;at fourteen. I used to write her
+foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a year or two....</p>
+
+<p>"Well,&mdash;there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for
+any more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under
+pressure of work, I have to say good-bye.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span style="margin-right: 10.5em;">"Lovingly ever,</span></p>
+<p class="right"><span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">
+"Lafcadio Hearn."</span></p>
+
+<p>In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she
+told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used
+to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't
+think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if
+accurately known, give revelation about some other matters."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>TRAMORE</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the
+sea; if in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to
+that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if you have
+ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the fishing vessels turn rosy
+in the blush of sunset, or once breathed as your native air the divine
+breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary
+breakers.... When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars
+dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of
+machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for
+life, does not there visit you at long intervals in the dingy office or
+the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of
+wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper,
+'Come!'?</p>
+
+<p>"So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself revisiting
+in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand,
+ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of
+vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the
+thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever
+new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the
+free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the
+west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the
+infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you,
+with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom,
+a delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life restored.
+And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of the sea-dream in
+your ears and tears of regret in your eyes, to find about you only heat
+and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city
+sickening on its own thick breath.'"</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tramore</span> is situated six miles south of the
+city of Waterford, at the end of a bay three miles wide. The facilities
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+for sea-bathing and the picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have
+made it a favourite resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer
+mornings when a light wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights
+when the stars rule supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy
+days when the waves come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an
+Atlantic storm, to break with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of
+beach, Tramore Bay presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp
+themselves for ever on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.</p>
+
+<p>There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when
+impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is
+stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's
+brain&mdash;perhaps after the lapse of years&mdash;of a day spent by the
+sea listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a
+ray of sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the
+scent of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a
+freshness, something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or
+verse, raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of
+pathos, sometimes of inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so
+bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes
+unconsciously, memories of these childish days.</p>
+
+<p>At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years
+later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there
+came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at
+something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether
+suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo
+hedge&mdash;or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the
+black beach&mdash;or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something
+indefinable in the touch of the wind,&mdash;or
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+by all these&mdash;he could not say; but slowly there became defined
+within him the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago,
+he could not tell where, in those childish years of which the
+recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....</p>
+
+<p>Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had
+listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he
+remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world,
+the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion
+was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries,
+the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.</p>
+
+<p>The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a
+fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"
+<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
+shows his inspiration at its best. Freeing himself from the trammels of
+journalistic work on the <i>Commercial</i>, while cooped up in the
+streets of New Orleans, he recalls the delight of the sea in connection
+with the Levantine sailors in the marketplace, and breaks into a piece
+of poetic prose which I maintain has not been surpassed by any English
+prose writer during the course of last century.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a>
+"Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was
+published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
+published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic
+production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that
+constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then
+memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with
+sudden light. <i>Chita</i>, at the Viosca Ch�ni�re, conquering her
+terror of the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness
+of waters curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the
+dawn&mdash;like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves;
+<i>Chita</i> learning the secrets of the air,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+many of those signs of heaven, which, the dwellers in cities cannot
+comprehend, the scudding of clouds, darkening of the sea-line, and the
+shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, foretelling wild
+weather, are but reminiscences of his own childish existence at
+Tramore.</p>
+
+<p>For him, as for <i>Chita</i>, there was no factitious life those
+days, no obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering
+in dumb revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his
+elders; no cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy
+desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright
+winds flutter in the trees without.</p>
+
+<p>When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long
+days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his
+especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest
+for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every
+Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian
+warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are
+to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.</p>
+
+<p>Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as
+he was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many
+additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often
+too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered
+for his habit of "drawing the long bow."</p>
+
+<p>Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and
+certainly during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood,
+Hearn was not distinguished by accuracy of statement.</p>
+
+<p>The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those
+surrounding him&mdash;not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford
+fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from
+wanderings
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world. While other
+children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was building
+castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light of dawn
+and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which none
+could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul
+entrenched itself.</p>
+
+<p>Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears
+filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he
+saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens
+and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and
+divine&mdash;the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision
+of beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it,
+recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and
+existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing
+of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from
+countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from
+the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."</p>
+
+<p>It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded
+in the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to
+as having been found amongst his papers after his death.</p>
+
+<p>His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert,
+with a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any
+religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual
+sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly,
+stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however,
+exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing
+figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all
+the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology.
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 38]</span>
+Figure after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear.
+Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he
+remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan
+statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the
+gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The medi�val creed
+seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.</p>
+
+<p>The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of
+sorrow; the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day
+the books disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their
+former places, but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage
+under which he was placed had been offended by the nakedness of the
+gods, parts of many figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in
+some cases, drawers had been put on the gods&mdash;large, baggy bathing
+drawers, woven with cross strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to
+conceal all curves of beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved
+of some educational value. It furnished him with many problems of
+restoration; for he tried persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing
+the obliterated lines. By this patient study Greek artistic ideas were
+made familiar....</p>
+
+<p>After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things
+began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green
+of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before
+unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for
+he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty
+and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees,
+in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At
+moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so
+deep that it frightened him. But at other times there
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+would come to him a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable
+pain.</p>
+
+<p>A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he
+had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the
+"Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of
+her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and
+difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city
+of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>USHAW</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Really there is nothing quite so holy as a
+College friendship. Two lads, absolutely innocent of everything in the
+world or in life, living in ideals of duty and dreams of future
+miracles, and telling each other all their troubles, and bracing each
+other up. I had such a friend once. We were both about fifteen when
+separated. Our friendship began with a fight, of which I got the worst;
+then my friend became for me a sort of ideal which still lives. I should
+be almost afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other
+so): but your letter brought his voice and face back&mdash;just as if
+his ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder."</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">St. Cuthbert's College</span>, Ushaw, is situated
+on a slope of the Yorkshire Hills, near Durham. In the estimation of
+English Roman Catholics, it stands next to Stonyhurst as an educational
+establishment. Since Patrick Lafcadio Hearn's days it has counted
+amongst its pupils Francis Thomson, the poet, and Cardinal Wiseman, the
+archbishop, both of whom ever retained an affectionate and respectful
+memory of their Alma Mater.</p>
+
+<p>Lafcadio Hearn was sent there from Redhill in Surrey, arriving on
+September 9th, 1863, at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Brenane is not likely
+to have been a determining influence in sending him to college. For all
+her narrow-minded piety, the old lady was warm-hearted and intensely
+attached to Lafcadio, and must have known how unfitted he was for
+collegiate life in consequence of constitutional delicacy and defective
+eyesight.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+religious education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister,
+Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a
+hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been
+prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the
+Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early
+impressions.</p>
+
+<p>That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is
+incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to
+preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says:
+"You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the
+priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic
+Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the
+pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic."</p>
+
+<p>Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College
+and a school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas
+on the part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood,
+the authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of
+the "mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he
+was quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood.
+This disposes of one of the many Hearn myths.</p>
+
+<p>That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the
+authorities of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining
+lights in the Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a
+"painful subject" was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant,
+original spirit that had characterised his childhood, characterised him
+apparently in his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws
+and conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of
+forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in
+Shintoism
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire absence of
+ceremonial or doctrinal teaching.</p>
+
+<p>All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against
+prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against
+restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst
+those whom the French term <i>des�quilibr�s</i>, one of those ill-poised
+and erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly
+allied to madness.</p>
+
+<p>Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to
+ecclesiasticism was artistic and �sthetic.</p>
+
+<p>Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and
+informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient
+Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as
+exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof.</p>
+
+<p>"I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on
+my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing
+I could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe
+that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to
+explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the
+folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I
+immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my
+imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground,
+but also to become the sky!"</p>
+
+<p>That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of
+discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were
+the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded
+ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very
+stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist?</p>
+
+<p>If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had
+been at that time head of Ushaw, as he
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+ultimately became, instead of a contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to
+conjecture that the life of the little genius might have taken an
+entirely different course. Like his prototype, Flaubert, there was a
+<i>fond d'eccl�siastique</i> in Hearn's nature, as was proved by his
+later life. Had his earnestness, industry, and ascetic self-denial been
+appealed to, with his warm heart and pliable nature, might he not have
+been tamed and brought into line?</p>
+
+<p>It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional
+youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a
+university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his
+eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped
+himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger,
+better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from
+Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is
+plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry,
+French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to
+instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre
+Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely
+ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
+remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition
+for three years of his residence at Ushaw.</p>
+
+<p>He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance
+on many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were
+cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions
+of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight
+in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible
+dream of modern �sthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.'</p>
+
+<p>"Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas,
+and the Sagas, and the Chronicles of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+the Heimskringla, and the age of the Vikings and Berserks, he had at his
+finger ends, because they were mighty and awesomely grand."</p>
+
+<p>Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from
+Kobe, in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me
+incapacitated to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of
+having dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge
+of some one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have
+been of so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything
+I learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some
+of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..."</p>
+
+<p>In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D&mdash;&mdash;, one of those
+in his class at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you
+much about him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember
+him as a boy about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming
+with delight at some of his many mischievous plots with which he
+disturbed the College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or
+three classes, or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But
+he was always considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and
+the terror of his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I
+fancy very popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody,
+but he loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or
+of glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,'
+<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4">
+</a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
+who was one of his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many
+whippings, wrote poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in
+fact, quite irresponsible."</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a>
+I give this name as it is written in Canon D&mdash;&mdash; 's
+letter.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of
+Ushaw College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+"He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one
+could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in
+evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks
+of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very
+respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped
+muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc.</p>
+
+<p>"As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his
+class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly
+first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who
+were considered very good English writers&mdash;for boys. In other
+subjects, he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose
+he exerted himself except in English.</p>
+
+<p>"I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to
+say and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from
+the Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and
+brightness, disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He
+was so very curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that
+you felt he might do anything in different surroundings."</p>
+
+<p>Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat
+the same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this
+subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably
+getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati,
+Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being
+given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little
+fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it.</p>
+
+<p>His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was
+exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very
+close to his eyes. He had a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+great taste for the strange and weird, and had a certain humour of a
+grim character. There was always something mysterious about him, a
+mystery which he delighted in increasing rather than dissipating. The
+confession which he is supposed to have made to Father William Wrennal
+that he hoped the devil would come to him in the form of a beautiful
+woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the desert, was worthy of his
+fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic mischief and humour.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have
+been Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable
+literary talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of
+travel. His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most
+detailed and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was
+already noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was
+what chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he
+once rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which
+we had never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior
+aspects, and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly
+picturesque. Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep
+forests, low red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces,
+and glinting on the armour of great champions, storms howling over
+wastes and ghosts shrieking in the gale&mdash;these were favourite
+topics of conversation, and in describing these fancies his language was
+unusually rich.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and
+I were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in,
+I think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'
+<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>
+This separated us a
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 47]</span>
+little, as the lads in the High Figures were not permitted to use the
+same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A note was handed to me
+one evening from him as I sat reading in this library, inviting me to
+take a stroll. The style of this epistle was eminently characteristic of
+his tastes and style, and although it is now more than forty years ago,
+I think the following is very nearly a correct copy of it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a>
+"High Figures" is the name of a class or "School" (as we call "classes"
+at Ushaw), <i>e.g.</i> Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax,
+Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or class for
+two years, <i>e.g.</i> High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to
+be moved up into the next class, Grammar. Each class has its own
+library, so that a boy in the class of High Figures would not be allowed
+to intrude into the Library of the school or class above him,
+Grammar.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Massive and quaint, of the days of yore;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">When the spectral forms of the mighty dead</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Shrieks forth his note so wild,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">In the moonlight soft and mild,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">When the dead in the lonely vaults below</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Rise up in grim array</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Weird forms, unknown in day;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">When the dismal death-bells clang so near,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Sounding o'er world and lea,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Like the moan of the sobbing sea.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the
+initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make
+sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd.
+His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then
+romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when
+the passing excitement was over.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+He cared little, or not at all, for school games, cricket, football,
+etc., and this not merely because of his want of sight, but because they
+failed to interest him. I and he were in the habit of walking round the
+shrubberies in the front of the College, indulging our tastes in
+fanciful conversation until the bell summoned us again to study.</p>
+
+<p>"A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address.
+Lafcadio said his address was longer&mdash;'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw
+College, near Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth,
+Universe, Space, God.' His companion allowed that his address was more
+modest.</p>
+
+<p>"You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland
+or Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during
+the vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I
+believe I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having
+told me anything of his relations with his family, or of his
+childhood."</p>
+
+<p>It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter
+written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a
+heading to this chapter.</p>
+
+<p>At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of
+Hearn's subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's
+Stride" one of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to
+slip from his hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the
+inflammation supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly
+disfigured by the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched
+out at school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in
+Jesuitical schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in
+Dublin in the hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no
+confirmation.</p>
+
+<p>Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes.
+They must have been a Hearn inheritance,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton, has prominent myopic eyes, and
+Lafcadio's eldest son has been disqualified, by his near-sight, from
+entering the Japanese army.</p>
+
+<p>There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the
+idea of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person.
+Something of the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he
+imagined, to the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with
+the best of youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of
+long, lithe limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner
+in contests, and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of
+a palm which Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos.</p>
+
+<p>Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn.
+He never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much
+disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in
+appearance, especially to women, always pursued him.</p>
+
+<p>Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power,
+Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the <i>Times
+Democrat</i>, he alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an
+impressionist artist, declaring that the inability to see detail in a
+landscape makes it more mystical and impressive. Certainly, in
+imaginative work his defective sight seems, if one can say so, a help,
+rather than a drawback in the conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths
+and imaginings, glimpses, as it were, enlarging and extending the world
+around him and insight into others far removed from ordinary
+comprehension or practical insight. The quality of double perception
+became at last a cultivated habit of mind. "I have the double sensation
+of being myself a ghost, and of being haunted&mdash;haunted by the
+prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he says, in his essay on
+"Dust."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and
+accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of
+his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No
+doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of
+the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept
+him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power.</p>
+
+<p>It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw.
+Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of
+action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons
+were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question
+of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence
+of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his
+grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees.</p>
+
+<p>Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his
+holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as
+time went on.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable
+any longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded
+her that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and
+declared her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a
+Christian household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that
+she, who only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned
+a home of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail
+himself of Molyneux's hospitality.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a
+marriage which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs.
+Brenane bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin
+Brenane, had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+lady. The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the
+Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore.</p>
+
+<p>Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited
+it would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont
+to say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a
+necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value
+betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I
+am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself
+to things of the imagination and spirit."</p>
+
+<p>Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live
+upon, might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating
+vague philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of
+being driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and
+children?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>LONDON</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"In Art-study one must devote one's whole life
+to self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a little
+higher and advanced a little farther than anybody else. You should feel
+the determination of those Neophytes of Egypt who were led into
+subterranean vaults and suddenly abandoned in darkness and rising water
+whence there was no escape, save by an iron ladder.</p>
+
+<p>"As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each rung of
+the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had quitted it, and fell
+back into the abyss, echoing; but the least exhibition of fear or
+weariness was fatal to the climber."
+<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6">
+</a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A parlour-maid</span> of Mrs. Brenane's,
+Catherine by name, who had accompanied her from Ireland when the old
+lady came over to the Molyneux's house at Redhill, had married a man of
+the name of Delaney, and had settled in London, near the docks, where
+her husband was employed as a labourer. To them Hearn went when he left
+Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly comfortable circumstances, and
+Hearn's account in the letters&mdash;the only ones we have of his at
+this time&mdash;written to his school-friend, Mr. Achilles Daunt, of the
+grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was cast, of the nightly
+sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open, or shattered into
+pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and plunges in the river,
+are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and excitable imagination.</p>
+
+<p>The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the
+law. It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius
+struggling against overwhelming odds&mdash;poverty-stricken,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+starving&mdash;than lazily and luxuriously floating down the current of
+life with unlimited champagne and chicken mayonnaise on board.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a
+biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance.
+Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping,
+was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he
+had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he
+might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work.</p>
+
+<p>As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to
+take refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought
+about by his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable
+refusal to submit to discipline or restraint of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this
+period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some
+of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to
+finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home,
+surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in
+spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of
+his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was
+forced to become a servant.</p>
+
+<p>This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism
+of fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until
+he arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for
+there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in
+Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his
+destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was
+probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr.
+Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum
+given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the
+first hour&mdash;his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or
+curio that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself
+miles away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying
+himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all
+the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by
+official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can
+imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during
+the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no
+dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or
+trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going.</p>
+
+<p>At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in
+the experiment of working his brain at the expense of his
+body&mdash;sometimes to the extent of seriously undermining his health,
+and having to submit to the necessity of knocking off work until lost
+ground had been made up. He held the opinion that the owner of pure
+"horse health" never possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In
+its separation of the spiritual from the physical portion of existence,
+severe sickness was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation
+it bestows of the psychological under-currents of human existence. From
+the intuitive recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious
+fact, that the highest life can only be reached by subordinating
+physical to spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the
+material self, lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression
+as the most efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual
+power.</p>
+
+<p>Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and
+then, as when he tried to stay the pangs of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or when, on his first arrival in Japan,
+he insisted on adopting a diet of rice and lotus roots, until he
+discovered that endeavouring to make the body but a vesture for the
+soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight and acute dyspepsia.</p>
+
+<p>Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal
+from communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that
+he possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in
+silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and
+aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.</p>
+
+<p>Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and
+misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he
+showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and
+sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external
+influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If
+those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him
+forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse
+himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.</p>
+
+<p>After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when
+in front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of
+achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you
+are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic
+material?</p>
+
+<p>Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that
+literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling,
+as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance,
+that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that
+the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient
+sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, and the necessary
+utterance will come, until at last the emotional idea develops itself
+unconsciously. Analysing the feeling that remains dim, and making the
+effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt
+at last the necessary utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You
+may work at a page for months before the idea clearly develops, the
+result is often surprising; for our best work is often out of the
+unconscious."</p>
+
+<p>Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to
+other men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable
+determination which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path,
+with all his blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and
+weariness of life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that
+happiness which was possible to a man of his temperament.</p>
+
+<p>"All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find
+the right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage
+within hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it
+within hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama,
+carrying through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful
+romance of all, his own genius.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you too have had your revelations,&mdash;which means deep
+pains. One must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs.
+Atkinson, recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth
+making."</p>
+
+<p>Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows
+and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the
+undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of
+the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at
+Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid
+surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+things, fascinated by the sight of the human stream pouring through the
+streets of the great metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and
+eddyings, strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the
+city sea of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision
+and range of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to
+interpret the ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the
+"race ghost" of the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We
+can see in imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle,
+near-sighted fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the
+British Museum, where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of
+his essays, he pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten
+divinities of Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog,"
+trembling faintly at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks
+indignantly. "To aid another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another
+vanished civilisation or to illustrate an English dictionary of
+Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future Laureate with a metaphor
+startling as Tennyson's figure of the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'?
+Will they be preserved in vain? Each idol shaped by human faith remains
+the shell of truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself may hold
+a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of those
+Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds,
+transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to
+proclaim, 'I have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the
+moral as the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those
+holding sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs
+are good and true.'"</p>
+
+<p>We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the
+white-winged ships, "swift Herm� of traffic&mdash;ghosts of the infinite
+ocean," put out to sea, some of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+them bound for those tropical lands of which he dreamed; others coming
+in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed little men from that country in
+the Far East of which he was one day destined to become the
+interpreter.</p>
+
+<p>We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were
+the sheets&mdash;destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical
+stuff&mdash;that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not
+destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the
+aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.</p>
+
+<p>"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard
+a girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two
+little words&mdash;'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even
+saw her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the
+passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a
+double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain&mdash;pain and
+pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of
+pre-existence and dead suns.</p>
+
+<p>"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot
+be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly
+there never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But
+in the utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to
+the myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes
+familiar even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress.
+Inherited, no doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of
+grief, of pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the
+Far East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than
+individual being&mdash;vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim
+loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly.
+They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be
+startled at
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+rarest moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."
+<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a>
+From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay &amp; Hancock.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of
+England in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the
+wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the
+future.</p>
+
+<p>Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in
+every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and
+the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at
+Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his
+fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his
+candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of
+art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in
+writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in
+dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of
+October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers,
+called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to
+lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of
+sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The
+<i>Germ</i> was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had
+published in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden
+of Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during
+the intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying
+over to Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the
+first time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple
+fans, and <i>kakemonos</i> embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama,
+which, in his whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the
+Parthenon marbles."</p>
+
+<p>Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+selection and evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between
+religious orthodoxy and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To
+doubt a single theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient
+Hebraic text, seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious
+life and nature in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been
+introduced by Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well
+had he maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been
+written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to
+Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the
+creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached
+his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have
+wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that
+came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to
+think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been
+fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter,"
+indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters
+contributed to the <i>Commercial</i> from New Orleans. There is a
+certain pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and
+character of <i>Midwinter</i> made to his imagination. "What had I known
+of strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as
+hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had
+known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in
+corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and
+cheated and starved."</p>
+
+<p>Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his
+lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period
+intervening between this and his arrival
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+in America which I have in vain endeavoured to penetrate.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven,"
+alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who
+had 'run away from a Monastery <i>in Wales,'</i> and who still had part
+of his monk's garb for clothing."</p>
+
+<p>In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his
+tendency to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi,
+his widow, told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as
+professor at the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials
+that he had been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in
+France." His brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis,
+Michigan, says that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at
+college in France, and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at
+Cincinnati, states that Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood
+and youth, referred to Ireland, England, and "some time at school in
+France." Hitherto it has been a task of no difficulty to trace the
+inmates of Roman Catholic colleges abroad, it having been customary to
+keep records of the name of every inmate and student of each college,
+but since the breaking up of the religious houses in France, many of
+these records have been lost or destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here,
+leads to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and
+good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman
+Catholic institution of the <i>Petits Pr�cepteurs</i> at Yvetot, near
+Rouen. Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance
+unendurable, he took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If,
+as we imagine, he went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal
+himself to his Uncle Richard, who was living there at the time.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor,
+disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort
+of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The
+church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore,
+not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as
+far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and
+renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and
+curiosity&mdash;appanage of his artistic nature&mdash;with which Hearn
+must have entered Paris. Paris, where, as he says, "talent is
+mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to express the Inexpressible;
+human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to clutch the Unattainable."</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital
+memories&mdash;memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary
+work.</p>
+
+<p>It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
+war, when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and
+luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the
+world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin,"
+while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon
+Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists
+who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of
+their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the <i>Chat
+Noir</i>, and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures
+were inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the
+painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, Fran�ois Millet, in
+poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing
+"The Sowers" and "The Angelus."</p>
+
+<p>Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+Parisian world of Bohemia, one principle was established and followed,
+and this principle it was that made it so invaluable a school for a
+nature such as Hearn's. Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned
+for any other, however lucrative, not even when art remained blind and
+deaf to her worshippers. However forlorn the hope of ultimate success,
+it was the artist's duty to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of
+the divinity.</p>
+
+<p>It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory
+that ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the
+moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for
+itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of
+Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of
+Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of
+his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented
+exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit,
+which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and
+Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He
+could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves
+of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in
+praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the
+originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the
+directors.</p>
+
+<p>It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert
+Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands,
+Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the
+same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about
+the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also
+frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which
+he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"&mdash;"Trilby" of which Lafcadio
+writes later with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.</p>
+
+<p>In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland
+who had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was
+directed to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America.
+There he was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's
+brother-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to
+propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have
+well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any
+inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>CINCINNATI</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>" ... I think there was one mistake in the
+story of &OElig;dipus and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement
+about the Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every
+one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the Sphinx in
+life;&mdash;so I can speak from authority. She doesn't kill people like
+me,&mdash;she only bites and scratches them; and I've got the marks of
+her teeth in a number of places on my soul. She meets me every few years
+and asks the same tiresome question,&mdash;and I have latterly contented
+myself with simply telling her, 'I don't know.'"
+<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> a letter to his sister, written from
+Kumamoto, in Japan, years later, Hearn tells her that he found his way
+to the office of an old English printer, named Watkin, some months after
+his arrival in Cincinnati. "I asked him to help me. He took a fancy to
+me, and said, 'You do not know anything; but I will teach you. You can
+sleep in my office. I cannot pay you, because you are of no use to me,
+except as a companion, but I can feed you.' He made me a paper-bed
+(paper-shavings from the book-trimming department); it was nice and
+warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of tidying the papers, sweeping
+the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr. Watkin's frugal meals."</p>
+
+<p>In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the
+conversation that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and
+himself at his shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found
+his way there in the year 1859.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"</p>
+
+<p>"To write, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth
+first, try your hand at writing later on."</p>
+
+<p>Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied
+reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge
+of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to,
+but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other
+than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one
+time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy,
+Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant,
+regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's
+weird tales.</p>
+
+<p>The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely
+near-sighted&mdash;one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that
+had befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white&mdash;he was
+intensely shy, and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement
+that in itself was apt to influence people against him. But the
+intellectual brow, a something dignified and reserved in voice and
+manner, an intangible air of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention.
+As Hearn somewhere says, hearts are the supreme mysteries in life,
+people meet, touch each other's inner being with a shock and a feeling
+as if they had seen a ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the
+door of his printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature;
+he discerned at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific
+individuality, and conceived an immediate affection for the boy.</p>
+
+<p>Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he
+left France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's
+printing-shop in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of
+events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In
+his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had
+been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself
+in considerable difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he
+tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the
+names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is
+sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading
+of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian
+publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the
+same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago
+in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food,
+he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian
+peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of
+brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the
+vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a
+beauty and charm that never were hers&mdash;and under the title of "My
+First Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers.</p>
+
+<p>After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have
+touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of
+misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement
+in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he
+had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to
+seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson,
+when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very
+lucky, she has not seen the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the apish side; the ugly facets
+of the monkey puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>"I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew
+nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out
+of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's
+photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had
+to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then
+I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to
+sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen
+from the house."</p>
+
+<p>This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as
+having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister
+and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses,
+unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at
+that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen.</p>
+
+<p>His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft,
+delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his
+hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure
+of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the
+frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he
+thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were
+of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining
+stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures
+like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The
+horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they
+were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was,
+yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did
+not.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+"I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a
+business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling
+the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary
+calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph
+Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I
+looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was
+touchy&mdash;went off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends
+refused to do anything further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of
+doors. At last I became a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires,
+shovelled coals, etc., in exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on
+the floor of the smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half
+years, finding time to read and write stories. The stories were
+published in cheap Weekly Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for
+them. I tried other occupations also&mdash;canvassing, show-card
+writing, etc. These brought enough to buy smoking tobacco and
+second-hand clothes&mdash;nothing more."</p>
+
+<p>It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never
+applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are
+not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop,
+with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even
+sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a
+disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of
+money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry
+Molyneux's brother-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
+<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>
+Dr. George Milbury Gould alludes to this gentleman in the following
+terms:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9">
+</a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a>
+Messrs. Fisher Unwin.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>"There is still living, an Irishman, to whom Lafcadio was sent from
+Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+extent, the boy was placed. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in
+1870."</p>
+
+<p>"He was not sure," says Gould in his account of an interview with Mr.
+Cullinane, "whether Mrs. Brenane was really Hearn's grand-aunt; the fact
+is, he declared that he knew nothing, and no one knew anything true of
+Hearn's life. Asked why the lad was shipped to him, he replied, 'I do
+not know&mdash;I do not even know whether he was related to my
+brother-in-law, Molyneux, or not.'"</p>
+
+<p>From these statements Gould infers that the boy couldn't stop in any
+school to which he was sent, that he was apparently an unwelcome charge
+upon his father's Irish relations. Every one, indeed, who had anything
+to do with him made haste to rid themselves of the obligation.</p>
+
+<p>The friendship with Mr. Watkin, the old English printer, was destined
+to last for the term of Hearn's life.</p>
+
+<p>Many of Hearn's friends in America have insinuated that Mr. Watkin
+exaggerated the strength of the tie that bound him to Lafcadio Hearn;
+but Hearn's letters to his sister bear out all the statements made in
+the introduction to the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." Even
+when Hearn succeeded in obtaining occupation elsewhere, he would return
+to Mr. Watkin's office during leisure hours, either for a talk with his
+friend, or, if Mr. Watkin was out, for a desultory reading of the books
+in the "library," the appellation by which the two or three shelves
+containing Mr. Watkin's heterogeneous collection was dignified. He was
+of no use in Mr. Watkin's business owing to defective eyesight, but when
+he returned after his day's work elsewhere, literary, political and
+religious subjects were discussed and quarrelled over.</p>
+
+<p>As was now and afterwards his custom with his friends, in spite of
+daily intercourse, Hearn kept up a frequent correspondence with Mr.
+Watkin. This correspondence has been edited and published by Mr. Milton
+Bronner under
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+the title of "Letters from the Raven." Edgar Allan Poe had died in 1849,
+but the influence of his weird and strange genius was still pre-eminent
+in America. Early in their acquaintance Hearn established the habit of
+addressing Mr. Watkin as "Old Man" or "Dad," while on the other hand the
+boy, in consequence of his sallow complexion, black hair, and admiration
+for Poe's works, was known as the "Raven." During the long years of
+their correspondence, a drawing of a raven was generally placed in lieu
+of signature when Lafcadio wrote to Mr. Watkin. Many of these
+pen-and-ink sketches interspersed with other illustrations here and
+there through the letters show considerable talent for drawing, of a
+fantastic sort, that might have been developed, had Hearn's eyesight
+permitted, and had he not nourished other ambitions.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the letters are simply short statements left on the table for
+Mr. Watkin's perusal when he returned home, or a few lines of nonsense
+scribbled on a bit of paper and pinned on a door of the office.</p>
+
+<p>Often when Hearn was offended by some observation, or a reprimand
+administered by the older man, he would "run away in a huff." Mr.
+Watkin, who was genuinely attached to the erratic little genius and
+understood how to deal with him, would simply follow him, tell him not
+to be a fool, and bring him back again.</p>
+
+<p>In the fourth autobiographical fragment, found amongst Hearn's papers
+after his death, is one entitled "Intuition." He there alludes to Watkin
+as "the one countryman he knew in Cincinnati&mdash;a man who had
+preceded him into exile by nearly forty years."</p>
+
+<p>In a glass case at the entrance to a photographer's shop, Hearn had
+come across the photograph of a face, the first sight of which had left
+him breathless with wonder and delight.... The gaze of the large dark
+eyes, the aquiline curve of the nose, the mouth firm but fine&mdash;made
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+him think of a falcon, in spite of the delicacy of the face.... He stood
+looking at it, and the more he looked, the more the splendid wonder of
+it seemed to grow like a fascination. But who was she? He dared not ask
+the owner of the gallery. To his old friend Watkin, therefore, he went
+and at once proposed a visit to the photographer's. The picture was as
+much a puzzle to him as to Hearn.</p>
+
+<p>For long years the incident of the photograph passed from Hearn's
+memory until, in a Southern city hundreds of miles away, he suddenly
+perceived, in a glass case in a druggist's shop, the same
+photograph.</p>
+
+<p>"Please tell me whose face that is," he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible you do not know?" responded the druggist. "Surely you
+are joking?"</p>
+
+<p>Hearn answered in the negative. Then the man
+told him&mdash;it was that of the great tragedienne, Rachel.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>Cincinnati is separated from Kentucky by the Ohio. It is there but a
+narrow river, and the Cincinnati folk were wont to migrate into Kentucky
+
+when there were lectures on spiritualism, revivalist meetings, or
+political haranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to
+make the journey when the day's work was done.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of
+thought. We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle"
+as well as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its
+astral visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of
+tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects
+through space.</p>
+
+<p>These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later,
+Hearn was on the staff of the <i>Enquirer</i> as night reporter, his
+"Dad" often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as
+the water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi
+valley.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the <i>Enquirer</i>
+staff visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's
+Home" (he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati
+where business people of small means spend their declining years. An
+account of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The
+writer described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many
+pigeon-holes, holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels
+of Tual"&mdash;the letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman
+tottered when the reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings,
+and as he balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told,
+in a voice heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and
+how their friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition
+with the years.</p>
+
+<p>"I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloom y
+views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny
+reminded me of Poe at his best&mdash;or worst, as you might call it;
+only, in my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to
+my place when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a
+raven varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour
+he was in when he sketched it."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can
+hardly be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of
+his statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to
+see him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be
+quite accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having
+spent nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures
+after his arrival, of his having worked as type-setter and proof-reader
+for the Robert Clarke Co., before seeking employment at Mr. Watkin's
+office.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+It was while he was sleeping on the bed of paper shavings behind Mr.
+Watkin's shop that he acted as private secretary to Thomas Vickers,
+librarian in the public library at Cincinnati. He mentions Thomas
+Vickers at various times in his letters to Krehbiel, and refers to rare
+books on music and copies of classical works to be found at the
+library.</p>
+
+<p>During all this period, wandering from place to place, endeavouring
+to find employment of any kind, the boy's underlying ambition was to
+obtain a position on the staff of one of the large daily newspapers, and
+thus work his way to a competency that would enable him to devote
+himself to literary work of his own.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe he would have signed his soul away to the devil," one of
+his colleagues says, "to get on terms of recognition with either Colonel
+John Cockerill, then managing editor of the <i>Cincinnati Enquirer</i>,
+or Mr. Henderson, the city editor of the <i>Commercial</i>." Though
+Hearn may not have signed his soul to the devil, he certainly sold his
+genius to ignoble uses when he wrote his well-known description of the
+tan-yard murder. His ambition however was gratified. A reporter who
+could thus cater to the public greed for horrors was an asset to the
+Cincinnati press.</p>
+
+<p>We have an account, given by John Cockerill, twenty years later, of
+Hearn's first visit to the <i>Enquirer</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"One day there came to the office a quaint, dark-skinned little
+fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power
+and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding
+terms.</p>
+
+<p>"When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid
+for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted
+in the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to
+what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 75]</span>
+tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted
+brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and
+indescribable.</p>
+
+<p>"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I
+was astonished to find it charmingly written....</p>
+
+<p>"From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote
+special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as
+anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him
+to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of
+the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work,
+for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper
+was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his
+prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit,
+scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more
+annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those
+days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as
+sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him
+as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense
+resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the
+beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither
+wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city
+staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive
+powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled
+about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out
+charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings
+fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth
+ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba
+dances."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was
+Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous
+steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the
+city from that exalted position.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the
+performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not
+listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there
+was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the
+climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that
+he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the
+remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.'
+Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished
+their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns
+describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained
+from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have
+seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose."</p>
+
+<p>Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the
+paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his
+wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them
+and to his fellow-reporters.</p>
+
+<p>After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting
+in the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning,
+under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its
+wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations
+from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire.</p>
+
+<p>Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than
+the Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create
+something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the
+latter-day
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+English and American romance. Although later he modified considerably
+his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art, he ever
+retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and finish of
+the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right phrase,
+their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position, the
+strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to vividly-realised
+themes and objects, all these elements combined conferred a particular
+charm on their method of expression to a stylist of Hearn's quality.</p>
+
+<p>Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first
+translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification
+of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales,
+included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he
+undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de
+Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man
+cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I
+translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass
+without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I
+think nothing ought to be suppressed."</p>
+
+<p>As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking
+speech at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's
+productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and
+Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets
+and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the
+matter of social morality.</p>
+
+<p>When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp"
+was refused admittance to the pages of a San Francisco magazine as
+likely to shock the sentiments of its readers and injure the circulation
+of the periodical in consequence of the morals of the mother of the
+<i>Luck</i>, we are not surprised that Hearn's attempt to introduce
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+the American public to the masterpieces of the French Impressionist
+School was foredoomed to failure. There is a certain na�ve, determined
+defiance of convention in his insistence on gaining admiration both from
+his friends and the public for productions that were really quite
+unsuited to general circulation at that time in America. We find him,
+for instance, recommending the perusal of "Mdlle. de Maupin" to a
+clergyman of the Established Church and sending a copy of Gautier's
+poems to Miss Bisland in New Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall stick," he says, "to my pedestal of faith in literary
+possibilities like an Egyptian Colossus with a broken nose, seated
+solemnly in the gloom of my own originality, seeking no reward save the
+satisfaction of creating something beautiful; but this is worth working
+for."</p>
+
+<p>It is a noteworthy fact and one that may be mentioned here that, in
+spite of his extraordinary mastery of the subtleties of the French
+language, he always spoke French with an atrociously bad accent. "He had
+a very bad ear," his friend, Henry Krehbiel, tells us in his article on
+"Hearn and Folk Music," "organically incapable of humming the simplest
+tune; he could not even sing the scale, a thing that most people do
+naturally."</p>
+
+<p>From these Cincinnati days dates Hearn's hatred of the drudgery of
+journalism, "a really nefarious trade," he declared later; "it dwarfs,
+stifles and emasculates thought and style.... The journalist of to-day
+is obliged to hold himself in readiness to serve any cause.... If he can
+enrich himself quickly and acquire comparative independence, then,
+indeed, he is able to utter his heart's sentiments and indulge his
+tastes...."</p>
+
+<p>Amongst his colleagues on the staff of the <i>Enquirer</i> Hearn was
+not popular. He was looked upon as what Eton boys call a "sap"; his
+fussiness about punctuation and style, soon earned for him the sobriquet
+of "Old Semi-Colon."
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+This meticulous precision on the subject of punctuation and the value of
+words remained a passion with him all his life. He used to declare he
+felt about it as a painter would feel about the painting of his picture.
+He told his friend, Tunison, that the word "gray" if spelt "grey" gave
+him quite a different colour sensation.</p>
+
+<p>We remember his delightful outburst in a letter to Chamberlain, that
+has been so often quoted. "For me words have colour, form, character:
+they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations;&mdash;they have moods,
+humours, eccentricities:&mdash;they have tints, tones, personalities,"
+etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Though Hearn did not get on with others of the newspaper staff, he
+formed ties of intimacy with several choice spirits then moving in the
+best literary circles of Cincinnati and now well known in the literary
+life of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Krehbiel, recognised in England and America as an eminent music
+lecturer and critic, was one of his most intimate friends. Joseph
+Tunison was another; he afterwards became editor of the <i>Dayton
+Journal</i>, and, as well as Krehbiel, wrote sympathetically of the
+little Irishman after his death, expressing indignation at the
+scurrilous attacks made upon his reputation by several papers in the
+United States. "He was a wonderfully attractive personality, full of
+quaint learning, and a certain unworldly wisdom. He had a fashion of
+dropping his friends one by one; or of letting them drop him, which
+comes to the same thing; whether indifference or suspicion was at the
+bottom of this habit it would be hard to say. But he never spoke ill of
+them afterwards. It was not his way to tell much about himself; and what
+he did say was let out as if by accident in the course of conversation
+on other topics.... It was impossible to be long in his company without
+learning that his early years had been years of bitterness.
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 80]</span>
+His reminiscences of childhood included not only his dark-haired,
+dark-eyed mother, but also a beautiful blonde lady, who had somehow
+turned his happiness to misery."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>VAGABONDAGE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black
+skin that remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to
+me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should it not be
+beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is, and has been so
+acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced slave-owning races. Either
+Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps, told the world that after long living
+in Africa, the sight of white faces produced something like fear (and
+the evil spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost
+their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the fairer,
+the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in the North, of its
+kind. But it is not, surely, comparable with the wonderful beauty of
+colour in other races."
+<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10">
+</a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton,
+Mifflin &amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> to Hearn's more intimate life at this
+time there are many contradictory accounts. Published facts and the
+notoriety of legal proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and
+generally manage to work their way through any deposit of inaccurate
+scandal or imaginative rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set
+forth; otherwise how emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by
+discipline and self-control out of the depths into which at this time he
+fell?</p>
+
+<p>The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman,
+"Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries,
+which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of
+his unbalanced mental equipment.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 82]</span>
+On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing
+reporter's work for the <i>Enquirer</i> he fell under the "Shadow of the
+Ethiopian."</p>
+
+<p>In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain
+was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown
+off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through
+the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental
+vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and
+struggle.</p>
+
+<p>"He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs.
+Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I
+do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint
+in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat
+extremes of hate and love&mdash;a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature.
+Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had
+been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a
+different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood
+that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and
+lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If
+we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been
+better for those dependent on us."</p>
+
+<p>The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged.
+Hearn, then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to
+return from work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the
+morning. She was a handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his
+meals warm and allowed him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled.
+There was much in the circumstances surrounding her to set alight that
+spark of pity and compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a
+slave near Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in
+1863 President Lincoln's
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted into the city, a
+waif, like Hearn himself.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She
+saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they
+talked much of her early days and years of slavery.</p>
+
+<p>His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no
+one so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave
+herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found
+himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible
+position.</p>
+
+<p>After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to
+assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books.
+The <i>Enquirer</i> had articles running through several issues in 1906
+on the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after
+his death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws
+of Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage
+between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone
+through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto,
+or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole."</p>
+
+<p>It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his
+work called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it
+would have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of
+French writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so
+great an influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for
+alien races and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness,
+primitive impulses, as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and
+admiration of strange people, were a vital part of the impressionist
+creed, constituted, indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+of their unwholesome opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared
+his preference for the women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's
+earlier novels were but the histories of love affairs with women of
+"dusky races," either Eastern or Polynesian.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn, as we have said before, was an exemplification of the theory
+of heredity. The fancy for mulattos, Creoles and orientals, which he
+displayed all his life, is most likely to be accounted for as an
+inheritance from his Arabian and oriental ancestors on his mother's
+side. He but took up the dropped threads of his barbaric ancestry.</p>
+
+<p>All his life he preferred to mix in the outer confines of society;
+the "levee" at Cincinnati; the lower Creoles and mixed races at New
+Orleans; fishermen, gardeners, peasants, were chosen by preference as
+companions in Japan. He railed against civilisation. "The so-called
+improvements in civilisation have apparently resulted in making it
+impossible to see, hear, or find anything out. You are improving
+yourself out of the natural world. I want to get back amongst the
+monkeys and the parrots, under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an
+eternally lilac and luke-warm sea&mdash;where clothing is superfluous
+and reading too much of an exertion.... Civilisation is a hideous thing.
+Blessed is savagery! Surely a palm two hundred feet high is a finer
+thing in the natural order than seventy times seven New Yorks."
+<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hearn was a born rebel, and every incident of his life hitherto had
+goaded him into further rebellion against all constituted authority.
+That a race should be trampled upon by one regarding itself as superior
+was a state of things that he could not contemplate without a protest,
+and by his action he protested in the most emphatic manner possible. He
+never took into consideration whether it was
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+wise to do so or not. Later, when the turbulent spirit of youth had
+settled down to accept the discipline of social laws and conventions, he
+took a very different view of the racial question in the United States
+and confessed the want of comprehension he had displayed on the subject.
+Writing years afterwards to a pupil in Japan, he alludes to the
+unfortunate incident in Cincinnati. He resolved to take the part of some
+people who were looked down upon in the place where he lived. He thought
+that those who looked down upon them were morally wrong, so he went over
+to their side. Then the rest of the people stopped speaking to him, and
+he hated them. But he was then too young to understand. The trouble was
+really caused by moral questions far larger than those he had been
+arguing about.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn was certainly correct in thinking that, from the point of view
+of the people amongst whom he was living, an attempt to legalise a union
+with a coloured woman was an unpardonable lapse from social law. Not
+only then, but for years afterwards, public opinion was strongly
+influenced against him in consequence of this lamentable incident. Even
+at the time of his death, in 1904, a perfect host of statements and
+distorted legends exaggerating all his lapses from conventional
+standards were raked up. Amongst other accusations, they declared that
+when in New Orleans he was the favoured admirer of Marie Levaux, known
+as "The Voodoo Queen."</p>
+
+<p>Page Baker, the editor of the <i>Times Democrat</i> immediately came
+forward to defend Hearn from the charge. Referring to the Voodoo Queen,
+the article says: "All this wonderful tale is based upon the fact that
+Hearn, like every other newspaper man in New Orleans who thought there
+might be a story in it, entered into communication with a negro woman,
+who called herself 'Marie Levaux,' and pretended, falsely as was
+afterward
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+shown, to know something of the mysteries of Voodooism.</p>
+
+<p>"Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on
+investigating for himself what he wrote about; but what the <i>Sun</i>
+states is not only untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern
+city like New Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If
+Hearn had been the man the <i>Sun</i> says he was, he could not have
+held the position he did a week, much less the long years he remained in
+this city.... He certainly was not conventional in the order of his life
+any more than he was in the product of his brain. For this, the man
+being now dead and silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge
+upon him."</p>
+
+<p>In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the <i>Enquirer</i>,
+and in the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the
+<i>Commercial</i>, but he had too seriously wounded the susceptibilities
+of society in Cincinnati to make existence any longer comfortable, or,
+indeed, possible. The uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit
+his delicate constitution. He longed to get away.</p>
+
+<p>Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great
+South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were
+evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New
+Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey
+north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South,
+his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a
+November morning, were oddly connected with <i>Jean ah-Poquelin</i>.
+Even before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond
+the wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar
+sheds, to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion.</p>
+
+<p>A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 87]</span>
+of the statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any
+difference of opinion with the editor of the <i>Commercial</i>. In fact,
+money for the journey was given to him as well as a roving commission
+for letters from Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the
+newspaper.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<h3>MEMPHIS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"So I wait for the poet's Pentecost&mdash;the
+inspiration of Nature&mdash;the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I
+think they will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the
+Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers&mdash;with hymns of wind and
+sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes bathed in this azure and
+gold air&mdash;saturated with the perfume of the sea, he can't help
+writing something. And he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The
+Soul of the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit
+that moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed&mdash;vivifying,
+illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion&mdash;the sense
+of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple. You would feel it
+too under this eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching
+the keys of his mighty organ ..."
+<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12">
+</a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning
+Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio
+Hearn, with forty dollars in his pocket and a head full of dreams,
+started for Memphis on his way to New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr.
+Edward Henderson, editors of the <i>Commercial</i>, and his old friend,
+Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami depot to bid him God speed.</p>
+
+<p>Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio
+rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey
+from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced,
+and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several
+days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication
+in the northern city he had left was Henry
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+Watkin. Hieroglyphs of ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate
+the text. It is in moments of loneliness and depression, such as these
+days at Memphis, that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and
+then almost defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions.</p>
+
+<p>On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven;
+"In a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching
+its head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His
+finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a
+day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to
+lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel.</p>
+
+<p>I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias
+Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this
+time to the <i>Commercial</i>. These letters, his first professional
+work, except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St.
+Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging
+industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit,
+giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which,
+combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed
+him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day.</p>
+
+<p>A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the
+identification in the files of the <i>Commercial</i> of these
+"Midwinter" letters.</p>
+
+<p>He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of
+the Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with
+shattered windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up
+appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted
+about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It
+gave him the impression of a place that had been
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+stricken by some great misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain
+and white fogs came, the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely
+Stygian; all things wooden uttered strange groans and crackling sounds;
+all things of stone or of stucco sweated as if in the agony of
+dissolution, and beyond the cloudy brow of the bluffs the Mississippi
+flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists lingering like shades upon its
+banks.</p>
+
+<p>"Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial
+Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and
+heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would
+appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus."</p>
+
+<p>Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at
+Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough,
+rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the
+life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical
+pioneer&mdash;one of those fierce and terrible men who form in
+themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white
+civilisation."</p>
+
+<p>Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there
+came a storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I
+saw the Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an
+invading army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making
+wild charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me
+that the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate
+leader, were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the
+Union."</p>
+
+<p>To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room
+overlooking the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing
+of the cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the
+<i>Thompson Dean</i> there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every
+corner between
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 91]</span>
+the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy spinning their dusty
+tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at night they creaked and
+groaned as if something or somebody was following him in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself
+alone in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary
+hours of the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from
+vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am
+writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and
+perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is
+accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose
+you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would
+write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again,
+only by years&mdash;until the times and places of old friendships were
+forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams.</p>
+
+<p>At last the New Orleans steamer, the <i>Thompson Dean</i>, arrived,
+and Hearn floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and
+also, inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the
+flood-tide of his genius. A letter contributed to the <i>Commercial</i>,
+describing the "Fair Paradise of the South," the great sugar country, in
+which he now found himself, shows how he was gaining in the manipulation
+of his material, also gaining in the power of appreciating the splendour
+of the vision, the inmost ultimate secret Nature ever reveals to those
+who can comprehend and decipher it.</p>
+
+<p>As the little half-blind genius sat on the cotton bales on the deck
+of the <i>Thompson Dean</i> those autumn days, peering forth one moment,
+the next with nose close to the paper, his pen scratching rapidly,
+describing the marvellous pictures, setting down the impressions that
+slipped by on either hand, all the joy of an imprisoned tumultuous soul
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+set free, mentally and morally free, must have come to him. It breathes
+in every line, in every paragraph of his work. And not only was this
+passionate joy his, but also the exhilarating assurance of knowing that
+by self-denial, industry and the determination to succeed he had
+achieved and perfected the power to describe and expound the marvellous
+pageant to others. From the horizon widening in front of him, through
+the "Great South Gate," from "The Gulf" and the Tropics, from Martinique
+and Florida came the health-giving breeze, carrying on its wings
+courage, regeneration, and the promise of future recognition and
+fame.</p>
+
+<p>Many were his backslidings, even to the extent of meditating suicide
+during the first years of his sojourn in New Orleans, but never did he
+fall so morally low as at Cincinnati. That life of sordidness and
+ignominy was left behind, the unclean spirit exorcised and cast forth!
+He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set
+throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and
+response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man
+again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise
+on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight
+of his soul.</p>
+
+<p>Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the
+page athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the <i>Commercial</i>;
+some magic, bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor,
+inducing him to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his
+"Ozias Midwinter" correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the
+ordinary reading public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>NEW ORLEANS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"The infinite gulf of blue above seems a
+shoreless sea, whose foam is stars, a myriad million lights are
+throbbing and flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with
+perfume prevails over the land,&mdash;made only more impressive by the
+voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy voices of
+business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton presses closed, and the
+city is half empty. So that the time is really inspiring. But I must
+wait to record the inspiration in some more energetic
+climate."</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin
+that we are able to follow his more intimate feelings and mode of life
+at this period of his career. He was at first extravagantly enthusiastic
+about the quaint beauty and novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant
+vegetation, the warmth of the climate, the charm of the Creole
+population of the older portion of the city. The wealth of a world,
+unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was to be found in this
+half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her pitiful decay, it still
+was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view of New Orleans was soon
+dissipated by pressing financial anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of
+beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for
+twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to
+sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds,
+as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need
+of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was
+unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper
+correspondence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of
+residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of
+Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven
+sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes
+himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed
+with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to
+the fire, smoking his pipe of <i>"terre Gambi�se,"</i> conjuring up
+fancies of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while
+a "voice from the far tropics called to him across the darkness."</p>
+
+<p>It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he
+started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his
+sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three
+days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of
+the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and
+brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate,
+it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for
+mastering the ignoble necessity for making expenditure tally with
+revenue. The editor of the <i>Commercial</i>, being accustomed to deal
+with the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a
+fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in
+the matter of ways and means.</p>
+
+<p>Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by
+his literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone,
+his shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only
+enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a
+penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the <i>Commercial</i>
+hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his
+helping the woe-begone
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 95]</span>
+"raven." He was also prevented by business affairs from sending a reply
+for some weeks.</p>
+
+<p>His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time,
+surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched
+close by.</p>
+
+<p>"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan,
+when referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the
+poverty and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an
+American city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket&mdash;and to send
+off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me
+seven cents for the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in
+an American city appals me&mdash;because I remember."</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Hermes</i> of �schylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial
+observer of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for
+<i>Prometheus</i>. The same might be said of most of those touched with
+Promethean fire. Not only does privation and struggle keep the spark
+alight, but often blows it into a flame. In spite of hunger and
+straitened means, Hearn was absorbing impressions on every hand. New
+Orleans, in the seventies and eighties of last century, presented
+conditions for the nourishing and expanding of such a genius as his,
+that were most likely unattainable in any other city in the world.</p>
+
+<p>From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's
+Romances," that appeared at this time in the <i>Century Magazine</i>, we
+can conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream,
+its multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their
+eccentric fa�ades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue
+Royale, its picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its
+gables, eaves, dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping
+or jutting out of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned
+with sap-green
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 96]</span>
+batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron,
+framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine
+the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as
+they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses
+decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels,
+American business men in broadcloth and straw hats&mdash;sauntering
+backwards and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and
+coloured awnings.</p>
+
+<p>We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the
+river bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound
+of the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the
+shadow of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards
+Barataria and the Gulf.</p>
+
+<p>He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the
+feudal splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to
+hide its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves
+left untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined,
+refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to
+allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.</p>
+
+<p>We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered
+through the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to
+the great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market,
+yellow as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy
+sailors from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant&mdash;from Sicily
+and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred
+cities fringing the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have
+wandered all over the face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all
+seas, sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at
+last by the levee of New Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue,
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 97]</span>
+in a climate as sunny and warm as their own beloved sea. Amongst them
+all he was able, he imagined, to distinguish some on whose faces lay a
+shadow of the beauty of the antique world&mdash;one, in particular, from
+Zante, first a sailor, then a vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant.
+Hearn immediately purchased some of his oranges, a dozen at six
+cents.</p>
+
+<p>From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by
+the representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster,
+where plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of
+the ancient r�gime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their
+memory from the carven stone.</p>
+
+<p>Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the
+levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living
+iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground,
+with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon
+teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the
+more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the
+anatomy of some extinct animal,&mdash;the way those jaws worked, the
+manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the
+mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained.
+The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the
+bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled
+it into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws
+closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened,
+flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five
+inches,&mdash;positively less than five inches! I thought it was going
+to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the
+jaw remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I
+thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque,
+through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed."</p>
+
+<p>The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed
+to Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to
+submit to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a
+feeling of futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining
+devoted to their country that had sold them for expediency.</p>
+
+<p>With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of
+those who had once been opulent&mdash;the princely misery that never
+doffed its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on
+bread and orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in
+accepting an invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused
+by the <i>mont de pi�t�</i>) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the
+pretty misery, young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too
+jocosely to have its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its
+well-fed wooers, and crying for hunger after they were gone.</p>
+
+<p>Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn
+mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue.</p>
+
+<p>During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various
+intervals contributed letters to the <i>Commercial</i>. Now that his
+genius has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written
+in the autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just
+value; but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted
+signification of the word they come under the head of satisfactory
+newspaper reporting. The American public wanted a clear and
+dispassionate view of political affairs in the state of Louisiana, and
+how they were likely to affect trade in the state of Ohio.</p>
+
+<p>We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 99]</span>
+over the following, and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny"
+correspondent meant by giving him such rubbish to digest with his
+morning's breakfast:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake.
+Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of
+beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the
+beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness,
+something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?"</p>
+
+<p>In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more
+suited to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters
+on political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion
+that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans
+signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an
+opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of
+earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself
+acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be
+credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so
+frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part
+was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head
+above water until regular work came his way.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth
+birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file
+of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery
+in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway
+by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments.
+Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some
+unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness
+and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which,
+instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+stupid frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures.
+All this he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to
+Mr. Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been
+through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when
+twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he
+said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in
+retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he
+damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that
+gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he
+disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same
+place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for
+the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow
+and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a
+broken capital of the Parthenon."</p>
+
+<p>About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city,
+desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a
+severe attack of "dengue" fever.</p>
+
+<p>"I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs.
+Atkinson. It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the
+pest-stricken city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The
+steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon;
+the slow-running river, its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the
+air suffocating with vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint,
+sickly odour&mdash;a stale smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred
+from wet mould, and each day the terror-stricken population offering its
+sacrifice to Death, the faces of the dead yellow as flame! On
+door-posts, telegraph-poles, pillars of verandahs, lamps over government
+letter-boxes, glimmered the white enunciations of death. All the city
+was spotted with them. And lime was poured into the gutters, and huge
+purifying fires kindled after sunset.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to
+insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he
+had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected.</p>
+
+<p>"I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office&mdash;no
+money, no friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the
+doctor failed," he tells his sister.</p>
+
+<p>In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of
+reminiscences, he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his
+tomb a sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then
+began within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair,
+between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in
+their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a
+coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self
+something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and
+human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart
+and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth
+living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up
+the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish
+tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the
+infinite world.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h3>WIDER HORIZONS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"There are no more mysteries&mdash;except what
+are called hearts, those points at which individuals rarely touch each
+other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a
+ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out
+of soul-sight."
+<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13">
+</a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter
+to his sister was Rudolf Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and
+a very important person in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man
+who was brought almost stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of
+1876. In six months his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to
+return to regular literary work.</p>
+
+<p>Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic
+admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection,
+and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from
+Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is
+said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him
+the book was dedicated.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>After the yellow fever had passed away "there were plenty of
+vacancies waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his
+sister....</p>
+
+<p>A daily newspaper called the <i>Item</i> was at that time issued in
+New Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its
+production, "items" taken from European
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 103]</span>
+and American sources filling most of its columns. Hearn described it as
+a poor little sheet going no farther north than St. Louis.</p>
+
+<p>He was offered the assistant-editorship; the leisure that he found
+for literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the
+smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as
+he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more
+consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and
+weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing
+with strange characters, invaluable as literary material&mdash;Creoles,
+Spaniards, Mexicans&mdash;all that curious, heterogeneous society
+peculiar to New Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to
+place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so
+in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest
+pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous
+tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and
+throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and
+outcasts from the world of so-called respectability.</p>
+
+<p>At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same
+roof as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened
+windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious
+shrine. This was quite sufficient to associate his name with hers, and
+many were the unfounded rumours&mdash;Nemesis of the unfortunate episode
+with Althea Foley at Cincinnati&mdash;which floated northwards regarding
+the manner of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this
+time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and
+in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry
+of ancient
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and emotion, the
+illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of
+annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of
+occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the <i>Item</i> by weird
+and mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds,
+considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing
+attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own
+genius.</p>
+
+<p>The routine of his life at this time is given in letters written to
+his "old Dad" and his friend, Krehbiel.</p>
+
+<p>The same ascetic scorn for material comfort, heritage of his oriental
+ancestry, seems to have distinguished him at this period in New Orleans,
+as later in Japan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the
+office, "concocting devilment" for the <i>Item</i>, his Spanish lessons
+with Jos� de Jesus y Preciado, the "peripatetic blasphemy," as he named
+him afterwards, dinner at a Chinese restaurant for an infinitesimal sum,
+an hour or two spent at second-hand book-stalls, and home to bed. There
+is, I am told, an individual, Armand Hawkins by name, owner of an
+ancient book-store at New Orleans, still alive, who remembers the
+curious little genius, with his prominent eyes, wonderful knowledge on
+all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects recounted in a soft, musical voice,
+who used to come almost daily to visit his book-store. He it was who
+enabled Hearn to get together the library about which there has been so
+much discussion since his death. Next to his love of buying old books,
+Hearn's great indulgence seems to have been smoking, not cigars, but
+pipes of every make and description.</p>
+
+<p>The glimpses we get of him from his own letters and from
+reminiscences collected from various people in New Orleans all give the
+same impression. A Bohemian love of vagabondage, picking up impressions
+here and there, some of which were set down in pencil, some in ink; as
+far
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+as his eyesight would permit, many were the sketches made at this time.
+None of them have been preserved, except the very clever Mephistophelian
+one sent to Mr. Watkin and reproduced in the volume entitled "Letters
+from the Raven." "He was a gifted creature," says a lady who knew him at
+this time. "He came fluttering in and out of our house like a shy moth,
+and was adored by my children."</p>
+
+<p>He had no ambitions, no loves, no anxieties, sometimes a vague unrest
+without a motive, sometimes a feeling as if his heart were winged and
+trying to soar; sometimes a half-crazy passion for a great night with
+wine and women and music; but the wandering passion was strongest of
+all, and he felt no inclination to avail himself of the only anchor
+which keeps the ship of a man's life in port.... Nights were so liquid
+with tropic moonlight, days so splendid with green and gold, summer so
+languid with perfume and warmth, that he hardly knew whether he was
+dreaming or awake.</p>
+
+<p>In 1881, Hearn succeeded in becoming a member of the staff of the
+leading New Orleans paper, the <i>Times Democrat</i>, "the largest
+paper," he tells his sister, "in the Southern States." He now seemed to
+have entered on a halcyon period of life&mdash;congenial society,
+romantic and interesting surroundings. Penetrated with enthusiasm for
+the modern French literary school as he was, he here met intellects and
+temperaments akin to his own. Now he was enabled to get his translations
+from Gautier and Baudelaire printed, and read for the first time by an
+appreciative public. "Everybody was kind," he tells his sister; "I
+became well and strong, lived steadily, spent my salary on books. I was
+thus able to make up for my deficiencies of education.... I had only a
+few hours of work each day;&mdash;plenty of time to study. I wrote
+novels and other books which literary circles approved of."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+With Page Baker, the owner and editor-in-chief of the <i>Times
+Democrat</i>, he formed a salutary and enduring friendship. The very
+difference in character between the two seems to have made the bond all
+the more enduring. Page Baker was a man of great business capacity, and
+at the same time keen discrimination in literary affairs. From the first
+he conceived the highest opinion of Hearn's literary ability. However
+fantastic or out-of-the-way his contributions to the columns of the
+<i>Times Democrat</i>, they were always inserted without elision. Years
+afterwards, writing to him from Japan, Hearn declares, in answer to a
+panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his Japanese books, that the
+most delightful criticisms he ever had were Page Baker's own readings
+aloud of his vagaries in the "<i>T. D.</i>" office, after the proofs
+came down, just fresh from the composition room, with the wet, sharp,
+inky smell still on the paper. Baker, apparently, in 1893 sent him
+substantial help, and Hearn writes thanking him from the bottom of his
+much-scarified heart. Often amidst the cramped, austere conditions of
+his existence in Japan, he recalled these days of communion with
+congenial spirits at New Orleans, and work with his colleagues at the
+<i>Times Democrat</i> office. "Ghosts! After getting your letter last
+night I dreamed. Do you remember that splendid Creole who used to be
+your city editor&mdash;John&mdash;&mdash;?&mdash;is it not a sin that I
+have forgotten his name? He sat in a big chair in the old office, and
+told me wonderful things, which I could not recall on waking."</p>
+
+<p>In a letter dated July 7, 1882, Hearn tells Mr. Watkin that he had
+entered into an arrangement with Worthington, the publisher, for the
+issuing of his translation of Gautier's stories made at Cincinnati. It
+was to cost him one hundred and fifty dollars, but there was an
+understanding that this money was to be repaid by royalties on the sale
+of the book and any extra profits. He announced
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 107]</span>
+his intention of going North in a few months by way of Cincinnati, as he
+wished to see Worthington about his new publication. Though he was
+making, he said, the respectable wage of thirty dollars a week for five
+hours' work a day, he felt enervated by the climate, incapable of any
+long stretch of work, and thought change to a northern climate for a bit
+might stimulate his intellectual powers. He then touched on the changes
+that passing years had wrought in his outlook on life. "Less despondent,
+but less hopeful; wiser a little and more silent; less nervous, but less
+merry; ... not strictly economical, but coming to it steadily." His
+horizons were widening, the accomplishment of a fixed purpose in life
+was really the only pleasurable experience, and the grasp of a friendly
+hand the only real satisfaction of an existence that wisdom declared a
+delusion and a snare.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn at times indulged in exaggerated fits of economy, the one
+thought that animated him being the idea of freeing himself from the
+yoke of dependence on the whims of employers&mdash;from the harness of
+journalism. He made up his mind to keep house for himself, so hired a
+room in the northern end of the French quarter, and purchased a complete
+set of cooking utensils and kitchen ware. He succeeded in reducing his
+expenses to two dollars a week, and kept them at that (exclusive of
+rent), although his salary rose to thirty dollars a week. Having saved a
+respectable sum, he formed the fantastical idea of trying to keep a
+restaurant, run on the lines of the cheap Spanish and Chinese
+restaurants he had been wont to frequent. "Business&mdash;ye
+Antiquities"; hard, practical business! he told Krehbiel; honourable,
+respectable business, but devoid of dreamful illusions. "Alas, this is
+no world for dreaming."</p>
+
+<p>The venture ended as might have been expected. Hearn had not
+inherited the commercial instincts of his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+ancestors who sold oil and wine in the Ionian Islands; his partner
+robbed him of all the money he had invested, and decamped, leaving him
+saddled with the restaurant and a considerable number of debts. A
+swindling building society seems to have absorbed the rest of his
+savings.</p>
+
+<p>After these two catastrophes the little man became almost comically
+terrified at financial enterprise of any kind, even the investment of
+money in dividend-paying concerns. When Captain Mitchell McDonald later,
+in Japan, endeavoured to induce him to put his money into various
+lucrative concerns, Hearn declared that he would prefer to lose
+everything he owned than submit to the worry of investing it. The mere
+idea of business was "a horror, a nightmare, a torture unspeakable."</p>
+
+<p>Though apparently only journalising and translating, Hearn was piling
+up experiences and sensations, not making use of them except in letters,
+but laying down the concrete and setting the foundation for his work in
+the West Indies and Japan. "The days come and go like muffled and veiled
+figures sent from a friendly, distant party; but they say nothing, and
+if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away."
+Emerson did not take into account those apparently infertile periods in
+an artist's life, when the days come and go, but though they pass
+silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their passage
+unproductive. How invaluable, for instance, was Hearn's study of Creole
+proverbs for his "Two Years in the French West Indies." How invaluable
+for his interpretation of the Orient were the studies he undertook for
+"Strange Leaves from Strange Literature," and his six small adaptations
+entitled "Chinese Ghosts."</p>
+
+<p>After several refusals "Stray Leaves" was accepted for publication by
+Osgood. He thus announced the fact to his friend Krehbiel:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+"<span class="smcap">Dear K</span>. (Private),</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"'Stray Leaves,' etc., have been accepted by James
+R. Osgood and Co. Congratulate your little Dreamer of Monstrous
+Dreams,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"Aschadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah,</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">"Bismillah,</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; ">"Allah-hu-akbar."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The book was dedicated to "Page M. Baker, Editor of the New Orleans
+<i>Times Democrat</i>."</p>
+
+<p>This series of small sketches is typical of the clarity of language
+and purity of thought that invariably distinguish Hearn's work; but it
+lacks the realism, the keenness of <i>choses vues</i>, so characteristic
+of his Japanese sketches. There is none of the haunting, moving tragedy
+and ghostliness, the spiritual imagination and introspection of "Kokoro"
+or the "Exotics." Though polished and scholarly, showing refinement in
+the use of words, the interest is remote and visionary, permeated here
+and there also with a certain amount of Celtic sentimentality, a "Tommy
+Moore" flavour, somewhat too saccharine in quality. The one, for
+instance, called "Boutimar" treats of a very hackneyed subject, the
+offering of the water of youth, and life without end, to Solomon, and
+the sage's refusal, because of the remembrance suggested by Boutimar
+that he would outlive children, friends and all whom he loved; therefore
+"Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the
+cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder
+of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,&mdash;the
+diamond dew of the heart, which is tears."</p>
+
+<p>"Chinese Ghosts," though distinguished also by that <i>soigneux</i>
+flavour that gives a slightly artificial impression, holds far more the
+distinctive flavour of Hearn's genius. His own soul is written into the
+legend of "Pu the potter."
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+"Convinced that a soul cannot be divided, Pu entered the flame, and
+yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving
+his life for the life of his work,&mdash;his soul for the soul of his Vase."</p>
+
+<p>By the publication of the "Letters from the Raven" we are enabled to
+push those to Krehbiel, published by Miss Bisland, into place, and
+assign fairly accurate dates to each of them. He tells Mr. Watkin that
+he was six months before finding a fixed residence. In August, 1878, he
+writes inviting him to come in the autumn to pay him a visit, and
+telling him of delightful rooms with five large windows opening on
+piazzas, shaded by banana-trees. This apparently is the house in St.
+Louis Street, which he describes to Krehbiel. Miss Bisland places it
+almost at the beginning of the series, but it must have been written at
+a considerably later period. How picturesque and vivid is his
+description! With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway,
+with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their
+dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a hoary
+dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball,"
+with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and
+rising to the ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said
+to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom
+the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with
+only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his
+genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw,
+but an immaterial and spiritual world as well.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<h3>LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Writing to you as a friend, I write of my
+thoughts and fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties
+and follies and failures and successes,&mdash;even as I would write to a
+brother. So that sometimes what might not seem strange in words, appears
+very strange upon paper."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lafcadio Hearn's</span> thoughts, aspirations and
+mode of life are revealed with almost daily minuteness during this
+period at New Orleans&mdash;indeed, for the rest of his life, by his
+interchange of letters with various friends. Those contained in the
+three volumes published by Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) are now
+indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the many series from
+eminent people that have been given to the world during the last
+half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of publicity
+actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine that nothing
+would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which his letters
+have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the outcome of
+an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and versatile
+brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to pour, as
+it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and sympathetic friend
+the confessions of his own intellectual struggles, his doubts and
+despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily intercourse by a
+sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and a sheet of paper
+in front of him, he cast off all disquieting considerations and allowed
+the spiritual structure of emotion and thought to show itself in the
+nakedness of its humanity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg
+112]</a></span> To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task.
+"Ask a carpenter to plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from
+Gautier; but to him it was a relaxation from his daily task of
+journalism and literary work. Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his
+house at Philadelphia, Hearn would sometimes break off suddenly in the
+midst of a discussion, especially if he were afraid of losing his
+temper, and retire to his own room, where he would fill sheets of the
+yellow paper, which he habitually used, with theories and reasons for
+and against his argument; these he would leave later on Gould's study
+table.</p>
+
+<p>To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were
+face to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the
+intellect. In his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate
+feelings and sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by
+hour. Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his
+nature, inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of
+being egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying
+an odd specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed
+amongst an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have
+created a necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of
+thought; his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his
+perturbations of spirit&mdash;perturbations that he dared not confide to
+those surrounding him&mdash;a record of illusion and disillusion with
+regard to his adopted country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above
+all, have the charm of temperament, the very essence of the man,
+recorded in a style of remarkable picturesqueness and reality.</p>
+
+<p>The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given
+possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely
+different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am
+not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual
+petulant,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of relations in
+a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the world.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore,
+been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely
+interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto
+shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories,
+incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and
+people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to
+outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his
+half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and
+intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and
+unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the
+charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you
+would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering
+friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all,
+in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private
+inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his
+undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a
+Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are
+addressed.</p>
+
+<p>It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life
+that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him
+and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled
+the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual
+struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to
+Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque
+silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western
+city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom
+hopes....
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to
+observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher
+and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the
+East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever cometh.'"</p>
+
+<p>He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests
+and ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on
+the Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles,
+publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist,
+he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of
+the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss
+Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her
+magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was
+not a particle of literary jealousy in his composition.</p>
+
+<p>To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear
+old fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain
+qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an
+Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical.
+You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and
+labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I
+cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the
+thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even
+think."</p>
+
+<p>Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art.
+Comically averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell
+McDonald not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to
+express an opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a
+record
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 115]</span>
+of the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the
+thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can
+see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others
+would reach the same standard.</p>
+
+<p>In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to
+Professor Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of
+the most finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy
+of his boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw
+College.</p>
+
+<p>He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his
+advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that
+give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in
+prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he
+says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one
+side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be
+sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a
+medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by
+Lafcadio Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of
+showing no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The
+little man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make
+his a trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs.
+The mood or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him
+often to commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the
+foot of the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he
+did not see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being
+an extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and
+unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic
+theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though
+you were passing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape. You never know what
+will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round the next bend of
+the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical passage, he declares
+that his mind to him "a kingdom was&mdash;not!" Rather was it a
+fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever
+occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his possession
+of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude, others in
+the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others dwelling
+in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage the very
+essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries, freakishness
+and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen.</p>
+
+<p>Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him
+hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance
+and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of
+people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other
+day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan
+unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there
+came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and
+sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty,
+all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that
+voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back,
+and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."
+<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14">
+</a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that
+he could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having
+learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson,
+Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating
+the criticism of the moment. While he was writing
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 117]</span>
+the sketch at Kumamoto entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him
+a volume of Watson's poems&mdash;"The Dream of Man" he declared to be
+"high sublimity," because Watson happened to enunciate philosophical
+ideas akin to his own. Dobson had translated some poems of Gautier's,
+and therefore was worthy of all honour; Miss Deland was "one of the
+greatest novelists of the century," because the heroine of "Philip and
+His Wife" reminded him of Miss Bisland. He pronounced Matthew Arnold to
+be "one of the colossal humbugs of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and
+an unutterably dreary essayist," because at the moment he was animated
+by one of his intense enthusiasms for <i>Edwin</i> Arnold, whose
+acquaintance Hearn had made during one of Arnold's visits to Japan. "Far
+the nobler man and writer, permeated with the beauties of strong faiths
+and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in some happier era, may bless
+mankind with the universal religion in perfect harmony with the truths
+of science, and the better nature of humanity."</p>
+
+<p>But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique
+or partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpassed, here and there
+expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when
+passing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like
+a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises
+suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of
+phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside
+the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are
+shimmering, a mass of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the
+dullest subjects&mdash;writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the
+subject of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain
+force, he suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and
+Shintoism. "There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and
+race feeling.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a Polish
+brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells the
+story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still under
+the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least
+murmur,&mdash;'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands
+fell, but the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At
+last, old Steinmetz gave a signal&mdash;<i>the</i> signal. The bugles
+rang out with the force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air
+forbidden ever to be sung or heard at other times&mdash;the national air
+(you know it)&mdash;<i>'No! Poland is not dead!'</i> And with that crash
+of brass all that lives of the brigade was hurled at the French
+batteries. Mechanical power, if absolutely irresistible, might fling
+back such a charge, but no human power. For old Steinmetz had made the
+mightiest appeal to those 'Polish brutes' that man, God, or devil could
+make, the appeal to the ghost of the Race. The dead heard it; and they
+came back that day,&mdash;the dead of a thousand years."</p>
+
+<p>Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of
+"Auld Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain
+on some everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas,
+connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely
+recounted:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me
+years ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you <i>must</i> go.' (I had
+been surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had
+vowed not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim
+pressure, a stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of
+toilet-perfumes. Then came an awful hush; all the silks stopped
+whispering. And there suddenly sweetened out through that dead, hot air
+a clear, cool, tense thread-gush of melody
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 119]</span>
+unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in tropical nights, from
+the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang Syne,' only, but with
+never a <i>tremolo</i> or artifice; a marvellous, audacious simplicity
+of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in my heart still."</p>
+
+<p>Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities,
+there were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving
+allegiance. Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were
+foremost among these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and
+his treatment of Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysanth�me," Hearn
+retained the same admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine
+Loti's 'Roman d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lema�tre or
+Anatole France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope
+you will have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I
+might die, one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to
+read 'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn had a wonderful memory&mdash;he could repeat pages of poetry
+even of the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason
+told us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an
+argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's
+criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement,
+repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his
+soft musical voice.</p>
+
+<p>A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the
+subject of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at
+first sat apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused
+him; the insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and
+poured forth a flood of information on the subject under discussion so
+fluent, so accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the
+biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the
+world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little
+boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in
+Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the
+Japanese kimono.</p>
+
+<p>At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of
+promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he
+was a much more responsible and important person than the little
+"brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office,
+turning out page after page of "copy" for the <i>Cincinnati
+Enquirer</i>, or doing the "night stations" for the <i>Commercial</i>.
+In later years, in consequence of his sedentary habits, he became
+corpulent and of stooping gait; at this time he was about five feet
+three inches in height, his complexion clear olive, his hair straight
+and black, his salient features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and
+prominent near-sighted eyes, the left one, injured at Ushaw,
+considerably more prominent than the other. In his sensitive, morbid
+fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the disfiguring effect this had on
+his personal appearance. When engaged in conversation, he habitually
+held his hand over it, and was always photographed in profile looking
+down.</p>
+
+<p>In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and
+well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited
+the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the
+musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo
+University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and
+white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made
+his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal
+manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before
+the Japan
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 121]</span>
+Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I first met
+Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to begin
+with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice;
+seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much,
+and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind
+ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but
+nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be
+surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and
+whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected,
+companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was
+extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a
+physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his
+tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with
+velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and
+gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and
+you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly,
+he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He
+appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I
+found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in
+Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion,
+tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious.
+Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a
+foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in
+appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our
+acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any
+better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things,
+deliberately protesting against social restrictions in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+his personal attire. Shy, diffident people, who above all things wish to
+avoid attracting attention, seem so often to forget that if they would
+only garb themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best
+disguise they could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in
+the streets of Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street
+gamins formed a queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they
+kept in step, singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any
+effect, Gould tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional
+headgear for the enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and
+flannel shirt, that he habitually wore.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a
+starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as
+a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't
+wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do.
+"Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an
+article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts!
+Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in
+itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It
+represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious
+class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons
+sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is
+unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing
+winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His
+wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject
+of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his
+Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have
+nothing that was not of the best make and quality.</p>
+
+<p>In later years he was described by an acquaintance in
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 123]</span>
+Japan as an odd, nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft,
+well-modulated voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly
+dainty and clean in his person, and of considerable personal influence
+and charm when you came in contact with him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<h3>THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"The lady wore her souls as other women wear
+their dresses and change them several times a day; and the multitude of
+dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to the
+multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she was of the
+South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was of the North, and her
+eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of the thirteenth, and sometimes of
+the eighteenth century; and people doubted their own senses when they
+saw these things ... and the men who most admired her could not presume
+to fall in love with her because that would have been absurd. She had
+altogether too many souls."</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> year 1882 was a memorable one for
+Lafcadio Hearn; during the course of that winter the purest and most
+beneficent feminine influence that he had hitherto known entered his
+life, an influence destined to last for close on a quarter of a century,
+from these New Orleans days until the month of September, 1904, when he
+died.</p>
+
+<p>In all the annals of literary friendships between men and women, it
+is difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory
+than this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange
+little Irish genius.</p>
+
+<p>Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more
+tender, none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and
+friendship, as told in his letters.</p>
+
+<p>The affection between Jean Jacques Amp�re and Madame R�camier is the
+one that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position
+is reversed. Madame R�camier was a decade older than her admirer;
+Elizabeth Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+to have been something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this
+"veritable blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her
+pity, shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the
+balm of affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises
+given him in the tussle of life.</p>
+
+<p>Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished
+for Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his
+life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the
+unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable
+thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was
+disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his
+side.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik
+from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore,
+"whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well
+for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement."</p>
+
+<p>Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better
+self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed
+conviction that her love&mdash;as love is understood in common
+parlance&mdash;could never be his.</p>
+
+<p>And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and
+rare in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of
+mere friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared
+not; she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst
+whom her lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against
+him, was offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where
+she, as a neophyte, also worshipped.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner,
+ruined, like many others, in the war. With
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+the idea of aiding her family by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl
+quitted the seclusion of her parents' house in the country and bravely
+entered the arena of journalistic work in New Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the <i>Times
+Democrat</i>. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and
+the beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an
+appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed
+of what were known as "Hearn's admirers."</p>
+
+<p>His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange
+Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He
+also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then
+slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called
+them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them
+all&mdash;love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing
+a thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the
+pleasant fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon
+pellets of green hashisch.</p>
+
+<p>One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"My heart would hear her and beat</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Had I lain for a century dead;&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Would start and tremble under her feet,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">And blossom in purple and red."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the <i>Times
+Democrat</i>. There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her
+seventeen years, wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance
+the "Fantastic" was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to
+Mitchell McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to
+the expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor
+Inexpressible,' which you
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 127]</span>
+did not like. I send you a copy of the story in which I first used
+it&mdash;years and years ago. Don't return the thing&mdash;it has had
+its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush."</p>
+
+<p>Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not
+return the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A
+Dead Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude
+enough to deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush,"
+and is distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the
+French Impressionist school.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for
+the unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even
+of continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that
+permeate every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories
+translated by Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.</p>
+
+<p>A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love,
+yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his
+lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb
+the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the
+litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that
+which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor
+Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of
+music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and
+the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And
+at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by
+his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient
+place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle
+of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she,
+unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away
+forever.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 128]</span>
+going through a period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New
+Orleans. The problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with
+eyes of iron. Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for
+a man who preserved freedom of thought and action&mdash;absolute quiet,
+silence, dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy,
+was his idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could
+not obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried
+himself in the mediocrity to which she belonged.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth
+Bisland had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the
+strange old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous
+illness, and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel
+where she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl
+as a grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a
+thought, <i>une jeune fille un peu farouche</i> (no English word could
+give the same sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans
+from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so
+kind to a particular variety of savage, that he could not
+understand&mdash;and was afraid." But all this was long ago, he
+concludes regretfully; "since then I have become grey and the father of
+three boys."</p>
+
+<p>For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's
+friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position
+of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to
+induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social
+unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this
+young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic
+beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems,
+he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby,
+has travelled
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are
+charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres fran�aises' (as
+Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a
+nicer copy...."</p>
+
+<p>Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her,
+mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her
+voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The
+gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom
+in the room&mdash;but in the future, which was black without stars!"</p>
+
+<p>In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf,
+for his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at
+the same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible
+nature of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the
+copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the
+Tertiary epoch&mdash;three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the
+most ancient branch of humanity."</p>
+
+<p>It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was
+written and contributed to <i>Harper's Magazine</i> under the title of
+"Torn Letters."</p>
+
+<p>We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New
+York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she
+taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of
+circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and
+subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as
+you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to
+chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the
+memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best
+inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his
+genius and quickened his pen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg130]</a></span>
+I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when
+she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I
+looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in
+lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or <i>Karma</i>
+(as he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that
+hers was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio
+Hearn&mdash;the Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade
+never dressed for dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.</p>
+
+<p>In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the
+<i>Cosmopolitan</i>, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent
+correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.</p>
+
+<p>She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't
+think I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it
+is a pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much
+better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own
+personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does
+a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?</p>
+
+<p>"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number
+anyhow, but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that
+seems at this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With
+the nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out
+of existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary,
+evolved simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The
+secret of the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the
+old Greek romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few
+laconic sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no
+explanation&mdash;nothing but the feeling itself at highest intensity."
+As is so often the case, this opinion expressed
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+in a letter is a running commentary on the work he was doing at the
+moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever attempted, had
+appeared serially in <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, and he was occupied in
+reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at highest
+intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches, the
+indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details, that
+render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and
+accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the
+descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being
+fragmentary and unfinished.</p>
+
+<p>After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of
+literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly,
+writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing
+her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a formality&mdash;and you are you; and you are not a
+formality&mdash;but a somewhat&mdash;and I am only I."
+<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15">
+</a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland
+ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional
+life.</p>
+
+<p>During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies
+for his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two
+delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he
+was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to
+him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years.</p>
+
+<p>The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and
+pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a
+word:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 132]</span> "Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed
+solid was breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very
+foolish&mdash;made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my
+letter was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't
+think it is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses
+of the Unknown for Art's sake,&mdash;or rather, you <i>must</i> obey
+them. The Spahi's fascination by the invisible forces was purely
+physical. I think I am right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of
+making the tropics a home. Probably it will be the same thing over
+again: impulse and chance compelling another change.</p>
+
+<p>"The carriage&mdash;no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or
+sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East
+River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I
+shan't put anybody's name to it."
+<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a>
+"The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit
+to George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to
+call at the office of the <i>Cosmopolitan Magazine</i>. On her arrival
+at eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New
+York for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey
+round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in
+competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss
+Bisland consented.</p>
+
+<p>After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she
+published her experiences in the <i>Cosmopolitan Magazine</i>. These
+contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are
+charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+as the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period.</p>
+
+<p>Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her
+that he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in
+front of a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere
+hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to
+return. He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were
+never audible in dreams.</p>
+
+<p>In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and
+not I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you
+in the <i>Tribune</i> there suddenly came back to me the same vague
+sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,&mdash;an absurd sense of
+absolute loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you
+hoping for you to win your race&mdash;so that every one may admire you
+still more, and your name flash round the world quicker than the
+sunshine, and your portrait&mdash;in spite of you&mdash;appear in some
+French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I
+thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you are never the
+same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled; it would
+only be one small phase of you, Proteus, Circe, Undine,
+Djineeyeh!..."</p>
+
+<p>I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there
+are any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or
+three of the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters.
+It seems almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to
+endeavour to give the substance of these fanciful and exquisite
+outpourings in any words but his own. Again and again he recurs to his
+favourite idea of the multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one
+or other of the "dead within her" floats up from the depth within,
+transfiguring her face.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+you&mdash;all the Me's that were&mdash;keep asking the Me that is, for
+something always refused;&mdash;and that you keep saying to them: 'But
+you are dead and cannot see&mdash;you can only feel; and I can
+see,&mdash;and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed.
+You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant
+your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait, and leave me in peace
+with myself.' But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into
+momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,&mdash;and
+as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come&mdash;and stay: the
+one I saw that night when we were looking at ... what was it?</p>
+
+<p>"Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory
+of it,&mdash;just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly
+exposed.... Will you ever be <i>like that always</i> for any one
+being?&mdash;I hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent
+on Tuesday at latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the
+paper; but you will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to
+me between the leaves."</p>
+
+<p>Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around
+the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of
+his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and
+then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and
+she married Mr. Wetmore.</p>
+
+<p>Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between
+the time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his
+professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the
+simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he
+think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the
+<i>jeune fille un peu farouche</i>, who in distant New Orleans days had
+understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's
+unsophisticated enthusiasm. She
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+had written to him, and he gives her a whimsically pathetic answer,
+touching on memories, on thoughts, on aspirations, which had been a
+closed book for so long a period of time, and now, when re-opened, was
+seen to be printed as clearly on mind and heart as if he had parted with
+her but an hour before.</p>
+
+<p>About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September,
+1904&mdash;the month in which he died&mdash;comes his last. He tells her
+that to see her handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was
+a great pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was
+undeserved. He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese
+Miscellany" which he had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its
+way, and perhaps you will later on find no reason to be sorry for your
+good opinions of the writer. I presume that you are far too clever to
+believe more than truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a
+few estimable people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...."</p>
+
+<p>He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing
+to her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear
+in book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on
+sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects
+and flowers, and queer small things&mdash;and leave the subject of the
+destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains
+will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the
+book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will
+recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof.</p>
+
+<p>"May all good things ever come to you, and abide."</p>
+
+<p>It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years,
+that he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any
+affection or sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may
+read," is this record of a devotion
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a century, lasting intact
+through fair years and foul, through absence, change of scene, even of
+nationality.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Fear not, I say again; believe it true</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">That not as men mete shall I measure you...."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for
+the estimation of human character and genius.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<h3>RELIGION AND SCIENCE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor
+yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man.
+Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a
+ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is
+potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in
+Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the
+world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice
+brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly
+doubt&mdash;remembering the myriads of the centuries of man&mdash;that
+even now there does not remain one place on earth where life
+has not been freely given for love or duty?"</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">
+Though</span> some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite
+marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of
+operations where effective work and fame awaited him.</p>
+
+<p>"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin.
+"Splendid field in Japan&mdash;a climate just like England&mdash;perhaps a little
+milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I
+have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor
+I may do well in Japan."</p>
+
+<p>When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the
+publishers&mdash;who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an
+artist of their staff&mdash;now made an arrangement with him, by which he was
+to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied
+from photographs, of the principal exhibits.</p>
+
+<p>On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in <i>Harper's Weekly</i>. In
+it he describes the fans, the <i>kakemonos</i>,
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 138]</span>
+the screens in the Japanese department. Long lines of cranes flying
+against a vermilion sky, a flight of gulls sweeping through the golden
+light of a summer morning; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats
+under the moon; the fairy hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies;
+the modelling and painting of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises,
+crabs, storks, frogs, not mere copies of nature, but exquisite
+idealisations stirred his artistic sense as did also the representations
+of the matchless mountain Fuji-no-yama&mdash;of which the artist, Hokusai,
+alone drew one hundred different views, on fans, behind rains of gold,
+athwart a furnace of sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by
+some wizard dawn, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense
+smoke, towering above stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains,
+or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like
+some beauty of Yoshiwara.</p>
+
+<p>It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy
+world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of
+clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty
+day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he
+ascended Fuji-no-yama.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young
+Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at
+West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He
+was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn
+frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy
+was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last
+century.</p>
+
+<p>One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First
+Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately
+accepted all the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that day began what
+only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the colourless analytic
+English philosopher that lasted till his death.</p>
+
+<p>The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest
+mind that this world has yet produced&mdash;the mind that systematised all
+human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated
+materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity,
+and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history
+of a sun."</p>
+
+<p>Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at
+various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness
+of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss
+the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with
+the offending individual.</p>
+
+<p>"A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
+rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a
+cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of
+tingling shock,&mdash;a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The
+pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things
+visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity&mdash;all sensed
+existences&mdash;are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one
+infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...."</p>
+
+<p>This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first
+volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had
+taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like
+that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in
+darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of
+things&mdash;a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,&mdash;and from
+that time the world never
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+again appeared to him quite the same as it had appeared before.</p>
+
+<p>It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and
+philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in
+London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to
+have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the
+present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new
+survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of
+thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been
+proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher
+demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature.
+Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of
+Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific
+philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in
+his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral
+consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage
+of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately,
+moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than
+we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and
+faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put
+forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural
+selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it,
+"Equilibration,"&mdash;a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from
+which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were
+eliminated.</p>
+
+<p>These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring
+that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or
+pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as
+efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+<p>In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and
+Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on
+Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man
+towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was
+concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and
+science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the
+learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us
+there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
+re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
+said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy&mdash;'the rest is silence!'"</p>
+
+<p>It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn,
+in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid
+most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had
+read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is
+disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of
+words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own
+wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only
+to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific
+facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.</p>
+
+<p>Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental
+religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical
+theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean
+only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great
+Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty."
+The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.</p>
+
+<p>Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to
+imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and
+self-effacement would exercise over a mind
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+such as his. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the
+great Dai Batsu with its picturesque surroundings in the garden at
+Kamakura, he was carried away by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that
+it embodied.</p>
+
+<p>It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he
+emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he
+subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.</p>
+
+<p>Invariably the best critic of his own nature&mdash;"Truly we have no
+permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The
+opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods&mdash;at compound
+interest!"</p>
+
+<p>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 grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a
+pantheist.</p>
+
+<p>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 Mass 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 Mass,
+interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+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 Shintoism 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 worship 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, asserting that the worship of natural objects&mdash;not
+spirit or ancestor worship&mdash;was the beginning of the religious sentiment
+in man.</p>
+
+<p>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 worship, the influence of spirits or
+ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same
+idea. "The real religion of Japan," 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 worship.' 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."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Robert Young, editor of the <i>Japan Chronicle</i>, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+Mr. W. B. Mason, who both of them have lived in Japan for many years,
+keen observers of Japanese 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
+worship.</p>
+
+<p>The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their
+heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all
+their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but
+practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every
+direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of
+modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every
+means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness&mdash;arguing by analogy, it is
+not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at
+every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn
+describes for "millions long buried"&mdash;for "the nameless dead."</p>
+
+<p>Nature worship, the worship 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 Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their
+"ancestral spirits."</p>
+
+<p>In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form
+to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most
+ancient Japanese 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 Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems
+for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in
+pre-existence,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+the continuity of mind connected again with the scientific theory of
+evolution.</p>
+
+<p>"He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at
+the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,&mdash;Buddhism
+in particular,&mdash;which history has engrafted on the �sthetic heart of
+Japan, 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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori,
+where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought&mdash;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 Japanese embroidery, they will show you
+that these traceries are fine Japanese 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,"<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17">
+</a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a>
+"In Ghostly Japan," Little, Brown &amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p>
+<p>Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as
+they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull
+crashings.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth
+that was not stone&mdash;and lifted it&mdash;and was startled by the cheekless
+gibe of death.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his sketches, entitled, "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.</p>
+
+<p>"The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the
+emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,&mdash;that the
+mystery was of other existences than mine."
+<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18">
+</a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a>
+"Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown &amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;created by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+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 passed, and in the dark the sadness only
+lingered&mdash;unutterable&mdash;profound.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<h3>WEST INDIES</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden
+leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred
+peaks,&mdash;over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes
+from the hills&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;when all the heavens seem filled with
+vapours of a molten sun!"</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">
+In</span> 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,&mdash;the Pantheist Nature,&mdash;the philosopher, the
+Unknowable."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the <i>Tribune</i> 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 <i>milieu</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+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;&mdash;just a nervous condition that renders effort
+unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,&mdash;to
+see no one except you and Joe."</p>
+
+<p>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 space of ten years,
+subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the
+passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters
+transmitted across thousands of miles.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that
+Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;no musician from a technical point of view&mdash;frankly
+declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's
+sonata or an opera by Wagner.</p>
+
+<p>Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "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
+<i>glissando</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the
+<i>Cosmopolitan Magazine</i>. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see
+her. "Nobody 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+not to see you&mdash;but since you live in Hell what can I do?" This is his
+outburst to Tunison.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Barracouta</i>
+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 <i>Harper's Monthly</i>. It was afterwards incorporated in his
+larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 snobs; 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 <i>Elixir Vit�</i>."<a name="FNanchor_19_19"
+id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a>
+Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
+Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+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 friendship, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Barracouta</i>, 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 Japanese 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it
+is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>feel</i>, rather than
+hear behind you,&mdash;surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body,
+dumb oscillations of raiment,&mdash;and ere you can turn to look, the haunter
+swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."</p>
+
+<p>"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">"A mon cher ami,</p>
+
+<p class="center">"L�OPOLD ARNOUX</p>
+
+<p class="center">"Notaire � Saint Pierre, Martinique.</p>
+
+<p>"Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des
+sympathies �chang�es, de tout le charme d'une amiti� inalt�rable et
+inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle � l'�me au doux Pays des Revenants."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly
+after the great eruption of Mt. Pel�e 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 destitution, obliged to make a translation of Anatole
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 156]</span>
+France's "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" to keep bread in his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"So you read my translation of 'Sylvestre Bonnard?'" he says to his
+sister, writing from Japan. "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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a>
+"Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 157]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 entitled "Karma,"
+published in <i>Lippincott's Magazine</i> after Hearn had left for Japan,
+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 sex, while
+absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect nature inspires a love that
+is fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman
+inspires a love that is half compassion; this is always dangerous,
+untrustworthy, delusive."</p>
+
+<p>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 Japan from New
+Orleans days, this seems an unlikely statement; but of all unprofitable
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>A passage 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...."</p>
+
+<p>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, shivering with cold, and longing for the
+tropics.</p>
+
+<p>Lights are thrown upon his emotional and intellectual life in letters
+written in the autumn to Dr. Gould from New York.</p>
+
+<p>Japan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival
+Lowell, entitled "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 Japan was aroused, he followed her progress with
+the deepest interest. The Japanese constitution 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,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+what was more important to commercial America, her trade had enormously
+developed under the new r�gime.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+institutions, 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<h3>JAPAN</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>" ... Yes&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Wetmore</span>
+is inaccurate in stating that Lafcadio Hearn started for
+Japan 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,
+entitled "A Winter Journey to Japan," contributed to <i>Harper's</i>,
+describes a journey made in the depth of winter.</p>
+
+<p>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
+passengers.... A pale-blue sky arched cloudlessly overhead; and grey
+Montreal lay angled very sharply in the keen air over the
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 161]</span>
+frozen miles of the St. Lawrence; sleighs were moving,&mdash;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...."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's account of his journey through wastes of snow, up mountain
+sides, through long chasms, passing 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 illustrations. So
+irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's illustrations
+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
+Japan.</p>
+
+<p>The seventeen days that he passed 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
+passengers, playing the game of "fan-tan" by the light of three candles
+at a low table covered with a bamboo mat.</p>
+
+<p>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 ship, and smoking or dreaming their time away in just such berths, and
+playing the
+same
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+strange play by such a yellow light, in even just such an
+atmosphere, heavy with vaporised opium.</p>
+
+<p>"Meanwhile, something has dropped out of the lives of some of us, as
+lives are reckoned by Occidental time,&mdash;a day. A day that will never
+come back again, unless we return by this same route,&mdash;over this same
+iron-grey waste, in the midst of which our lost day will wait for
+us,&mdash;perhaps in vain."</p>
+
+<p>Not from the stormy waters of the Pacific, however, not from gleaming
+Canadian pinnacles, or virgin forests, or dim ca�ons, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Henry Watkin appears to have been the first person to whom Hearn
+wrote from Japan. 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 passed 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 Japan and the Japanese.... He
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+loved their gods, their customs, their dress, their bird-like, quavering
+songs, their houses, their superstitions, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Most travellers when first visiting Japan 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 Japanese
+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 Japan," 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+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?"</p>
+
+<p>A storm soon passed 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?"...</p>
+
+<p>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 illustrations
+of the articles sent to the magazine, instead of the illustrations being
+done for Hearn's letterpress. Besides which, the fact transpired that
+the artist was receiving double Hearn's salary.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+conducting affairs with him, when he threw up his Japanese 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
+Japan, 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
+competition, must fail. Uncontrolled emotional feeling was the rock on
+which he split, at this and many other critical moments in his career.</p>
+
+<p>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
+Japanese." On his arrival, Hearn thought of obtaining a position as
+teacher in a Japanese 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 Japan, without
+passing several years exclusively amongst the Japanese people.</p>
+
+<p>Chamberlain, however, saw at once that Hearn's capacities were far
+superior to those necessary for a private tutorship. Having been so long
+resident in Japan, and written so much upon the country, as well as
+occupying a professorship in Tokyo Imperial University, his influence in
+Japanese 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 166]</span></p>
+<p>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 Japan.</p>
+
+<p>On several occasions Professor Chamberlain held out the kindly hand of
+comradeship to Lafcadio; to him Hearn owed his subsequent appointment at
+the Tokyo University.</p>
+
+<p>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 Mitchell McDonald, Lafcadio dedicated his "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan."</p>
+
+<p class="smcenter">to the friends</p>
+<p class="smcenter">whose kindness alone rendered possible</p>
+<p class="smcenter">my sojourn in the orient</p>
+<p class="center">PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N.</p>
+<p class="smcenter">and</p>
+<p class="center">BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ.</p>
+<p class="smcenter">emeritus professor of philology and</p>
+<p class="smcenter">japanese in the imperial university</p>
+<p class="smcenter">of tokyo</p>
+<p class="smcenter">i dedicate these volumes</p>
+<p class="smcenter">in token of</p>
+<p class="smcenter">affection and gratitude</p>
+
+<p>Then came a sudden break.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+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 friendship. They
+had been in correspondence on the subject of the connection of the
+tenets of Buddhism and scientific expositions of evolutionary science in
+England.</p>
+
+<p>"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....</p>
+
+<p>"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....
+I cannot help fearing that what you mean by 'justice and temperateness'
+means that you want me to write as if I were you, or at least to measure
+sentence or thought by your standard.... If I write well of a thing one
+day, and badly another, I expect my friend to discern that both
+impressions are true, and solve the contradiction&mdash;that is, if my
+letters are really wanted."</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that, if Hearn took up a philosophic or scientific opinion,
+he was determined to make all with whom he held converse share them, and
+if they did not do so at once, like the despotic oriental monarch, he
+would overturn the chessboard.</p>
+
+<p>"The rigid character of his philosophical opinions," says Chamberlain,
+"made him perforce despise as intellectual weaklings all those who did
+not share them, or shared them in a lukewarm manner, and his
+disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to
+find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable."</p>
+
+<p>It was principally during the last fourteen years of his life that Hearn
+acquired the unenviable name of being ungrateful, inconstant, and
+capricious. To those friends made in his youthful days of struggle and
+adversity he remained
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+constant, but with the exception of Mitchell McDonald, Nishida Sentaro,
+and Amenomori, it is the same story of perversity and estrangement.</p>
+
+<p>An unceremonious entry into his house, without deference to ancient
+Japanese etiquette, which enjoined the taking off of boots and the
+putting on of sandals, a sneer at Shinto ancestor worship, a difference
+of opinion on Herbert Spencer, and Hearn would disappear actually and
+metaphorically. This proves his want of heart, you say. But a careful
+study of Hearn's "Wesen" will show that his apparent inconstancy did not
+arise from a change of affection, but because his very affection for the
+people he had turned from made the taut strands of friendship more
+difficult to reunite, especially for a person of his shy temperament.
+Which of us has not recognised the greater difficulty of making up a
+"tiff" with a friend for whom one cares deeply than with a person to
+whom one is indifferent? The tougher the stuff the more ravelled the
+edges of the tear, and the more difficult to join together.</p>
+
+<p>At Kobe, an incident was related to us by Mr. Young, his chief on the
+<i>Kobe Chronicle</i> and a person to whom Hearn owed much and was attached
+by many ties of gratitude and friendship. A guest at dinner ventured to
+dissent from Hearn's opinion that the reverential manner in which people
+prostrated themselves before the mikado was in no way connected with
+religious principles. Hearn shrugged his shoulders, rose, walked away
+from the table, and nothing would induce him to return. He did not,
+indeed, enter Mr. Young's house again for some days, though doing his
+work at the office for the newspaper as usual.</p>
+
+<p>When Hearn left Tokyo to take up his appointment at Matsue, he was
+accompanied by his friend Akira, a young student and priest, who spoke
+English and could, therefore, act as interpreter. At Kobe they left the
+railway and continued their journey in jinrikishas, a journey of four
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+days with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan.</p>
+
+<p>"Out of the city and over the hills to Izumo, the Land of the Ancient
+Gods!" The incantation is spoken, we find ourselves in the region of
+Horai&mdash;the fairyland of Japan&mdash;with its arch of liquid blue sky,
+lukewarm, windless atmosphere, an atmosphere enormously old, but of
+ghostly generations of souls blended into one immense translucency,
+souls of people who thought in ways never resembling occidental ways.</p>
+
+<p>Writing later to Chamberlain, Hearn acknowledged that what delighted him
+those first days in Japan was the charm of nature in human nature, and
+in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness,
+politeness ... for in Japan even hate works with smiles and pretty
+words.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time Hearn was not merely describing a sensuous world of
+sights and sounds, but a world of soft domesticity, where thatched
+villages nestled in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist
+temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above a congregation of
+thatched homesteads. Can anything be more delightful than his
+description of one of the village inns, with its high-peaked roof of
+thatch, and green-mossed eaves, like a coloured print out of Hiroshige's
+picture-books, with its polished stairway and balconies, reflecting like
+mirrored surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms
+fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid
+down. The old gold-flowered lacquer ware, the diaphanous porcelain
+wine-cups, the teacup holders, which are curled lotus leaves of bronze;
+even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the
+brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions; distant as it
+was from all art-centres, there was no object visible in the house which
+did not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+and form. "Indeed, wherever to-day in Japan one sees anything
+uninteresting in porcelain or metal, something commonplace and ugly, one
+may be almost sure that detestable something has been shaped under
+foreign influence. But here I am in Ancient Japan, probably no European
+eyes ever looked upon these things before."</p>
+
+<p>After he had submitted to being bathed by his landlord, as if he had
+been a little child, and eaten a repast of rice, eggs, vegetables and
+sweetmeats, he sat smoking his kiseru until the moon arose, peeping
+through the heart-shaped little window that looked out on the garden
+behind, throwing down queer shadows of tilted eaves, and horned gables,
+and delightful silhouettes. Suddenly a measured clapping of hands became
+audible, and the echoing of <i>geta</i>, and the tramping of wooden sandals
+filled the street. His companion, Akira, told him they were all going to
+see the dance of the Bon-odori at the temple, the dance of the Festival
+of the Dead, and that they had better go, too. This dance of the
+Festival of the Dead he describes in his usual graphic way: the ghostly
+weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet&mdash;above all, the flitting
+of the marvellous sleeves, apparitional, soundless, velvety as the
+flitting of great tropical bats. In the midst of the charmed circle
+there crept upon him a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted, until,
+recalled to reality by a song full of sweet, clear quavering, gushing
+from some girlish mouth, and fifty other voices joined in the chant.
+"Melodies of Europe," he ends, "awaken within us feelings we can utter,
+sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations
+behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant,
+totally unlike anything in western melody, impossible even to write in
+those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue?</p>
+
+<p>"And the emotion itself&mdash;what is it? I know not; yet
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 171]</span>
+I feel it to be something infinitely more old than I, something not of
+only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being,
+under the universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in
+some untaught spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most
+ancient song, in some unconscious kinship to the music of
+solitudes,&mdash;all trillings of summer life that blend to make the great
+sweet Cry of the Land."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<h3>MATSUE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions
+and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty
+spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its
+impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
+Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which
+the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of
+heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith
+have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span>
+year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue&mdash;birth-place of the
+rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion&mdash;was one of the
+happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career.</p>
+
+<p>His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as
+finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years
+afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read
+about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"&mdash;then he howled and
+wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was
+only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be
+kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however,
+though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of
+enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always
+make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work,
+the one which is most read and by which he is best known.</p>
+
+<p>Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the
+odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 173]</span>
+his utmost desire. Matsue was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of
+bowler hats and red-brick warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths
+were still a living force, where old customs were still followed, and
+ancient chivalry still an animating power.</p>
+
+<p>How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day
+and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the
+first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled
+echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most
+pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the
+pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the
+hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people
+saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant
+vendors, the sellers of <i>daikon</i> and other strange vegetables ... and
+the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of
+kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.</p>
+
+<p>Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long
+nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral
+sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an
+exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the
+sun's yellow rim came into sight.</p>
+
+<p>From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was
+packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old
+city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country
+round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples.</p>
+
+<p>One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at
+night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the
+feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint
+imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some
+communication, mysterious and awful, between the
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 174]</span>
+world of waters and the
+world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls,
+that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish
+little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day
+of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all
+waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant
+Land."</p>
+
+<p>Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy
+precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the
+spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their
+ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary
+urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family
+to which Hearn's future wife belonged.</p>
+
+<p>To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living
+centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing
+in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past&mdash;that religion that
+lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The
+magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him,
+working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion
+of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary
+mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the
+very heart and soul of ancient Japan.</p>
+
+<p>If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was
+called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this
+strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could
+create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had
+selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy
+cycle of its eternal utterance.</p>
+
+<p>The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in
+which the real development of his genius
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 175]</span>
+lay; the loose, quivering needle of thought, that had moved hither and
+thither, was now set in one direction. The stage he was treading, though
+at first he did not realise it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a
+drama with eternal and immutable forces as scene-shifters and
+curtain-raisers. The qualities that had enabled Japan to conquer China,
+and had placed her practically in the forefront of far eastern nations,
+he was called upon to analyse and explain; to interpret the curious
+myths of this great people of little men, who, shut off from the rest of
+the world for hundreds of years, had, out of their own inner
+consciousness, built up a code of discipline and behaviour that, in its
+self-abnegation, its sense of cohesion, and fidelity to law, throws our
+much-vaunted western civilisation into the shade. Hearn brought to bear
+upon the interpretation a rare power of using words, sympathetic
+insight, an earnest and vivid imagination that enabled him to comprehend
+the strongly accentuated characteristics of a race living close to the
+origins of life; barbaric, yet highly refined; superstitious, yet
+capable of adapting themselves to modern thought; playful as children,
+yet astounding in their heroic gallantry and patriotism. His genius
+enabled him to catch a glimpse of the indisputable truth that legend and
+tradition are a science in themselves, that, however grotesque, however
+fantastic primeval myths and allegories may be, they are indicative of
+the gradual evolution of the heart and mind of generations as they arise
+and pass away.</p>
+
+<p>An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of
+superstition, as compared with the utility of religion. In consequence
+of his having elected to live the everyday life, and enter into the
+ordinary interests and occupations of this strange people, as no
+occidental ever had before, he was enabled to see that many Japanese
+superstitions had a sort of shorthand value in explaining
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+eternal and valuable things. When it would have been useless to preach
+to people vaguely about morality or cleanliness or ordinary rules of
+health, a superstition, a belief that certain infringement of moral law
+will bring direct corporal punishment, that maligned spirits will visit
+a room that is left unswept, that the gods will chastise over-excess in
+eating or drinking, are related to the most inexorable and highest moral
+laws, and it is easy to understand how invaluable is the study of their
+superstitions in analysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the
+Japanese.</p>
+
+<p>"Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated Japanese think nothing,"
+said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation.
+Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated Japanese
+must you go to understand the vitality of heart and intelligence which
+through centuries of the Elder Life has evolved so remarkable a
+nationality. To set forth the power that has moulded the character of
+this far eastern people, material must be culled from the
+unsophisticated hearts of the peasants and the common folk. "The people
+make the gods, and the gods the people make are the best." Hearn did not
+attempt, therefore, a mechanical repetition of social and religious
+tenets; but in the mythological beliefs, in the legendary lore that has
+slumbered for generations in simple minds he caught the suggestion of
+obedience and fidelity to authority, the strenuous industry and
+self-denial that endowed these quaint superstitions with a potency far
+beyond the religion and meaning, or the primitive idea that caused their
+inception. Merely accurate and erudite students would call the
+impressions that he collected here, in this unfamiliar Japan, trifling
+and fantastic, but he is able to prove that the details of ordinary
+intercourse, however trifling, the way in which men marry and bring up
+their children, the very manner in which they earn their daily bread,
+above all,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+the rules they impose, and the punishment and rewards they invoke to
+have them obeyed, reveal more of the manner by which the religion, the
+art, the heroism of this far eastern people have been developed, than
+hundreds of essays treating of dynasties, treaties and ceremonials.</p>
+
+<p>Aided by that very quality which some may look upon as a mental defect,
+Hearn's tendency to over-emphasise an impressive moment at the expense
+of accuracy stood him now in good stead. Physical myopia, he maintained,
+was an aid to artistic work from one aspect: "The keener the view, the
+less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of
+attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like
+the eye of a hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of
+every leaf." So mental myopia united with the shaping power of
+imagination was more helpful in enabling him to catch a glimpse of the
+trend of thought and characteristics of the folk whose country he
+adopted than the piercing judgment that saw faults and intellectual
+short-comings.</p>
+
+<p>Many people, even the Japanese themselves, have said that Hearn's view
+in his first book of things in their country was too roseate. Others
+have declared that he must have been a hypocrite to write of Japan in so
+enthusiastic a strain when in private letters, such as those to
+Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik, he expresses so great a detestation for
+the people and their methods. Those who say so do not know the nature of
+the man whom they are discussing; compromise with those in office was
+entirely antagonistic to his mode of thought. His life was composed of
+passing illusions and disillusions. That he, with his artistic
+perception, should have been carried off his balance by the quaintness
+and mysticism that he encountered in the outlying portions of the
+country was but natural. Go into the highlands of Japan amongst the
+simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+the ancient gods are still believed to haunt the ancient shrines, where
+the glamour and the grace of bygone civilisation still lingers, you will
+yield to the same charm, and, as Hearn himself says, better the
+sympathetic than the critical attitude. Perhaps the man who comes to
+Japan full of hate for all things oriental may get nearer the truth at
+once, but he will make a kindred mistake to him who views it all, as I
+did at first, almost with the eyes of a lover.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<h3>MARRIAGE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"'Marriage may be either a hindrance or help on the path,'
+the old priest said, 'according to conditions. All depends
+upon conditions. If the love of wife and child should cause a
+man to become too much attached to the temporary advantages
+of this unhappy world, then such love would be a hindrance.
+But, on the contrary, if the love of wife and child should
+enable a man to live more purely and more unselfishly than he
+could do in a state of celibacy, then marriage would be a
+very great help to him in the Perfect Way. Many are the
+dangers of marriage for the wise; but for those of little
+understanding, the dangers of celibacy are greater, and even
+the illusion of passion may sometimes lead noble natures to
+the higher knowledge.'"</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Hearn's</span>
+marriage, as his widow told us, took place early in the year of
+1891, "23rd of Meiji." That on either side it was one of passionate
+sentiment is doubtful. Marriages in Japan are generally arranged on the
+most businesslike footing. By the young Japanese man, it is looked upon
+as a natural duty that has duly to be performed for the perpetuation of
+his family. Passion is reserved for unions unsanctioned by social
+conventions.</p>
+
+<p>Dominated as he was by the idea that his physical deficiencies rendered
+a union with one of his own nationality out of the question, he yet knew
+that at his time of life he had to enter into more permanent conditions
+with the other sex than hitherto, or face a future devoid of settled
+purpose or stability. His state of health also demanded domestic comfort
+and feminine care. The only alternative that presented itself to a
+celibate life was to choose a wife from amongst the people with whom his
+lines were cast.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+<p>From the first moment of his arrival, Hearn had been carried away by
+enthusiasm for the gentleness, the docility, of the women of Japan. He
+compares them, much to their advantage, with their American sisters. "In
+the eternal order of things, which is the highest being, the childish,
+confiding, sweet Japanese girl, or the occidental Circe women of
+artificial society, with their enormous power of evil and their limited
+capacity for good?" In his first letter to Miss Bisland, he writes:
+"This is a domesticated nature, which loves man and makes itself
+beautiful for him in a quiet grey and blue way like the Japanese women."</p>
+
+<p>It seems an unromantic statement to make with regard to an artist who
+has written such exquisite passages on the sentiment that binds a man to
+a woman, but Hearn, in spite of his intellectual idealism, had from
+certain points of view a very material outlook. All considerations&mdash;even
+those connected with the deepest emotions that stir the human
+heart&mdash;were secondary to the necessities of his genius and artistic
+life.</p>
+
+<p>His intimacy with Althea Foley in Cincinnati was prompted and fostered
+by gratitude for her care in preparing his meals, and nursing him when
+ill, thus saving him from the catastrophe of relinquishing his position
+on the staff of the <i>Enquirer</i>, which meant not only the loss of all
+means of subsistence, but also the possibility of prosecuting the
+ambition of his life&mdash;a literary career.</p>
+
+<p>Now, at Matsue, after a touch of somewhat severe illness obliging him to
+pass some weeks in bed, it became really a matter of life or death that
+he should give up living from hand to mouth in country inns.</p>
+
+<p>With the Japanese teacher of English at the Matsue College, an
+accomplished English scholar, Hearn had formed a close intimacy from the
+moment of his arrival,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+an intimacy, indeed, only broken by Nishida Sentaro's death in 1898.</p>
+
+<p>"His the kind eyes that saw so much for the stranger, his the kind lips
+that gave him so much wise advice, helping him through the difficulties
+that beset him, in consequence of his ignorance of the language." At the
+beginning of his first term Hearn found the necessity of remembering or
+pronouncing the names of the boys, even with the class-roll before him,
+almost an insurmountable difficulty. Nishida helped him; gave him all
+the necessary instructions about hours and text-books, placed his desk
+close to his, the better to prompt him in school hours, and introduced
+him to the directors and to the governor of the province. "Out of the
+East," the volume written later at Kumamoto, was dedicated to Nishida
+Sentaro, "In dear remembrance of Izumo days."</p>
+
+<p>"Hearn's faith in this good friend was something wonderful," his wife
+tells us. "When he heard of Nishida's illness, in 1897, he exclaimed: 'I
+would not mind losing everything that belongs to me if I could make him
+well.' He believed in him with such a faith only possible to a child."</p>
+
+<p>Nishida Sentaro was also one of the ancient lineage and caste, and an
+intimate friend of the Koizumi family.</p>
+
+<p>Matsue had been at one time almost exclusively occupied by the Samurai
+feudal lords. After throwing open her doors to the world, and admitting
+western civilisation, Japan found herself obliged to accept, amongst
+other democratic innovations, the sweeping away of the great feudal and
+military past, reducing families of rank to obscurity and poverty.
+Youths and maidens of illustrious extraction, who had only mastered the
+"arts of courtesy" and the "arts of war," found themselves obliged to
+adopt the humblest occupations to provide themselves and their families
+with the means of livelihood. Daughters of men
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 182]</span>
+once looked upon as aristocrats had to become indoor servants with
+people of a lower caste, or to undertake the austere drudgery of the
+rice-fields or the lotus-ponds. Their houses and lands were
+confiscated&mdash;their heirlooms, costly robes, crested lacquer ware, passed
+at starvation prices to those whom "misery makes rich." Amongst these
+aristocrats the Koizumis were numbered. Nishida Sentaro, knowing their
+miserable circumstances, and seeing how advisable it would be, if it
+were Hearn's intention to remain in Japan, to have a settled home of his
+own, formed the idea of bringing about a union between Setsu and the
+English teacher at the Matsue College.</p>
+
+<p>On his own initiative he undertook the task of approaching his foreign
+friend. Finding him favourably inclined, he suggested the marriage as a
+suitable one to Setsu's parents.</p>
+
+<p>It is supposed that marriage in Japan must be solemnised by a priest,
+but this is not so. A Japanese marriage is simply a legal pledge, and is
+not invested with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in
+occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a Japanese woman
+can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom
+looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nishida, when
+he undertook to act as intermediary, or <i>Nakodo</i>, as they call it in
+Japan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu
+Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously,
+but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that
+the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and
+then only by his nationalising himself a Japanese citizen.</p>
+
+<p>One of Hearn's saving qualities was compassion for the weak and
+suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the
+deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted&mdash;as he was&mdash;behind the
+closely drawn veil of
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 183]</span>
+pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats drew between their
+poverty and public observation.</p>
+
+<p>What the Samurai maiden,&mdash;brought up in the seclusion of Matsue&mdash;may
+have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of
+forty-four (a patriarchal age in Japan), who was offered to her as a
+husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, Japanese fashion, and as
+the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding
+and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred
+ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during
+these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection,
+indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the <i>Gakusha</i> (learned
+person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all
+the American and English tourists at Tokyo.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the
+exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible
+fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to
+Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,&mdash;the complexion darker
+and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women&mdash;but comely, with the
+comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have
+been.</p>
+
+<p>Tender and true, as her <i>Yerbina</i>, or personal, name, "Setsu,"
+signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of
+patience and self-restraint&mdash;a daughter of Japan&mdash;one of a type fast
+becoming extinct&mdash;who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to
+wound other hearts.</p>
+
+<p>She may not have been obliged to submit to the trials of most Japanese
+wives, the whims and tyranny, for instance, of her father- and
+mother-in-law, or the drudgery to provide for, or wait upon a numerous
+Japanese household; but from many indications we know that her life
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+sometimes was not by any means a bed of roses. Humorous, and at the same
+time pathetic, are her reminiscences of these first days of marriage, as
+related in later life.</p>
+
+<p>"He was such an intense nature," she says, "and so completely absorbed
+in his work of writing that it made him appear strange and even
+outlandish in ordinary life. He even acknowledged himself that he must
+look like a madman."</p>
+
+<p>During the course of his life, when undergoing any severe mental or
+physical strain, Hearn was subject to periods of hysterical trance,
+during which he lost consciousness of surrounding objects. There is a
+host of superstitions amongst the Japanese connected with trances or
+fainting fits. Each human being is supposed to possess two souls. When a
+person faints they believe that one soul is withdrawn from the body, and
+goes on all sorts of unknown and mysterious errands, while the other
+remains with the envelope to which it belongs; but when this takes place
+a man goes mad; mad people are those who have lost one of their souls.
+On first seeing her husband in this condition, the little woman was so
+terrified that she hastened to Nishida Sentaro to seek advice. "He
+always acted for us as middle-man in those Matsue days, and I confess I
+was afraid my husband might have gone crazy. However, I found soon
+afterwards that it was only the time of enthusiasm in thought and
+writing; and I began to admire him more on that account."</p>
+
+<p>The calm and material comforts of domestic life gave Hearn, for a time,
+a more assured equilibrium, but these trances returned again with
+considerable frequency in later days.</p>
+
+<p>Amenomori, his secretary at Tokyo, tells a story of waking one night and
+seeing a light in Hearn's study. He was afraid Hearn might be ill, and
+cautiously opened
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+the door and peeped in. There he saw the little genius, absorbed in his
+work, standing at his high desk, his nose almost touching the paper on
+which he wrote. Leaf after leaf was covered with his small, delicate
+handwriting. After a while, Amenomori goes on, he held up his head, "and
+what did I see? It was not the Hearn I was familiar with; his face was
+mysteriously white; his eyes gleamed. He appeared like one in touch with
+some unearthly presence."</p>
+
+<p>Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much
+perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"
+<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21"
+class="fnanchor">[21]</a>she
+says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently,
+was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so
+interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at Kumamoto he told her
+that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there,
+she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He
+said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the
+Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark
+and the eerieness.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p>
+<a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21">
+<span class="label">[21]</span></a> It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or
+write a word of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her
+by the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store,
+when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he
+selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or
+spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>"I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an
+unmistakable streak of passion for gay things&mdash;however, his quiet
+conscience held him back from giving way to it."</p>
+
+<p>His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of
+etiquette&mdash;looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+for people in official positions&mdash;was a continued source of trouble to
+the little woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his
+"polite garments," which were <i>de rigueur</i> at any official
+ceremony. On one occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor
+visited the Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and
+top hat.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they
+instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called
+it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The
+"race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two.
+That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between
+two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and
+Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little
+wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to
+me, though always in a lovable way&mdash;of course a man and a woman know
+each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race
+tendencies difficult to understand."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 187]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<h3>THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after
+the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all
+illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion
+which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them.
+And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all
+emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at
+the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire
+anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is
+like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like
+violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though
+I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a
+man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he
+marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable,
+so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for
+intellectual converse a man can't really have with women.
+Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as
+plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer
+or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to
+the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex
+civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many
+questions involved."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the
+Ohasigawa&mdash;although dainty as a birdcage&mdash;too cramped for comfort, the
+rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that
+ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.</p>
+
+<p>On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the
+former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under
+military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its
+Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the
+straitened means of their owners, many of these
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+<i>Katchiu-yashiki</i> were untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky
+enough to secure one. Though he no longer had his outlook over the lake,
+with the daily coming and going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an
+extended view of the city and was close to the university. But above all
+he found compensation in the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of
+centuries of cultivation and care.</p>
+
+<p>The summer passed in this Japanese <i>Yashiki</i> was as happy as any in
+Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing
+regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf
+shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy
+peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul
+stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled&mdash;a free,
+clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully.
+Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were
+soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he
+could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life
+was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment
+receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said,
+twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds,
+this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of
+two.</p>
+
+<p>Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the
+announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.</p>
+
+<p>He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his
+Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household.
+After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian
+dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse&mdash;the marriage of Miss
+Elizabeth Bisland.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's description of the old <i>Yashiki</i> garden is done
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+with all the descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others
+have described Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental
+"atmosphere," the special peculiarities that make them so characteristic
+of the genius of the people that have originated them. It is impossible
+to find space to follow him into all the details of his "garden folk
+lore" as he calls it; of <i>Hijo</i>, things without desire, such as
+stones and trees, and <i>Ujo</i>, things having desire, such as men and
+animals, the miniature hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of
+green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant
+elevations rising from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface
+of silk, miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too
+beautiful, these sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of
+dirt would mar their effect, and it required the trained skill of an
+experienced native gardener&mdash;a delightful old man&mdash;to keep them in
+perfect form.</p>
+
+<p>Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the
+bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns,
+and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject
+to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and
+superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light.</p>
+
+<p>We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can
+catch the song of the caged <i>Uguisu</i>, an inmate of the establishment,
+presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of
+the Governor of Izumo.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Uguisu</i>, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and
+over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist
+confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five
+seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name.</p>
+
+<p>They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 190]</span>
+in summer. He watched them with the greatest delight, until they
+bloomed, and then was equally wretched when he saw them withering.</p>
+
+<p>One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the
+sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese,
+"Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a
+serious intention).</p>
+
+<p>When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in
+despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my
+flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident.</p>
+
+<p>He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his
+dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and
+exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable
+Japanese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five
+class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah
+overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below
+their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the
+city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling
+of <i>semi</i>, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and
+those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them
+hummed the changed Japan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-ships.
+Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the
+sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a
+faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty
+of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they
+were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams,
+creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce.</p>
+
+<p>The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+is an interesting psychological study. He had been wont to declare that
+his vocation was a monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as
+severe in its discipline as that of St. Francis of Assisi on the Umbrian
+hills. The code on which he moulded his life was formulated according to
+the teaching of the great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and
+effect progress, continual struggle against temptation is necessary.
+Appetites must be restrained. Indulgence means retrogression.</p>
+
+<p>It is not without a sense of amusement that we observe the complex
+personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and
+discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had
+seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the
+erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the
+starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel shirt,
+and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now
+clad in official robes, he passed out through a line of prostrate
+servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been
+handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and
+submission by the daughter of a line of feudal nobles.</p>
+
+<p>He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as
+to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the
+sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at
+eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the
+little lamps of the <i>kami</i> before the shrine were left to burn until
+they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal
+for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as
+to forget the hour.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of
+the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was
+very real indeed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 192]</span></p>
+<p>The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was
+I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty,
+and honour, and Hell fire staring you in the face, you would have gone
+after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and
+quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I
+am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in
+Japan."</p>
+
+<p>Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain,
+alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine,"
+of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and
+she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little
+like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a
+gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their
+tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had
+everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all,
+however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and
+selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring
+off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in
+riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese&mdash;don't you think so?
+And the man was certainly a detestable fellow."</p>
+
+<p>Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper,
+he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese
+food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to
+interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose
+knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women."</p>
+
+<p>"Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one
+of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later.
+Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild,
+wayward, undisciplined
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone by.</p>
+
+<p>When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the
+wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha.
+After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies,
+and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear
+the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan,
+where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man
+is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it,
+and the wife accepts it as her <i>Ingwa</i>&mdash;or sin in a former state of
+existence&mdash;it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over
+the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about.</p>
+
+<p>A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the
+old <i>Yashiki</i>, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed
+Japanese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of
+the interpreter, the superstitions and legends of the ancient Province
+of the Gods.</p>
+
+<p>She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring,
+"How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked
+fixedly in front of him.</p>
+
+<p>Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed
+to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"<a name="FNanchor_22_22"
+id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a>
+or "Dancing Girl," the
+finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written
+during the course of the summer passed in the old <i>Yashiki</i>. Its first
+inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891.
+"There was a story some time ago in the <i>Asahi-shimbun</i><a name="FNanchor_23_23"
+id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> about a
+'Shirabyoshi,' that brought
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully translated by a friend."</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a>
+"Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> The
+<i>Asahi-shimbun</i> was one of the principal Japanese
+illustrated daily papers, printed and published at Osaka.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign
+languages&mdash;German, Swedish, French and Italian&mdash;a writer in the <i>Revue
+des Deux Mondes</i> declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world.
+The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in
+England.</p>
+
+<p>The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a
+Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible
+and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a
+vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of
+warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into
+kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is
+no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature,
+in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her
+regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the
+possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she
+cherishes is for her.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story
+that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an
+account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how
+they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a
+woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife,
+that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to
+ideal things, her pure and simple passion, he thrills us through with
+the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength
+of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life.</p>
+
+<p>How different the manner in which he treats the scenes
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 195]</span>
+between the young man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the
+manner in which his French prototypes&mdash;in which Pierre Loti, for
+instance, whom Hearn declares to be one of the greatest living
+artists&mdash;would have treated it. Far ahead has he passed beyond them; the
+moral, the life of the soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line
+does he play on the lower emotions of his readers.</p>
+
+<p>A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to
+Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to passing
+the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a
+single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way
+towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's
+house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear
+any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He
+told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a
+woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and
+then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his
+feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier
+was set before him, and a cotton <i>zabuton</i> for him to kneel upon. He was
+struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when
+she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no
+time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and
+paper mosquito curtain."</p>
+
+<p>After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly
+fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of
+the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated <i>Butsudan</i>, he
+saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but
+before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad
+when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find
+out what I was
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 196]</span>
+doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she had fallen in
+love with one another, and how they had gone away and built the cottage
+in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to please him. One
+cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had lived alone with
+nothing to console her but the memory of her lover, laying daily before
+his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly dancing to please his
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p>After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try
+again to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had
+received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was
+not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the
+path he had to follow, she watched him until he passed from sight, his
+heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left
+behind.</p>
+
+<p>Many years passed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous.
+One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with
+him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but
+she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master.
+When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the
+knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments
+of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a <i>Shirabyoshi</i>.</p>
+
+<p>With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched
+her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred
+in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw
+the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated
+hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the
+strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night.
+"Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he
+said,
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 197]</span>
+as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years since
+we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up to me
+the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your story."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years,
+she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house,
+and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before
+the <i>Butsudan</i>. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she
+desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and
+attitude of the dance that she might hang it up before the <i>Butsudan</i>.
+"I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young
+again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose
+sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!"</p>
+
+<p>He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to
+thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted
+her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she
+clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master?
+She had nothing to offer but her <i>Shirabyoshi</i> garments. He took them,
+saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to
+place her beyond the reach of want.</p>
+
+<p>No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went
+away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day
+took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and
+outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and
+receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the
+aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired
+lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the
+lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him.</p>
+
+<p>Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 198]</span>
+seemingly asleep. On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient
+<i>Butsudan</i> with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was
+burning; in front of it stood the portrait he had painted.</p>
+
+<p>"The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as
+she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he
+gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the
+ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow
+had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier
+than he."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<h3>KUMAMOTO</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Of course Urashima was bewildered by the gods. But who is
+not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a
+bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the
+purpose of the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without
+any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima
+Mio-jin....</p>
+
+<p>"These are quite differently managed in the West. After
+disobeying Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to
+learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative
+sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at
+the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become
+after death small gods in our own right. How can we pity the
+folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with
+visible gods?</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity
+must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a
+myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular
+time of blue light and soft wind,&mdash;and always like an old
+reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the
+feeling of a season not to be also related to something real
+in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Only</span> for a year did Hearn's sojourn in Fairyland last. The
+winter following his arrival was a very severe one. The northern coast
+of Japan lies open to the Arctic winds blowing over the snow-covered
+plains of Siberia. Heavy falls of snow left drifts five feet high round
+the <i>Yashiki</i> on the hill. The large rooms, so delightful in the
+summer with their verandah opening on the garden, were cold as "cattle
+barns" in winter, with nothing but charcoal braziers to heat them. He
+dare not face another such experience, and asked, if possible, to be
+transferred to warmer quarters. Aided again by his friend, Professor
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+Chamberlain, the authorities at Tokyo were induced to give him the
+professorship of English at the Imperial University at Kumamoto.</p>
+
+<p>Kumamoto is situated in Kyushu, facing Formosa and the Chinese coast;
+the climate, therefore, is much milder than that of Matsue. Here,
+however, began Hearn's first disillusionment; like Urashima Taro, having
+dwelt within the precincts of Fairyland he felt the shock of returning
+to Earth again. The city struck him as being ugly and commonplace, a
+half-Europeanised garrison town, resounding to the sounds of bugles and
+the drilling of soldiers, instead of pilgrim songs and temple bells.
+"But Lord! I must try to make money; for nothing is sure in Japan and I
+am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a
+trip, whether the Government employs me or not."</p>
+
+<p>He began to look back with regret to the days passed at Matsue. "You
+must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find
+out how unutterably different it is from other places,&mdash;for instance,
+this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here
+exist."</p>
+
+<p>All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and
+apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has
+nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father,
+wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a
+Buddhist student.</p>
+
+<p>This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is
+nothing in Japan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he
+indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a
+little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all
+up&mdash;the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to
+orientals, and an oriental he had now become.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+His people felt like fish out of water, everything surrounding them was
+so different from their primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next
+yard, <i>"mezurashii kedamono,"</i> filled his little wife with an
+amused wonder. Some geese and a pig also filled her with surprise, such
+animals did not exist in the highlands of Japan.</p>
+
+<p>The Kumamoto Government College was one of the largest in Japan,&mdash;came
+next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was
+run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still
+adhered to their Japanese dress, but most of them adopted the military
+uniform now, as a rule, worn in Japanese colleges. There were three
+classes, corresponding with three higher classes of the <i>Jinjo
+Chugakko</i>&mdash;and two higher classes. He did not now teach on Saturdays.
+There were no stoves&mdash;only <i>hibachi</i>. The library was small, and the
+English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was
+taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The
+bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the
+same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great
+dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of
+chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college,
+except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning
+and evening, and in the intervals between classes sat in a corner to
+himself smoking his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to
+Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF GODS! What would you do if you
+were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! Japan in Kyushu is like
+Europe&mdash;except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking,
+and the difficulties of language,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+render it impossible for an <i>educated</i> Japanese to find pleasure in
+the society of a European. My scholars in this great Government school
+are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers
+never speak to me at all. I go to the college and return after
+class,&mdash;always alone, no mental company but books. But at home
+everything is sweet."</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence
+of matrimony, here at Kumamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to
+the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so
+many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own
+kindred," he says to his sister.</p>
+
+<p>His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second
+wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had
+died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his
+widow continued their journey to Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls
+were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two
+of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr.
+Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to
+Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own
+half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called.</p>
+
+<p>Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to Japanese affairs.
+Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as
+standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and
+social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their
+way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's
+articles contributed to the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, afterwards published
+under the title of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," had claimed public
+attention.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+<p>Miss Lillah Hearn was the first member of the family to write to this
+half-brother, who was becoming so famous, but received no answer. Then
+Mrs. Brown, the other sister, approached him, silence greeted her
+efforts as well. On hearing of his marriage to a Japanese lady, Mrs.
+Atkinson, the youngest sister, wrote. Whether it was that she softened
+the exile's heart in his expatriation by that sympathy and innate tact
+which are two of her distinguished qualities, it is impossible to say,
+but her letter was answered.</p>
+
+<p>This strange relative of theirs who had gone to Japan, adopted Japanese
+dress and habits, and married a Japanese lady, had become somewhat of a
+legendary character to his quiet-going Irish kindred. The arrival of the
+first letter, therefore, was looked upon as quite an event and was
+passed from house to house, and hand to hand, becoming considerably
+mutilated in its journeyings to and fro. The first page is entirely
+gone, and the second page so erased and torn that it is only
+decipherable here and there. We are enabled to put an approximate date
+to it by his reference to Miss Bisland's marriage, of which he had heard
+towards the end of his stay at Matsue.</p>
+
+<p>"I have written other things, but am rather ashamed of them," he adds.
+"So Miss Bisland has married and become Mrs. Wetmore. She is as rich at
+least as she could wish to be, but I have not heard from her for more
+than a year. I suppose friendship ends with marriage. If my sister was
+not married, I think&mdash;I only think&mdash;I would feel more brotherly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I will say _au revoir_. Many thanks for the letter you wrote me.
+I would like&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Please give
+me&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;you can. Don't
+think busy to write&mdash;much&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I
+teach for a week&mdash;English&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and
+Elementary Latin:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the time I
+study&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+write for pleasure, not for profit. There isn't much profit in
+literature unless, as a novelist, one happens to please a popular
+taste,&mdash;which isn't good taste. Some exceptions there are, like Rudyard
+Kipling; but your brother has not his inborn genius for knowing, seizing
+and painting human
+nature.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Love to you and
+yours&mdash;from</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span style="margin-right: 4em;">
+"LAFCADIO HEARN."</span></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"<i>Tetorihomnatu</i> 34,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><i>"Kumamoto, Kyushu,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><i>"Japan.</i>"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Atkinson replied immediately, thus beginning a series of delightful
+letters, which alas! relate, so many of them, to intimate family affairs
+that it is impossible to publish them in their original form.</p>
+
+<p>"My sweet little sister," he wrote in answer, "your letter was more than
+personally grateful: it had also an unexpected curious interest for me,
+as a revelation of things I did not know. I don't know anything of my
+relations&mdash;their names, places, occupations, or even number: therefore
+your letter interested me in a peculiar way, apart from its amiable
+charm. Before I talk any more, I thank you for the photographs. They
+have made me prouder than I ought to be. I did not know that I had such
+nice kindred and such a fairy niece. My wife stole your picture from me
+almost as soon as I had received it, to caress it, and pray to Buddha
+and all the ancient gods to love the original: she has framed it in a
+funny little Japanese frame, and suspended it in that sacred part of the
+house, called the Toko, a sort of alcove, in which only beautiful things
+are displayed. Formerly the gods were placed there (many hundred years
+ago); but now the gods have a separate shrine in the household, and the
+Toko is only the second Holy place...."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 544px;">
+<a name="fp204" id="fp204"><img src="images/fp204.jpg" width="544" height="700"
+alt="Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn&#39;s Half-sister)." title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn&#39;s Half-sister).</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The next letter is dated June 27th, '92, 25th year of Meiji.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 205]</span></p>
+<p>"Dear sister, I love you a little bit more on hearing that you are
+little. The smaller you are the more I will be fond of you. As for
+marriage being a damper upon affection between kindred, it is true only
+of Occidental marriages. The Japanese wife is only the shadow of her
+husband, infinitely unselfish and na�ve in all things....</p>
+
+<p>"If you want me to see you soon, you must pray to the Occidental gods to
+make me suddenly rich. However, I doubt if they have half as much
+influence as the gods of Japan,&mdash;who are helping me to make a bank
+account as fast as honest work can produce such a result. I have no
+babies; and don't expect to have, and may be able to cross the seas one
+of these days to linger in your country a while. But really I don't
+know. I drift with the current of events.</p>
+
+<p>"As for my book on Japan,&mdash;my first book,&mdash;there is much to do yet,&mdash;it
+ought to be out in the Fall. It will be called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar
+Japan," and will treat of strange things.</p>
+
+<p>"I would like to see you very much; for you are too tantalizing in your
+letters, and tell me nothing about your inner self. I want to find out
+what the angel shut up in your heart is like. No doubt very sweet, but I
+would like to pull it out, and stroke its wings, and make it chipper a
+little. As for the little ones, make them love me; for if they see me
+without previous discipline, they will be afraid of my ugly face when I
+come&mdash;I send you a photo of one-half of it, the other is not pleasant, I
+assure you: like the moon, I show only one side of myself. In Spanish
+countries they call me Leucadio&mdash;much easier for little folk to
+pronounce. By the way, you never gave me your address,&mdash;sign of
+impulsive haste, like my own.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 12em;">"With best love,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio Hearn."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+<p>Then in January, 1903, he writes again, "Your kind sweet letter reached
+me at Christmas time, where there is no Christmas. Don't you know that
+you are very happy to be able to live in England? I am afraid you do
+not. Perhaps you could not know without having lived much elsewhere....
+Your photo has come. The same eyes, the same chin, brow, nose: we are
+strangely alike&mdash;excepting that you are very comely, and I very much the
+reverse&mdash;partly by exaggeration of the traits which make your face
+beautiful, and partly because I am disfigured by the loss of an
+eye&mdash;punched out at school.... Won't you please give my kindest thanks
+to your husband for the pains he has taken to please me! I hope to meet
+him some day, and thank him in person, if I don't leave my bones in some
+quaint and curious Buddhist cemetery out here...."</p>
+
+<p>The wonderful series of letters to Professor Hall Chamberlain, recently
+published by Miss Bisland, are also written from Kumamoto and Kobe, and
+to a great extent run simultaneously with those to his sister. He had a
+habit of repeating himself; the same expressions, the same quotations,
+appear in both series, and sometimes are again repeated in his published
+essays. When struck by an idea or incident, it seems as if he must
+impart it as something noteworthy to every one with whom he was holding
+communion. He gives, for instance, the same account to his sister of the
+routine of his Japanese day as related to Professor Hall Chamberlain and
+Ellwood Hendrik.</p>
+
+<p>We can imagine his rigidly Protestant Irish relations amidst the
+conventional surroundings of an Irish country house, following minutely
+the services of the established church as preached to them by their
+local clergyman, utterly bewildered in reading the description of the
+outlandish cult to which he, their relation, subscribed in Japan. The
+awakening to the rising of the sun with the clapping of hands of
+servants in the garden, the prayers
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 207]</span>
+at the <i>Butsudan</i>, the putting out the food for the dead, all the
+strange, quaint customs that mark the passing of the day in the ancient
+Empire of Nippon. Not by thousands of miles only was he separated from
+his occidental relations, but by immemorial centuries of thought.</p>
+
+<p>On May 21st, 1893, there is another letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
+in which he first announces his expectation of becoming a father. It is
+so characteristic of Lafcadio to take it for granted that the child
+would be a boy, and already to make plans for his education abroad.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 4em;">"<i>Tsuboi, Nichihorabata</i> 35, <i>Kumamoto,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 6em;"><i>"Kyushu, Japan.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 2em;"><i>May</i> 21<i>st</i>, '93.</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em; font-variant: small-caps;">My Dear Minnie:</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>"(I think 'sister' is too formal, I shall call you by your pet name
+hereafter.) First let me thank you very, very much for the photographs.
+I was extremely pleased with that of your husband;&mdash;and thought at once,
+'Ah! the lucky girl!' For your husband, my dear Sis, is no ordinary man.
+There are faces that seen for the first time leave an impression which
+gives the whole of the man, <i>ineffaceably</i>. And they are rare. I
+think I know your husband already, admire him and love him,&mdash;not simply
+for your sake, but for his own. He [is] all man,&mdash;and strong,&mdash;a good
+oak for your ivy. I don't mean physical strength, though he seems (from
+the photograph) to have an uncommon amount of it, but strength of
+character. You can feel pretty easy about the future of your little ones
+with such a father. (Don't read all this to him, though,&mdash;or he will
+think I am trying to flatter either him or you,&mdash;though, of course, you
+can tell him something of the impression his photo gives me, in a milder
+form.) And you don't know what the real impression is,&mdash;nor how it is
+enhanced by the fact that I have been for three years isolated from all
+English or European intercourse,&mdash;never
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+see an English face, except that of some travelling missionary, which is
+apt to be ignoble. The Oriental face is somewhat inscrutable,&mdash;like the
+faces of the Buddhist gods. In youth it has quite a queer charm,&mdash;the
+charm of mysterious placidity, of smiling calm. (But among the
+modernised, college-bred Japanese this is lost.) What one never&mdash;or
+hardly ever&mdash;sees among these Orientals is a face showing strong
+character. The race is strangely impersonal. The women are divinely
+sweet in temper; the men are mysteries, and not altogether pleasant. I
+feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me
+homesick for English life,&mdash;just one plunge into it again.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Will I ever see you? Really I don't know. Some day I should like to
+visit England,&mdash;provided I could assure myself of sufficient literary
+work there to justify a stay of at least half-a-year, and the expense of
+the voyage. Eventually that might be possible. I would never go as a
+mere guest&mdash;not even a sister's; but I should like to be able to chat
+with the sister occasionally on leisure-evenings. I am quite a savage on
+the subject of independence, let me tell you; and would accept no
+kindnesses except those of your company at intervals. But all this is
+not of to-day. I cannot take my wife to Europe, it would be impossible
+to accustom her to Western life,&mdash;indeed it would be cruel even to try.
+But I may have to educate my child abroad,&mdash;which would be an
+all-powerful reason for the voyage. However, I would prefer an Italian,
+French, or Spanish school-life to an English one.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Oh yes, about the book&mdash;'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan' is now in
+press. It will appear in two volumes, without illustrations. The
+publishers are Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co., of Boston,&mdash;the best in America.
+Whether you like the book or no, I can't tell. I have an idea you do not
+care much about literary matters;&mdash;that you are too
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 209]</span>
+much wife and mother for that;&mdash;that your romances and poetry are in
+your own home. And such romance and poetry is the best of all. However,
+if you take some interest in trying to look at ME between the lines, you
+may have patience to read the work. Don't try to read it, if you don't
+like.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;But here is something you might do for me, as I am not asking for
+certain friendly offices. When the book is criticised, you might kindly
+send me a few of the best reviews. Miss Bisland, while in London, wrote
+me the reviews of some of my other books had been very kindly; but she
+never dreamed of supplementing this pleasant information by cutting out
+a few specimens for me.&mdash;By the way, she has married well, you
+know,&mdash;has become awfully rich and fashionable, and would not even
+condescend to look at me if she passed me in Broadway&mdash;I <i>suppose</i>. But
+she well deserved her good fortune; for she was certainly one of the
+most gifted girls I ever knew, and has succeeded in everything&mdash;against
+immense obstacles&mdash;with no help except that of her own will and genius.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;And now I must give you a lecture. I don't want more than one
+sister,&mdash;haven't room in my heart for more. All appear to be as charming
+as they are sweet looking. I am interested to hear how they succeed,
+etc., etc. But don't ask me to write to everybody, and don't show
+everybody my letters. I can't diffuse myself very far. You said you
+would be 'my favourite.' A nice way you go about it! Suppose I tell you
+that I am a very jealous, nasty brother; and that if I can't have one
+sister by herself I don't want any sister at all! Would that be very,
+very naughty? But it is true. And now you can be shocked just as much as
+you please.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Yes, I have lost an eye, and look horrible. The operation in Dublin
+did not cause the disfigurement, but
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 210]</span>
+a blow, or rather the indirect results of a blow, received from a
+play-fellow.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;You ask me if I should like a photograph of father. I certainly
+should, if you can procure me one without trouble. I hope&mdash;much more
+than to see England,&mdash;to visit India, and try to find some tradition of
+him. I did not know positively, until last year, that father had been in
+the West Indies. When I went there, I had the queerest, ghostliest
+sensation of having seen it all before. I think I should experience even
+stranger sensations in India! The climate would be agreeable for me.
+Remember, I passed fourteen years of my life south of winter. The first
+snow I saw from 1876 to 1890 was on my way through Canada to Japan.
+Indeed, if ever I become quite independent, I want to return to the
+tropics.</p>
+
+<p>"Enough to tire your eyes,&mdash;isn't it?&mdash;for this time.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"Ever affectionately,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio Hearn."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"In the names of the eight hundred myriads of Gods,&mdash;do give me your
+address. The only way I have been able to write you is by finding the
+word <i>Portadown</i> in <i>Whittaker's Almanac</i>. You are a careless, naughty
+'Sis.'</p>
+
+<p>"I enclose my name and address in Japanese.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 18em; font-variant: small-caps;">Yakumo Koizumi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 15em;">"<i>Tsuboi,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;"><i>"Nichihorabata</i> 35,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em;"><i>"Kumamoto, Kyushu.</i>"</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>All the women are making funny little Japanese baby-clothes, and all the
+Buddhist Divinities, who watch over little children, are being prayed
+to.... "Letters of congratulation," he said, "were coming from all
+directions, for the expectation of a child is always a subject of great
+gladness in Japan.... Behind all this there is a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+universe of new sensations, revelations of things in Buddhist faith
+which are very beautiful and touching. About the world an atmosphere of
+delicious, sacred na�vet�,&mdash;difficult to describe because resembling
+nothing in the Western world...."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's account of his home before the birth of his son throws most
+interesting lights on Japanese methods of thought and daily life. He
+refers to the pretty custom of a woman borrowing a baby when she is
+about to become a mother. It is thought an honour to lend it. And it is
+extraordinarily petted in its new home. The one his wife borrowed was
+only six months old, but expressed in a supreme degree all the Japanese
+virtues; docile to the degree of going to sleep when bidden, and of
+laughing when it awakened. The eerie wisdom of its face seemed to
+suggest a memory of all its former lives. The incident he relates also
+of a little Samurai boy whom he and his wife had adopted is interesting
+as showing the Spartan discipline exercised over Japanese children from
+earliest youth, enabling them in later life to display that iron
+self-control that has astonished the world; interesting, also, as
+showing how nothing escaped Hearn's quick observation and assiduous
+intellect. Hearn, at first, wanted to fondle the child, and make much of
+him, but he soon found that it was not in accordance with custom. He
+therefore ceased to take notice of him; and left him under the control
+of the women of the house. Their treatment of him Hearn thought
+peculiar; the little fellow was never praised and rarely scolded. One
+day he let a little cup fall and broke it. No notice was taken of the
+accident for fear of giving him pain. Suddenly, though the face remained
+quite smilingly placid as usual, he could not control his tears. As soon
+as they saw him cry, everybody laughed and said kind things to him, till
+he began to laugh, too. But what followed was more surprising.
+Apparently he had been distantly treated.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+One day he did not return from school until three hours after the usual
+time; suddenly the women began to cry&mdash;they were, indeed, more deeply
+affected than their treatment of the boy would have justified. The
+servants ran hither and thither in their anxiety to find him. It turned
+out that he had only been taken to a teacher's house for something
+relating to school matters. As soon as his voice was heard at the door,
+every one was quiet, cold, and distantly polite again.</p>
+
+<p>On September 17th he writes again to his sister, thanking her for a copy
+she had sent him of the <i>Saturday Review</i>. "You could send me nothing
+more pleasing, or more useful in a literary way. It is all the more
+welcome as I am really living in a hideous isolation, far away from
+books, and book-shops, and Europeans. When I can get&mdash;which I hope is
+the next year&mdash;into a more pleasant locality, I shall try to pick out
+some pretty Oriental tales to send to the little ones." He was not able,
+he goes on, to go far from Kumamoto, not liking to leave his little wife
+too long alone; so his vacation was rather monotonous. He travelled only
+as far as Nagasaki. It was quaint and pretty, but hotter than any West
+Indian port in the hot season. He was economising, he said, and had
+saved nearly three thousand five hundred dollars. Once he had provided
+for his wife, he hoped to be able to make a few long voyages to places
+east of Japan. "You are much to be envied," he goes on to his sister,
+"for your chances of travel. What a pity you are not able to devote
+yourself to writing and painting in a place like Algiers&mdash;full of
+romance and picturesqueness. If you go there, don't fail to see the old
+Arab part of the city&mdash;the Kasbah, I think they call it. How about the
+Continent? Have you tried Southern Italy? And don't you think that one
+gets all the benefit of travel only by keeping away from fashion-resorts
+and places consecrated by conventionalism? Nothing
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 213]</span>
+to me is more frightful than a fashionable seaside resort&mdash;such as those
+of the Atlantic Coast. My happiest sojourns of this sort have been in
+little fishing villages, and little queer old unknown towns, where there
+are no big vulgar hotels, and where one can dress and do exactly as one
+pleases.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you do with your little man when he grows up? Army, or Civil
+Service? Whatever you do, never let him go to America, and lose all his
+traditions. Australia would be far better. I expect he will be
+gloriously well able to take care of himself anywhere,&mdash;judging by his
+father, but I have come to the belief that one cannot too soon begin the
+cultivation of a single aim and single talent in life. This is the age
+of specialism. No man can any longer be successful in many things. Even
+the 'general practitioner' in medicine has almost become obsolete.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing seems to me more important now for a little boy than the
+training of his linguistic faculties,&mdash;giving him every encouragement in
+learning languages by ear&mdash;(the only natural way); and your travelling
+sometimes with him will help you to notice how his faculties are in that
+direction. But perhaps it will be possible for him to pass all his life
+in England. (For me, England, Ireland and Scotland mean the same thing.)
+That would be pleasant indeed.... When I think of your little man with
+the black eyes, I hope that his life will always be in the circle of
+English traditions, wherever the English Flag flies, there remain.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you know that in this Orient the construction of the family
+is totally different to what it is in Europe.... We are too conceitedly
+apt to think that what is good for Englishmen is good for all
+nations,&mdash;our ethics, our religion, our costumes, etc. The plain facts
+of the case are that all Eastern races lose, instead of gaining,
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 214]</span>
+by contact with us. They imitate our vices instead of our virtues, and
+learn all our weaknesses without getting any of our strength. Already
+statistics show an enormous increase of crime in Japan as the result of
+'Christian civilisation'; and the open ports show a demoralisation
+utterly unknown in the interior of the country, and unimaginable in the
+old feudal days before 1840 or 1850...."</p>
+
+<p>In the next letter he gives his sister a minute account of his Japanese
+manner of life on the floor without chairs or tables. It has been
+described so often by visitors to Japan, and by Hearn himself, that it
+is unnecessary to repeat it here. He ends his letter:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I am now so used to the Japanese way of living, that when I have to
+remain all day in Western clothes, I feel very unhappy; and I think I
+should not find European life pleasant in summer time. Some day, I will
+send you a photograph of my house.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you much happiness and good health and pleasant days of travel,
+and thank you much for the paper.</p>
+
+<p>"This letter is rather rambling, but perhaps you will find something
+interesting in it.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"Ever affectionately,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In September comes another letter to Mrs. Atkinson:
+"You actually talk about writing too often,&mdash;which is strange! There is
+only this difficulty about writing,&mdash;that we both know so little of each
+other that topics interesting to both can be only guessed at. That
+should be only a temporary drawback.</p>
+
+<p>"The more I see your face in photos, the more I feel drawn toward you.
+Lillah and the other sister represent different moods and tenses
+pictorially. You seem most near to me,&mdash;as I felt on first reading your
+letter. You
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 215]</span>
+have strength, too, where I have not. You are certainly very sensitive,
+but also self-repressed. I think you are not inclined to make mistakes.
+I think you can be quickly offended, and quick to forgive&mdash;if you
+understand the offence to be only a mistake. You would not forgive at
+all should you discern behind the fault a something much worse than
+mistake,&mdash;and in this you would be right. You are inclined to reserve,
+and not to bursts of joy;&mdash;you have escaped my extremes of depression
+and extremes of exultation. You see very quickly beyond the present
+relations of a fact&mdash;I think all this. But of course you have been
+shaped in certain things by social influences I have never had,&mdash;so that
+you must have perfect poise where I would flounder and stumble.</p>
+
+<p>"But imagining won't do always. I should like to know more of you than a
+photograph or a rare letter can tell. I don't know, remember, anything
+<i>at all</i> about you. I do not know where you were born, where you were
+educated,&mdash;anything of your life; or what is much more, infinitely more
+important, I don't know your emotions and thoughts and feelings and
+experiences in the past. What you are now, I can guess. But what <i>were</i>
+you,&mdash;long ago? What memories most haunt you of places and people you
+liked? If you could tell me some of these, how pleasantly we might
+compare notes. Mere facts tell little: the interest of personality lies
+most in the infinitely special way that facts affect the person. I am
+very curious about you,&mdash;but, don't take this too seriously; because
+though my wishes are strong, my disinclination to cause you pain is
+stronger; and you have told me that writing is sometimes fatiguing to
+you. It were so much better could we pass a day or two together.</p>
+
+<p>"You must not underrate yourself as you did in your last. Your few lines
+about the scenery,&mdash;short as they were,&mdash;convinced me that you could do
+something literary
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 216]</span>
+of a very nice sort had you the time and chance to give yourself to any
+such work. But I do not wish that you would&mdash;except to read the result;
+for literary labour is extremely severe work, even after the secret of
+method is reached. I am only beginning to learn; and to produce five
+pages means to write at least twenty-five. Enthusiasms and inspirations
+have least to do with the matter. The real work is condensing,
+compressing, choosing, changing, shifting words and phrases,&mdash;studying
+values of colour and sound and form in words; and when all is done, the
+result satisfies only for a time. What I wrote six years ago, I cannot
+bear the sight of to-day. If I had been a genius, I wonder whether I
+would feel the same.</p>
+
+<p>"Romances are not in novels, but in lives. Can you not tell me some of
+yours when you are feeling very, very well, and don't know what to do?
+What surprised me was your observation about 'sentimental' in your last
+letter,&mdash;and that upon such a worthy topic! What can you think of me?
+And here in this Orient, where the spirit of more ancient faiths enters
+into one's blood with the sense of the doctrine of filial piety, and the
+meaning of ancestor worship,&mdash;how very, very strange and cruel it seems
+to me that my little sister should be afraid of being thought
+<i>sentimental</i> about the photograph of her father! What self-repression
+does all this mean, and what iron influences in Western life&mdash;English
+life that I have almost forgotten! However, character loses nothing:
+under the exterior ice, the Western could only gain warmth and depth if
+it be of the right sort. I hope, nevertheless, my little sister will be
+just as 'sentimental' as she possibly can when she writes to Japan,&mdash;and
+feel sure of more than sympathy and gratitude. Unless she means by
+'sentimental' only something in regard to style of writing&mdash;in which
+case I assure her that she cannot err. If she is afraid of being thought
+really sentimental, I should be
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+much more afraid of meeting her,&mdash;for I should wish to say sweet things
+and to hear them, too, should I deserve.</p>
+
+<p>"At all events remember that you have given me something very
+precious,&mdash;not only in itself,&mdash;but precious because precious to you.
+And it shall never be lost,&mdash;in spite of earthquakes and possible
+fires."</p>
+
+<p>(The something he alludes to as "very precious" was a photograph of
+their father, Charles Hearn, that Mrs. Atkinson had sent him.)</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;I wish I could talk to you more about Father and India. I wish to ask
+a hundred thousand questions. But on paper it is difficult to express
+all one wishes to say. And letters of mere questions carry no joy with
+them, and no sympathy. So I shall not ask <i>now</i> any more. And you must
+not tire your dear little aching head to write when you do not feel
+well. I shall write again soon. For a little while good-bye, with love
+and all sweet hope to you ever,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 26em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio Hearn.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"<i>Kumamoto,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><i>"Kyushu, Japan.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><i>"Jan</i>. 30, '94."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>On November 17th, 1893, at one o'clock in the morning, Hearn's eldest
+son, Leopold Kazuo Koizumi, was born.</p>
+
+<p>He declared that the strangest and strongest sensation of his life was
+hearing for the first time the cry of his own child. There was a strange
+feeling of being double; something more, also, impossible to
+analyse&mdash;the echo in a man's heart of all the sensations felt by all the
+fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the past.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks later he writes to his sister, giving her news about his
+son. "The physician says that from the character of his bones he ought
+to become very tall. He is very dark. He has my nose and promises to
+have the
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 218]</span>
+Hearn eyebrows; but he has the Oriental eye. Whether he will be handsome
+or ugly, I can't tell: his little face changes every day;&mdash;he has
+already looked like five different people. When first born, I thought
+him the prettiest creature I ever saw. But that did not last. I am so
+inexperienced in the matter of children that I cannot trust myself to
+make any predictions. Of course I find the whole world changed about
+me....</p>
+
+<p>"My wife," he goes on, "is quite well. Happily the old military caste to
+which she belongs is a strong one, but how sacred and terrible a thing
+is maternity. When it was all over I felt very humble and grateful to
+the Unknowable Power which had treated us so kindly. The possibility of
+men being cruel to the women who bear their children seemed at the
+moment to darken existence.</p>
+
+<p>"I have received your last beautiful photograph&mdash;or I should say
+two:&mdash;the vignette is, of course, the most lovable, but both are very,
+very nice. I gave the full-figure one to Setsu. She would like to have
+her boy grow up looking either like you or like Posey&mdash;but most like
+you. (Thanks also for the pretty photo of yourself and Posey: Posey is
+decidedly handsome.) But I fear my son can never be like either of you.
+He is altogether Oriental so far,&mdash;looks at me with the still calm
+Buddhist eyes of the Far East, and the soul of another race. Even his
+nose will never declare his Western blood; for the finest class of the
+Japanese offer many strongly aquiline faces. Setsu is a Samurai, and
+though her own features are the reverse of aquiline, there are aquiline
+faces among the kindred.</p>
+
+<p>"I am awfully anxious that the boy should get to be like you. I have had
+your most beautiful photograph copied by a clever photographer here and
+have sent the copies to friends, saying, 'this is my sister; and this is
+the boy. I want him to look like her.' You see I am proud of you,&mdash;not
+only as to the ghostly, but also as to the material part
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+of you. Physiologically I am all Latin and Pagan,&mdash;even though my little
+boy's eyes are bright blue.</p>
+
+<p>" ... It is really nonsense, sending such a thing as his photo at
+fifty-five days old, because the child changes so much every week. But
+you are my little sister. I have called him Leopold Kazuo Hearn&mdash;for
+European use and custom. Kazuo, in Japanese, signifies 'First of the
+Excellent.' I have not registered him under that name, however; because
+by the law, if I registered my wife or son in the Consulate, both become
+English citizens, and lose the right to hold any property, or do any
+business in Japan, or even to live in the interior without a passport. I
+have, therefore, stopped at the Japanese marriage ceremony, and a
+publication of the fact abroad. In the present order I dare not deprive
+my folks of their nationality."</p>
+
+<p>Then some time later he writes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You ask for all kinds of news about Kajiwo. Well, he is now able to
+stand well, and is tremendously strong to all appearance. He tries to
+speak. 'Aba' is the first <i>word</i> spoken by Japanese babes: it means
+'good-bye.' Here is a curious example of the contrast between West and
+East,&mdash;the child comes into the world saying farewell. But this would be
+in accordance with Buddhist philosophy,&mdash;saying farewell to the previous
+life.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right about supposing that the birth of a son in Japan is an
+occasion of special rejoicing. All the baby clothes are ready long
+before birth&mdash;(except the ornamental ones)&mdash;as the <i>Kimono</i> or little
+robe is the same shape for either sex (<i>of children</i>). But, when the
+child is born, if it be a girl, very beautiful clothes of bright
+colours, covered with wonderful pictures, are made for it. If it be a
+boy the colours are darker, and the designs different. My little
+fellow's silken Kimono is covered with pictures of tortoises, storks,
+pine, and other objects typical of long life, prosperity, steadfastness,
+etc. This subject is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+enormously elaborate and complicated,&mdash;so that I cannot tell you all
+about it in a letter.</p>
+
+<p>"After the child is born, all friends and relatives bring presents,&mdash;and
+everybody comes to see and congratulate the mother. You would think this
+were a trial. I was afraid it would tire Setsu. But she was walking
+about again on the seventh day after birth. The strength of the boy is
+hers,&mdash;not mine.</p>
+
+<p>"I was also worried about the physician. I wanted the chief surgeon of
+the garrison,&mdash;because I was afraid. He was a friend, and laughed at me.
+He said: 'If anything terrible should happen, call me, but otherwise
+don't worry about a doctor. The Japanese have managed these things in
+their own way for thousands of years without doctors: a woman or two
+will do.' So two women came, and all was well. I hated the old women
+first, but after their success, I became very fond of them, and hugged
+them in English style, which they could not understand."</p>
+
+<p>The kind dull veil that nature keeps stretched between mankind and the
+Unknown was drawn again. The world became to Hearn nearly the same as it
+had been before the birth of his child, and he could plan, he said, for
+the boy's future. He was afraid he might be near-sighted, and wondered
+if he would be intellectual. "He was so proud of him," his wife says,
+"that whenever a guest, a student, or a fellow-professor called, he
+would begin talking about him and his perfections without allowing his
+friend to get a word in. He perfectly frightened me with a hundred toys
+he brought home when he returned."</p>
+
+<p>After his son's birth, Hearn naturally became still more anxious to have
+Setsu registered legally as his wife, but he was always met by official
+excuses and delays. He was told that if he wished the boy to remain a
+Japanese citizen he must register him in the mother's name only. If he
+registered him in his own name his son became a foreigner.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+On the other hand, Hearn knew that if he nationalised himself his salary
+would be reduced to a Japanese level.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 462px;">
+<a name="fp220" id="fp220"><img src="images/fp220.jpg" width="462" height="700"
+alt="Kazuo (Hearn&#39;s Son) and his Nurse." title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Kazuo (Hearn&#39;s Son) and his Nurse.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"I don't quite see the morality of the reduction," he says, "for
+services should be paid according to the market value at least;&mdash;but
+there is no doubt it would be made. As for America, and my relatives in
+England, I am married: that has been duly announced. Perhaps I had
+better wait a few years and then become a citizen. Being a Japanese
+citizen would, of course, make no difference whatever as to my relations
+in any civilised countries abroad. It would only make some difference in
+an uncivilised country,&mdash;such as revolutionary South America, where
+English or French, or American protection is a good thing to have. But
+the long and the short of the matter is that I am anxious about Setsu's
+and the boy's interests: my own being concerned only at that point where
+their injury would be Setsu's injury."</p>
+
+<p>The only way out of the difficulty, he concluded, was to abandon his
+English nationality and adopt his wife's family name, Koizumi. As a
+prefix for his own personal use he selected the appellation of the
+Province of Izumo "Yakumo" ("Eight clouds," or the "Place of the Issuing
+of Clouds," the first word of the ancient, Japanese song "Ya-he-gaki").</p>
+
+<p>On one of his letters he shows his sister how his name is written in
+Japanese.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Atkinson's youngest child, Dorothy, was born in March, 1894. There
+is an interval of exactly four months between her and her cousin Kazuo.
+It is in reference to this event that the following letter was
+written:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"How sweet of you to get Mrs. or Miss Weatherall to write me the dear
+news! You will be well by the time this reaches you, so that I may
+venture to write more than congratulations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 222]</span></p>
+<p>"I was quite anxious about you,&mdash;feeling as if you were the only real
+<i>fellow-soul</i> in my world but one:&mdash;and birth is a thing so much more
+terrible than all else in the universe&mdash;more so than death itself&mdash;that
+the black border round the envelope made my heart cold for a moment. I
+had forgotten the why. Now I hope you will not have any more sons or
+daughters; you have three,&mdash;and I trust you will have no more pain or
+trouble. As for me, I am very resolved not to become a father again.</p>
+
+<p>"You will laugh at me, and perhaps think it very strange that when only
+thirty-five I began to feel a kind of envy of friends with children. I
+knew their troubles, anxieties, struggles; but I saw their sons grow up,
+beautiful and gifted men, and I used to whisper to myself,&mdash;'But I never
+shall have a child.' Then it used to seem to me that no man died so
+utterly as the man without children: for him I fancied (like some folk
+still really think in other lands) that death would be utter eternal
+blackness. When I did, however, hear the first cry of my boy&mdash;<i>my</i> boy,
+dreamed about in forgotten years&mdash;I had for that instant the ghostly
+sensation of being <i>double</i>. Just then, and only then, I did not
+think,&mdash;but <i>felt</i>, 'I am TWO.' It was weird but gave me thoughts that
+changed all pre-existing thoughts. My boy's gaze still seems to me a
+queerly beautiful thing: I still feel I am looking at myself when he
+looks at me. Only the thought has become infinitely more complicated.
+For I think about all the dead who live in the little heart of
+him&mdash;races and memories diverse as East and West. But who made his eyes
+blue and his hair brown? And will he be like you? And will he ever see
+the little cousin who has just entered the world? The other day, for one
+moment, he looked just like your boy in the picture."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Atkinson about this time went through private trials upon which it
+is unnecessary to touch here. The
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 223]</span>
+following letter of consolation and encouragement was written to her by
+her half-brother:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you too have had your revelations,&mdash;which means deep pains. One
+must pay a terrible price to see and to know. Still, the purchase is
+worth making. You know the Emerson lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"Though thou love her as thyself,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">As a self of purer clay;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Though her parting dims the day,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">Stealing grace from all alive,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">Heartily know</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">When half-Gods go,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9.5em;">The Gods arrive!...</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Reverse the condition: the moral is the same,&mdash;and it is eternal. By
+light alone one cannot see; there must be shadows in multitude to help.
+What we love is good, and exists, but often exists only in <i>us</i>,&mdash;then
+we become angry at others, not knowing the illusion was the work of the
+Gods. The Gods are always right. They make us sometimes imagine that
+something we love ever so much is in others, while it is only in our own
+hearts. The reason they do this to some, like you and me, is to teach us
+what terrible long, long mistakes we might have made without their help.
+Sometimes they really cause a great deal of more serious trouble, and we
+can't tell why. We must wait and believe and be quite sure the Gods are
+good.</p>
+
+<p>"What is not always good is the tender teaching we get at home. We are
+told of things so beautiful that we believe everybody must believe
+them,&mdash;truth, and love, and duty, and honour of soul, etc. We are even
+taught the enormous lie that the world is entirely regulated by these
+beliefs. I wonder if it would not be much better to teach children the
+adult truth:&mdash;'The world is thus and so:&mdash;those beliefs are ideal only
+which do not influence the intellectual life, nor the industrial life,
+nor the social life.
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 224]</span>
+The world is a carnival-ball; and you must wear a mask thereat,&mdash;and
+never, <i>never</i> doff it;&mdash;except to the woman or the man you must
+love always. Learn to wear your mask with grace&mdash;only keep your heart
+fresh in spite of all bitter knowledge.' Wouldn't this be the best
+advice? As a mere commonplace fact,&mdash;the whole battle of life is fought
+in disguise by those who win. No man knows the heart of another man. No
+woman knows the heart of another woman. Only the woman can learn the
+man, and the man the woman;&mdash;and this only after years! What a great
+problem it is; and how utterly it is neglected in teaching the little
+human flowers that we set out in the world's cold without a thought!</p>
+
+<p>"You are more and more like me in every letter; but you are better far.
+I have not learned reserve with friends yet: I supply the lack by a
+retreating disposition,&mdash;a disinclination to make acquaintances. I love
+very quickly and strongly; but just as quickly dislike what I loved&mdash;if
+deceived, and the dislike does not die. My general experience has been
+that the loveable souls are but rarely lodged in the forms which most
+attract us: there <i>are</i> such exceptions on the woman's side as my dear
+little Sis,&mdash;and there are exceptions on the male side of a particular
+order, and rare. But the rule remains. I wonder if all these jokes are
+not played on us by the Gods, who think,&mdash;'No!&mdash;you want the infinite!
+That can be reached later only,&mdash;after innumerable births. First learn,
+for a million years or so, just to love only <i>souls</i>. You <i>must</i>! for
+you will be punished if you try to obtain all perfections in one.' I
+think the Gods talk to us about that way; and when we leave the Spring
+season of life behind, we find the Gods were right after all.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Still, the great puzzle is in all these things there are no general
+rules solid enough to trust in. I fancy the best teaching for a heart
+would be,&mdash;'Always caution,&mdash;but&mdash;believe
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 225]</span>
+the tendency of the world is to good.' And <i>largeness</i> seems to be
+necessary,&mdash;never to suffer oneself to see only one charm; but to train
+oneself to study combinations and understand them. Any modern human
+nature is too complex to be otherwise judged.</p>
+
+<p>"Music,&mdash;yes! If I were near you I would be always teasing you to
+play:&mdash;and would bring you all kinds of queer exotic melodies to make
+variations on: strange melodies from Spanish America and the Creole
+Islands, and Japan, and China, and all sorts of strange places. We
+should try to do very curious things in the way of ballads and songs,
+and you would teach me all sorts of musical things I don't know. By the
+way, you will be shocked to learn, perhaps, that I have never been able
+to appreciate the superiority of the new German music: The Italian still
+seems to me the divine: but that may be because I have never had time to
+train myself to appreciate.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;You do not know how much I sympathise with all your anxieties and
+troubles, and how much I wish for your strength and happiness. Would I
+not like to be travelling with you to countries where you would find all
+the rest and light and warmth you could enjoy! Perhaps, some day that
+may be. Pray to the Gods for my good fortune; and we shall share the
+pleasure together if They listen. If They do not, we must wait as the
+Buddhists say until the future birth. Then I want to be a very rich man,
+or woman, and you a very dear little sister or brother;&mdash;and I want to
+have a steam yacht of 30,000 horse-power.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Your sweetest little daughter, may you live to see her happiness in
+all things! I am glad I have no daughter. A boy can fight&mdash;must fight
+his way; but a daughter is the luxury of a rich man. Had I a daughter,
+she would be too dear; and I should feel inclined to say if dying:&mdash;'My
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 226]</span>
+child, I am unable to guard you longer, and the world is difficult: you
+would do better to come to Shadowland with me.' But your Marjory will be
+well guarded and petted, and have the world made sweet for her; and you
+will have no more grief. You have had all your disappointments and
+troubles in girlhood&mdash;childhood;&mdash;the future must be kind to you. As for
+me, I really think the Gods owe me some favours; they have ignored me so
+long that I am now all expectation."</p>
+
+<p>Then again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">My very sweet little Sister</span>,</p>
+
+<p>"Your dear letter came yesterday, and filled us all with gladness. You
+see I say US;&mdash;for my folks prayed very hard for you to the ancient Gods
+and to the Buddhas,&mdash;that I might not lose that little sister of
+mine.&mdash;And now to answer questions.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, Setsu got the photos, and wondered at them, for she had never
+seen a carriage before of that kind, or a room like your room; and very
+childishly asked me to make her a room like yours. To which I
+said:&mdash;'The cost of such a room would buy for you a whole street in your
+native city of Matsue; and besides, you would be very unhappy and
+uncomfortable in such a room.' And when I explained, she wondered still
+more. (A very large Japanese house could be bought with the grounds for
+about �30&mdash;I mean a big, big merchant's house&mdash;in Izumo.) Another wonder
+was the donkey in the other photo, for none had ever seen such an
+animal.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;As for your ever coming to Japan, my dear, if you do, you shall have
+a chair. But I fear&mdash;indeed I am almost certain&mdash;that the day is not
+very far away when I must leave Setsu and Kajiwo to the care of the
+ancient Gods, and go away and work bravely for them elsewhere, till
+Kajiwo is old enough to go abroad. The days of foreign
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 227]</span>
+influence and of foreign teaching in Japan are rapidly drawing to a
+close. Japan is learning to do well without us; and we have not been
+kind enough to her to win her love. We have persecuted her with hordes
+of fanatical missionaries, robbed her by unjust treaties, forced her to
+pay monstrous indemnities for trifling wrongs;&mdash;we have forced her to
+become strong, and she is going to do without us presently, the future
+is dark. Happily my folks will be provided for; and I expect to be able,
+if I must go, to return in a few years. It is barely possible that I
+might get into journalism in Japan,&mdash;but not at all sure. I suppose you
+know that is my living profession: I understand all kinds of newspaper
+work. But as I am no believer in conventions, I am not likely to get any
+of the big sinecures. To do that one must be a ladies' man, a member of
+some church, a social figure. I am no ladies' man: I am known to the
+world as an 'infidel,' and I hate society unutterably. Were I rich
+enough to live where I please, I should certainly (if unable to live in
+Japan) return to the tropics. Indeed, I have a faint hope of passing at
+least the winters of my old age near the Equator. Where the means are to
+come from I don't know; but I have a kind of faith in Goethe's saying,
+that whatever a man most desires in youth, he will have an excess of in
+his old age. Leisure to write books in a warm climate is all I ask. Pray
+to the Gods, if you believe in any Gods, to help the dream to be
+realised.</p>
+
+<p>"Kajiwo is my nightmare. I am tortured all day and all night by the
+problem of how to set him going in life before I become dust. Sometimes
+I think how bad it was of me to have had a child at all. Yet before
+that, I did not really know what life was; and I would not lose the
+knowledge for any terms of gifts of years. Besides, I am beginning to
+think I am really a tolerably good sort of fellow,&mdash;for if I had been
+really such a monster of
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 228]</span>
+depravity as the religious fanatics declared, how could I have got such
+a fine boy. There must be some good in me anyhow. Nobody shall make a
+'Christian' of Kajiwo if I can help it&mdash;by 'Christian' I mean a believer
+in absurd and cruel dogmas. The world talks much about Christianity, but
+no one teaches it.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;So glad to hear you are able to go out a little again. Perhaps a long
+period of strong solid calm health is preparing for you. After the
+trials and worries of maternity such happy conditions often come as a
+reward. I hope to chat with you by a fire when we are both old, and Kaji
+has shot up into a man,&mdash;looking like his aunt a little&mdash;with a delicate
+aquiline face. But only the Eternities know what his face will be like.
+It is changeable as water now. I won't send another photo of him till he
+looks pretty again.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"With best love,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio Hearn.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"<i>June</i> 24, '94.<br /></p>
+
+<p>"I must go off travelling in a couple of weeks. Perhaps there will be a
+little delay before my next letter reaches you."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 457px;">
+<a name="fp228" id="fp228"><img src="images/fp228.jpg" width="457" height="700"
+alt="Kazuo (Hearn&#39;s Son, Aged about Seven)." title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Kazuo (Hearn&#39;s Son, Aged about Seven).</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the next letter he touches upon these travels undertaken with his
+wife, mother-in-law, and Kaji (an abbreviation of Kazuo, or Kajiwo, as
+Hearn was in the habit of calling him at first).</p>
+
+<p>"How sweet of you," he says, "to send that charming photo of the
+children. It delighted us all. Setsu never saw a donkey&mdash;there are none
+in Japan; and all wondered at the strange animal. What I wondered at was
+to see what a perfect pretty little woman the charming Marjory is. As
+for the boy, he is certainly what every parent wants a boy to be as to
+good looks; but I also think he must
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+have a very sweet temper. I trust that you won't allow the world to
+spoil it for him. They do spoil tempers at some of the great public
+schools. I cannot believe it is necessary to let young lads be subjected
+to the brutality of places like Eton and Harrow. It hardens them too
+much. The answer is that the great school turns out the conquerors of
+the world,&mdash;the subalterns of Kipling,&mdash;the Clives,&mdash;the daring admirals
+and great captains, etc. Perhaps in this militant age it is necessary.
+But I notice the great thinkers generally come from other places.
+However, this is the <i>practical</i> age,&mdash;there is nothing for
+philosophers, poets, or painters to succeed in, unless they are
+independently situated. I shall try to make a good doctor out of Kaji,
+if I can. I could never afford to do more for him. And if possible I
+shall take him to Europe, and stay there with him for a couple of years.
+But that is a far-away matter."</p>
+
+<p>Characteristically with that apprehensive mind of his, his son's future,
+as Hearn himself confesses, became a perfect nightmare.</p>
+
+<p>"I must make an Englishman of him, I fear. His hair has turned bright
+brown. He is so strong that I expect him to become a very powerful man:
+he is very deep-chested and thick-built and so heavy now, that people
+think I am not telling the truth about his age.</p>
+
+<p>"Kajiwo's soul seems to be so English that I fancy his memory of former
+births would scarcely refer much to Japan. How about the real compound
+race-soul, though? One would have to recollect having been two at the
+same time. This seems to me a defect in the popular theory&mdash;still the
+Japanese hold, or used to hold, that the soul is itself a multiple&mdash;that
+each person has a <i>number of souls</i>. That would give an explanation.
+Scientifically it is true. We are all compounds of innumerable
+lives&mdash;each a sum in an infinite addition&mdash;the dead are not dead&mdash;they
+live in
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 230]</span>
+all of us and move us,&mdash;and stir faintly in every heart-beat. And there
+are ghostly interlinkings. Something of <i>you</i> must be in <i>me</i>,
+and of both of us in Kajiwo.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;I wonder if this also be true of little Dorothy. It is a curious
+thing that you tell me about the change in colour of the eyes. I only
+saw that happen in hot climates. Creole children are not uncommonly born
+with gold hair and bright blue eyes. A few years later the skin, eyes,
+hair seem to have entirely changed,&mdash;the first to brown, the two last to
+coal-black.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;I am writing all this dreamy stuff just to amuse my sweet little
+sister,&mdash;because I can't be near to pet her and make her feel very
+happy. Well, a little Oriental theory may have some caressing charm for
+you. It is a very gentle faith&mdash;though also very deep; and you will find
+in my book how much it interests me.</p>
+
+<p>"Take very, very, <i>very</i> good care of your precious little self,&mdash;and do
+not try to write till you feel immensely strong. Setsu sends sweet words
+and wishes. And I&mdash;&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 14em;">"With love,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio Hearn.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Kumamoto, June</i> 2, '94."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<h3>OUT OF THE EAST</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in
+life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole
+business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind
+of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced
+shadows were the sole product of Western civilisation, and
+bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows
+of machinery and chimneys and telegraph poles; and at the
+shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the
+hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of
+houses twenty storeys high, and of hunger begging under them;
+and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty;
+and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and the
+shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and
+the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for
+the purpose of an auto-da-fe. Whereat Japan became rather
+serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes.
+Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first
+matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her
+own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still cling to
+her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never
+again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did
+before."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">After</span>
+the lapse of a certain amount of time Hearn gradually became more
+reconciled to Kumamoto. The climate agreed with him, he put on flesh,
+all his Japanese clothes, he declared, even his <i>kimono</i>, had become too
+small. "I cannot say whether this be the climate, the diet, or what.
+Setsu says it is because I have a good wife: but she might be
+prejudiced, you know."</p>
+
+<p>It is more likely that his well-being at this time arose from his having
+given up the experiment of living exclusively on a Japanese regimen.
+After his bout of illness at Matsue, he found that he could not
+recuperate on the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+fare of the country, even when reinforced with eggs. Having lived for
+ten months thus, horribly ashamed as he was to confess his weakness, he
+found himself obliged to return to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and devoured
+enormous quantities of beef and fowl, and drank terrific quantities of
+beer. "The fault is neither mine nor that of the Japanese: it is the
+fault of my ancestors, the ferocious, wolfish hereditary instincts and
+tendencies of boreal mankind. The sins of the fathers, etc."</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, his knowledge of the strange people amongst whom his lot was
+cast was deepening and expanding. "Out of the East," the collection of
+essays&mdash;essence of experiences accumulated at this time, and the book,
+next perhaps to "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," by which he is best
+known&mdash;is typical of his genius at its best and at its worst. The first
+sketch, entitled, "The Dream of a Summer's Day," is simply a bundle of
+impressions of the journey to which he alludes when writing to his
+sister, made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland
+Sea. This journey, through some of the most beautiful scenery of Japan,
+after the horrors of a foreign hotel at an open port, was one of those
+experiences that form an epoch in an artist's life, touching him with
+the magic wand of inspiration. All the delightful impressions made by
+the poetry and the elusive beauty of old Japan seem concentrated into
+six pages of poetic prose. To the world it is known as "The Dream of a
+Summer's Day."<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a>
+<a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>
+ To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate
+beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the
+indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful
+memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its
+picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of
+sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a>
+</span>in the warm air. Like a bubbling spring the sense of beauty broke forth
+from the caverns of ancient memory, where, according to Lafcadio, it had
+lain imprisoned for years, to ripple and murmur sweet music in his ears.
+He went back to the days of his childhood, back to dreams lying in the
+past in what had become for him an alien land; the fragrance of a most
+dear memory swept over his senses. The gnat of the soul of him flitted
+out into the gleam of blue 'twixt sea and sun, back to the cedarn
+balcony pillars of the Japanese hotel, whence he could see the opening
+of the bay and the horizon, haunted by mountain shapes, faint as old
+memories, and then again to distant and almost forgotten memories of his
+youth by Lough Corrib, in the West of Ireland, the result being as
+beautiful a prose poem as Hearn ever wrote.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_24_24">
+<span class="label">[24]</span></a> "Out of the East," Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 493px;">
+<a name="fp232" id="fp232"><img src="images/fp232.jpg" width="493" height="700"
+alt="Dorothy Atkinson." title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Dorothy Atkinson.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The last essay in the collection is called "Yuko," a reminiscence.</p>
+
+<p>There are many of Lafcadio Hearn's critics who say that, in consequence
+of his ignorance of the Japanese language, and the isolation in which he
+lived, he never could have known anything really of the innermost
+thoughts and feelings of the people to whom he professed to act as
+interpreter. Sometimes they maintain that his views are unfavourable to
+an exaggerated extent, at another too laudatory. His essay entitled
+"Yuko" might certainly be taken as an example of the manner in which he
+selected certain superficial manifestations as typical of the inner life
+of the Japanese&mdash;a people as reserved, as secretive, as difficult to
+follow in their emotional aspects as the hidden currents to which he
+compares them, quoting the words of Kipling's pilot: "And if any man
+comes to you, and says, 'I know the Javva currents,' don't you listen to
+him; for those currents is never yet known to mortal man!"</p>
+
+<p>Yuko was a servant-maid in a wealthy family at Kinegawa.
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 234]</span>
+She had read in the daily newspaper the account of the attempt on the
+life of the Czarevitch during his visit to Japan in 1891. Being an
+hysterical, excitable girl, she was apparently wound up to the pitch of
+temporary insanity. Leaving her employer's home, she made her way to
+Kyoto, and there, buying a razor, she cut her throat opposite the gate
+of the Mikado's palace. Hearn writes of the incident as if the girl were
+a Joan of Arc, obeying the dictates of the most fervent patriotism. He
+goes to the extent of describing the Mikado, "The Son of Heaven,"
+hearing of the girl's death, and "augustly ceasing to mourn for the
+crime that had been committed because of the manifestations of the great
+love his people bore him."</p>
+
+<p>Afterwards, Hearn admitted that his enthusiasm was perhaps exaggerated,
+for revelations showed that Yuko, in a letter she had left, had spoken
+of "a family claim." Under the raw strong light of these commonplace
+revelations, he confessed that his little sketch seemed for the moment
+much too romantic, and yet the real poetry of the event remained
+unlessened&mdash;the pure ideal that impelled a girl to take her own life
+merely to give proof of the love and loyalty of a nation. No small,
+mean, dry facts could ever belittle that large fact.</p>
+
+<p>Let those, however, who say that Hearn did not understand the
+enigmatical people amongst whom his lines were cast, read his article on
+"Jiu-jitsu" in this same volume. It is headed by a quotation from the
+"Tao-Te-King." "Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm
+and strong. So is it with all things.... Firmness and strength are the
+concomitants of death; softness and weakness are the concomitants of
+life. Hence he who relies upon his own strength shall not conquer."
+Preaching from this text, Hearn writes a masterly article, showing how
+Japan, though apparently adopting western
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+inventions, preserves her own genius and mode of thought in all vital
+questions absolutely unchanged. The essay ends with a significant
+paragraph, showing how we occidentals, who have exterminated feebler
+races by merely over-living them, may be at last exterminated ourselves
+by races capable of under-living us, more self-denying, more fertile,
+and less expensive for nature to support. Inheriting, doubtless, our
+wisdom, adopting our more useful inventions, continuing the best of our
+industries&mdash;perhaps even perpetuating what is most worthy to endure in
+our sciences and our arts; pushing us out of the progress of the world,
+as the dinotherium, or the ichthyosaurus, were pushed out before us.</p>
+
+<p>Towards the end of his stay at Kumamoto, he wrote one of his delightful,
+whimsically affectionate letters to his old friend, Mr. Watkin, in
+answer apparently to one from him, recalling their talks and expeditions
+in the old days at Cincinnati, and expressing his gratitude for the
+infinite patience and wisdom shown in his treatment of his naughty,
+superhumanly foolish, detestable little friend. "Well, I wish I were
+near you to love you, and make up for all old troubles." He then tells
+his "dad" that he has been able to save between $3,500 and $4,000, that
+he has placed in custody in his wife's name. The reaction, he said,
+against foreign influence was very strong, and the future looked more
+gloomy every day. Eventually, he supposed, he must leave Japan and work
+elsewhere, and he ends, "When I first met you I was nineteen. I am now
+forty-four&mdash;well, I suppose I must have lots more trouble before I go to
+Nirvana."</p>
+
+<p>Towards the end of the Chinese-Japanese War Hearn was worried with
+anxiety on the subject of the noncontinuance of his appointment at the
+Kumamoto College. "Government Service," he writes to Amenomori, "is
+uncertain to the degree of terror,&mdash;a sword of Damocles;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+and Government 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
+kindness,&mdash;instead of being made to feel that he is the servant of petty
+political clerks." He approached Page Baker, his old New Orleans friend,
+asking him if he could get him anything if he started in the spring for
+America. Something good enough to save money at, not only for himself,
+but something that would enable him to send money to Japan; he was not
+desirous of seeing Boston, New York or Philadelphia, but would rather be
+in Memphis, Charleston, or glorious Florida. Page Baker had apparently
+been sending him help, for on June 2nd Hearn writes acknowledging a
+draft for one hundred and sixty-three pounds, thanking him ten thousand
+times from the bottom of his much scarified heart. "I am now
+forty-four," he adds, "and as grey as a badger. Unless I can make enough
+to educate my boy well, I don't know what I'm worth,&mdash;but I feel that I
+shall have precious little time to do it in; add twenty to forty-four,
+and how much is left of a man?"</p>
+
+<p>In another letter he again alludes to the manner in which the government
+are cutting down the number of employ�s: "My contract runs only until
+March," he ends, "and my chances are 0."</p>
+
+<p>At last, after many hesitations, he definitely decided to leave
+government service, and in the autumn of 1894 accepted the offer of a
+position on the staff of the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i> made by Mr. Robert Young,
+proprietor and editor of the newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>To his sister he wrote from the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i> office, Kobe, Japan:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 237]</span>
+"<span class="smcap">My dear Minnie</span>,</p>
+
+<p>"I am too much in a whirl just now to write a good letter to you (whose
+was the little curl in your last?&mdash;you never told me). I am writing only
+to say that I have left the Government Service to edit a paper in one of
+the open ports. This is returning to my old profession, and is pleasant
+enough,&mdash;though not just now very lucrative.</p>
+
+<p>"Best love to you. Perhaps we shall meet in a few years. My boy is well,
+beginning to walk a little. My book was to be issued on the 29th Sept.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"Ever affectionately,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio."</span>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<h3>KOBE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Last</span>
+spring I journeyed to Japan with Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio Hearn's
+half-sister, and her daughter. Mrs. Atkinson was anxious to make the
+acquaintance of her Japanese half-sister-in-law to ascertain the
+circumstances surrounding the family, also if it were possible to carry
+out her half-brother's wishes with regard to educating his eldest son,
+Kazuo&mdash;his Benjamin&mdash;in England.</p>
+
+<p>The first place at which we landed was Kobe, situated on the eastern end
+of the Inland Sea, opposite Osaka, the Manchester of Japan.</p>
+
+<p>Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's
+flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number
+of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed
+to reside in the city under Japanese law.</p>
+
+<p>During the six weeks on board the P. &amp; O. coming out, I had been reading
+Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden
+soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji&mdash;gateway of the Inland Sea&mdash;it had
+blown a gale, and the Japanese steamer, the <i>Chikugo Maru</i>, to which we
+had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the
+headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all
+night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea,
+made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our
+deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes,
+and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 239]</span>
+and fantastical charm of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed
+uncounted hours we crept between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains,
+catching glimpses here and there of mysterious bays and islands, of
+shadowy avenues, arched by symbolic <i>Torii</i> leading to ancient
+shrines, of groups of fishing villages that seemed to have grown on the
+shore, their thatched roofs covered with the purple flowers of the roof
+plant, the "<i>Yane-shobu</i>." At first we endeavoured to decipher in
+Murray the names of the enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn
+balconies, high-peaked gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by
+a strange people in <i>geta</i> and <i>kimono</i>, like figures on a
+Japanese screen depicting a scene of hundreds of years ago. Across the
+mind of almost every one the magic of Japan strikes with a sensation of
+strangeness and delight,&mdash;a magic that gives the visitor a sense of
+great issues, and remote visions, telling of a kingdom dim and
+half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile as all these villages
+looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of heroism and
+self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and China, or in her
+own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men who had fought
+heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their country,
+chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the death of
+husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields of
+China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur.</p>
+
+<p>A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself
+from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we
+crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the
+eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then
+paled to green.</p>
+
+<p>There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead.
+And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy
+peculiar to Japan, we
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the Ghost of Waters. We
+saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the water grasses that bend
+in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the falling dew was the spray
+from the herdsman's oar. And the heavens "seemed very near, and warm,
+and human; and the silence about us was filled with the dream of a love
+unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning and for ever young, and for ever
+left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the Gods."</p>
+
+<p>The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream.
+It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen
+and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick
+erections, factory chimneys, and plate-glass shop-fronts; easy was it to
+understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country.</p>
+
+<p>Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short
+<i>kuruma</i> journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again
+in the era of Kusimoki Marahige.</p>
+
+<p>Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea
+coast,&mdash;Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;&mdash;ancient Nippon keeps
+them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by
+woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual
+life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface
+of a mirror is changed by passing reflections, as says their
+interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the hotel&mdash;as if to emphasise its nationality&mdash;was an ancient
+pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood;
+while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of
+tiles, a cedar world of <i>engawa</i> and <i>shoji</i>, indescribable
+whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and
+grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+that a strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you
+passed along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity&mdash;another race
+soul, charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated
+itself to your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the
+arrangement of flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns
+with marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery
+rhymes in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman
+with elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and
+rouged and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter,
+while behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were
+squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes
+writing on long strips of paper from right to left.</p>
+
+<p>Enigmatical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing
+displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in
+the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross,
+red-faced women; no coarse, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling.
+Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge
+a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to
+be found in European cities.</p>
+
+<p>The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not
+satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the
+victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season,
+about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres
+that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from
+the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the
+cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen&mdash;about half a dollar
+in American money at the present rate of exchange."</p>
+
+<p>From the upper balcony of his house the Japanese street, with its rows
+of little shops, was visible to the bay;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+from thence he watched the cholera patients being taken away, and the
+bereaved, as soon as the law allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered
+abodes, while the ordinary life of the street went on day and night, as
+if nothing particular had happened. The itinerant vendors with their
+bamboo poles, and baskets or buckets, passed the empty houses, and
+uttered their accustomed cry; the blind shampooer blew his melancholy
+whistle; the private watchman made his heavy staff boom upon the
+gutter-flags; and the children chased one another as usual with screams
+and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished, but the survivors continued
+their play as if nothing had happened, according to the wisdom of the
+ancient East.</p>
+
+<p>A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the
+depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries
+and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of
+1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of
+inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been
+worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he
+or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great
+deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will
+be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which
+the said Lafcadio never deserved, and never will deserve."</p>
+
+<p>Death had no terrors for Lafcadio Hearn, but the premonitions of
+physical shipwreck that beset him now depressed him heart and soul
+because of the work still left undone.</p>
+
+<p>He would like nothing so much, he said, as to get killed, if he had no
+one but himself in the world to take care of&mdash;which is just why he
+wouldn't get killed. He couldn't afford luxuries until his work was
+done.</p>
+
+<p>To his sister he writes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+<p>"I have been on my back in a dark room for a month with inflammation of
+the eyes, and cannot write much. Thanks for sweet letter. I received a
+<i>Daily News</i> from you,&mdash;many, many thanks. Did not receive the other
+papers you spoke of&mdash;probably they were stolen in Kumamoto. I fear I
+cannot do much newspaper work for some time. The climate does not seem
+to suit my eyes,&mdash;a hot climate would be better. I may be able to make a
+trip next winter to some tropical place, if I make any money out of my
+books. My new book&mdash;"Out of the East"&mdash;will be published soon after this
+letter reaches you.</p>
+
+<p>"Future looks doubtful&mdash;don't feel very jolly about it. The mere
+question of living is the chief annoyance. I am offered some further
+work in Kobe, that would leave me leisure (they promise) for my own
+literary work, but I am not sure. However, the darkest hour is before
+the dawn, perhaps.</p>
+
+<p>"Kaji is well able to walk now, and talks a little. Every day his hair
+is growing brighter; a thorough English boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse bad eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"Love to you,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio."</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Although more than twelve years had elapsed between our visit and the
+period when Hearn had resided in Kobe, nearly every one remembered the
+odd little journalist, who might be seen daily making his way, in his
+shy, near-sighted fashion, from his house in Kitinagasa Dori, to the
+office of the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Papellier of Kobe, who attended Hearn in a professional capacity at
+this time, was full of reminiscences. Long before meeting him at Kobe
+Dr. Papellier had been a great admirer of his genius, had, indeed, when
+surgeon
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 244]</span>
+on board a German vessel, translated "Chita" for a Nuremburg paper.</p>
+
+<p>Being an oculist, one of his first injunctions, as soon as he examined
+Hearn's eyes, was cessation from all work and rest in a darkened room if
+he wished to escape total blindness. The right eye was myopic to an
+extent seldom seen, and at the moment was so severely inflamed by
+neuritis that the danger of an affection to the retina seemed
+imminent,&mdash;the left was entirely blind. For the purpose of keeping up
+his spirits, under this unwonted constraint, Dr. Papellier, in spite of
+his professional engagements, went out of his way to visit the little
+man frequently, and would stop hours chatting; showed him, indeed, a
+kindness and consideration that, we were told, were quite exceptional.
+Hearn, Dr. Papellier relates, was a good and fluent talker, content to
+keep the ball rolling himself, and preferred an attentive listener
+rather than a person who stated his own opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Their topics of conversations circled round the characteristics of the
+civilisation in which they were living. Hearn's emotional enthusiasm for
+the Japanese, the doctor said, had cooled; he had received several
+shocks in dealing with officials at Kumamoto, and said his illusions
+were vanishing, and he wanted to leave the country; France, China, or
+the South Sea Islands seemed each in turn to attract his wayward fancy.</p>
+
+<p>The account of Stevenson's life in Samoa had made a great impression on
+him. He declared that if he had not his Japanese family to look after he
+would pack up his books of reference and start at once for Samoa.</p>
+
+<p>"His wife, who understood no English at all, seldom appeared, a servant
+girl usually attending to his wants when I was present.</p>
+
+<p>"It struck me at the time that his knowledge of the Japanese vernacular
+was very poor for a man of his
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 245]</span>
+intelligence, who, for nearly four years, had lived almost entirely in
+the interior, surrounded by those who could only talk the language of
+the country.</p>
+
+<p>"It was plain that what he knew about Japan must have been gained
+through the medium of interpreters. I was still more surprised when I
+discovered how extremely near-sighted he was. His impressions of scenery
+or Japanese works of art could never have been obtained as ordinary
+people obtain them. The details had to be studied piece by piece with a
+small telescope, and then described as a whole."</p>
+
+<p>His mode of life, Dr. Papellier said, was almost penurious, although he
+must have been receiving a good salary from the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i>, and
+was making something by his books. At home he dressed invariably in
+Japanese style; his clothes being very clean and neat. The furniture of
+his small house was scanty. His food, which was partly Japanese and
+partly so-called "foreign," was prepared in a small restaurant somewhere
+in the town. In his position as medical attendant Papellier regarded it
+as his duty to remonstrate on this point, impressing upon him that he
+ought to remember the drain on his constitution of the amount of brain
+work that he was doing, both at the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i> office and writing
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>There were reasons for this that Hearn would not care to tell Papellier.
+Mrs. Koizumi was in delicate health, expecting her second child, and
+Hearn doubtless, with that consideration that invariably distinguished
+him in his treatment of his wife, had his food brought from outside so
+as to save her the trouble and exertion of cooking it at home. Only in
+one way, Papellier said, did he allow himself any indulgence, and that
+was in the amount he smoked. Although he seldom took spirits, he smoked
+incessantly&mdash;not cigars, but a small Japanese pipe&mdash;a
+<i>kiseru</i>&mdash;which
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+he handled in a skilful way, lighting one tiny tobacco pellet in the
+glowing ashes of the one just consumed. One of his hobbies was
+collecting pipes, the other was collecting books. He had already got
+together a valuable library at New Orleans, he did the same in Japan. He
+was able to exercise these hobbies inexpensively, but they needed
+knowledge, time and patience. At his death he possessed more than two
+hundred pipes, all shapes and sizes.</p>
+
+<p>Every one whom we met when we arrived at Kobe advised us to call on the
+editor of the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i> if we wanted information on the subject
+of Lafcadio Hearn. We therefore made our way to the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i>
+office as soon as we could. Mr. Young as well as Mrs. Young, whose
+acquaintance we made subsequently, were both full of reminiscences of
+the odd little genius.</p>
+
+<p>He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday
+for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events,
+the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding&mdash;a
+plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as
+Hearn was in Kobe. "The Japanese," he was wont to say, "are a very
+clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding."</p>
+
+<p>Absence of mind, and inattention to events passing around him, was very
+noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to
+find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the identity of the
+individual with whom he was conversing.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely
+agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For
+some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in Japanese. At last
+one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not Japanese."
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+"Oh, really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised
+the fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's
+editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of
+the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i>. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's
+opinions and conclusions, with regard to the Japanese and their
+religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far
+as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his
+contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary
+qualities. The flint-edged space of the newspaper column cramped and
+hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but
+writing for money an impossibility.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment
+he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the
+special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became nobody again;
+and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a
+fool. So he had to sit and wait for the gods. His mind, however, ate
+itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His
+thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant
+things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things
+were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to
+work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional,
+romantic&mdash;and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and
+rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result
+was an essay that the editor of the <i>Atlantic</i> declared was a veritable
+illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even
+he himself.</p>
+
+<p>Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+considerably against his being an effective newspaper correspondent,
+were his personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must,
+above all things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did
+not possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of
+life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he
+thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of
+wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of
+human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!&mdash;why not
+collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends
+and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to
+see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the
+same doom."</p>
+
+<p>No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary
+reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted
+the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an
+artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,&mdash;a
+wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes
+the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in
+Japan.</p>
+
+<p>"For myself," he says in one of the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i> leaders, "I could
+sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause.
+Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a
+destroyer,&mdash;and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they
+break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent
+the edge,&mdash;the <i>acies</i>,&mdash;to use the Roman word&mdash;of Occidental
+aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful
+and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in
+many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and
+the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+the Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong,
+and this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains
+accepted by the 'noble army.'"</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at
+this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He
+summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial
+element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the
+interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The
+Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and homely,
+which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the life in Old
+Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every way, with only
+the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury and money-grabbing
+at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant was ten times more a
+gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever learn to be.... Then he
+indulges in one of his outbursts against
+carpets&mdash;pianos&mdash;windows&mdash;curtains&mdash;brass bands&mdash;churches! and white
+shirts! and <i>"yofuku"!</i> Would that he had been born savage; the curse of
+civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away
+permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call
+civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have
+conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan&mdash;the only civilised
+country that existed since Antiquity."</p>
+
+<p>"Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly
+so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated,
+from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things,
+the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of
+divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most
+enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says
+in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+Japan,&mdash;for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro'
+(Heart)."</p>
+
+<p>Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the
+emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and
+inner meaning&mdash;just as we say in English, "the heart of things."</p>
+
+<p>It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one
+can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of
+Japan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is
+contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist
+who told him before she came to Japan she had read Hearn's books and
+thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a
+disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his
+descriptions!"</p>
+
+<p>The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's principal book on
+Japan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan." The conditions and people that he describes are
+certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western
+civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps
+exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange
+people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of
+the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for
+instance, said that he once showed him a report in the <i>Kobe Chronicle</i>,
+describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway
+tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in
+"Out of the East," which Papellier declared to be an entirely distorted
+account of the facts as they really occurred. It is the old story of
+imaginative genius and ordinary commonplace folk. In discussing the
+question, Hearn insisted that every artist should carry out the theory
+of selection. A photograph would give the unessential and the essential;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+an artist picks out important aspects; the portrait-painter's work,
+though manifestly less exact, is incomparably finer because of its
+spirituality; though less technically correct, it has acquired the
+imaginative sentiment of the mind of the artist. When depicting the
+Japanese he felt justified in emphasising certain excellent qualities,
+putting these forward and ignoring the rest; choosing the grander
+qualities, as portrait-painters do, and passing over the petty
+frailties, the mean characteristics that might impress the casual
+observer. Nothing is more lovely, for instance, than a Japanese village
+amongst the hills, when seen just after sunrise&mdash;through the mists of a
+spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the
+enchantment passes with the vapours: in the raw clear light he can find
+no palace of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood
+and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks.</p>
+
+<p>He attained to a certainty and precision of form in these "Kokoro"
+essays that places them above any previous work. Now we can see the
+benefit of his concentration of mind, of his earnestness of purpose and
+monastic withdrawal from things of the world; no outside influences
+disturbed his communing with himself, and it is this communing that
+imparts a vague and visionary atmosphere, a ghostly thrill to every page
+of the volume.</p>
+
+<p>Yet here was he, in the forty-fifth year of his age, a master amongst
+masters, arguing with solemn earnestness upon the use or mis-use of the
+word "shall" and "will," begging Professor Hall Chamberlain for
+information and guidance.</p>
+
+<p>"You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine, but I must confess
+that your letter on 'shall' and 'will' is a sort of revelation in one
+sense&mdash;it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of
+fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+sight and sound of the words 'will' and 'shall.' I confess also that I
+never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been
+guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of 'will' as softer and
+gentler than 'shall.' The word 'shall' in the second person especially
+has for me a queer identification with English harshness and
+menace,&mdash;memories of school perhaps. I shall study the differences by
+your teaching and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be
+able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything&mdash;the word
+nothing."</p>
+
+<p>The best essays in "Kokoro" were inspired, not by Kobe, but by Kyoto,
+one of the most beautiful cities in Japan, seat of the ancient
+government and stronghold of the ancient creeds. It lies only a short
+distance from Kobe, and many were the days and hours that Hearn spent
+dreaming in the charming old-fashioned hotel and picking up impressions
+amidst the Buddhist shrines and gardens of the surrounding country.
+"Notes from a Travelling Diary," "Pre-existence," and the charming
+sketch "Kimiko," written on the text "To wish to be forgotten by the
+beloved is a soul-task harder far than trying not to forget," all
+originated in Kyoto.</p>
+
+<p>In a letter to his sister dated March 11th, 1895, he alludes to his book
+"Kokoro."</p>
+
+<p>"My sweet little beautiful sister, since my book is being so long
+delayed I may anticipate matters by telling you something of the
+so-called Ancestor-Worship of which I spoke in my last letter. The
+subject is not in any popular work on Japan, and I think should interest
+you, if for no other reason than that you are yourself such a sweet
+little mother.</p>
+
+<p>"When a person dies in Japan, a little tablet is made which stands upon
+a pedestal, and is about a foot high. On this narrow tablet is inscribed
+either the real name of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+the dead, or the Buddhist name given to the soul. This is the Mortuary
+Tablet, or as you have sometimes seen it called in books, the Ancestral
+Tablet.</p>
+
+<p>"If children die they also have tablets in the home, but they are not
+prayed to,&mdash;but prayed <i>for</i>. Nightly the Mother talks to her dead
+child, advising, reminding, with words of caress,&mdash;just as if the little
+one were alive, and a tiny lamp is lighted to guide the little ghostly
+feet home.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I do not want to write a dry essay for you, but in view of all
+the unkind things said about Japanese beliefs, I thought you might like
+to hear this, for I think you will feel there is something beautiful in
+the rule of reverence to the dead.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope, though I am not at all sure, that you will receive some fairy
+tales by this same mail,&mdash;as I have trusted the sending of them to a
+Yokohama friend. Here there are no book-houses at all&mdash;only shops for
+the sale of school texts. Should you get the stories, I want you to read
+the 'Matsuyama Mirror' first. There is a ghostly beauty that I think you
+will feel deeply. After all, the simplest stories are the best.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to say many more things; but the mail is about to leave, and I
+must stop to-day.</p>
+
+<p>"My little fellow is trying hard to talk and to walk. He is now very
+fair and strong.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, dear little beautiful sister, how you are always,&mdash;give me
+good news of yourself,&mdash;and love me a little bit. I will write soon
+again.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio Hearn."</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In November, 1895, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited him at Kobe,
+and then probably the possibility was discussed of Hearn's re-entering
+the government service as professor of English in the Imperial
+University at Tokyo. But as late as April, 1896, he still seemed uncertain
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+that his engagement under government was assured.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Toyama wrote to him, saying that his becoming a Japanese
+citizen had raised a difficulty, which he hoped might be surmounted.
+Hearn replied, that he was not worried about the matter, and had never
+allowed himself to consider it very seriously&mdash;hinting, at the same
+time, that he would not accept a lower salary. If Matsue only had been a
+little warmer in the winter, he would rather be teaching there than in
+Tokyo, in any event he hoped some day to make a home there.</p>
+
+<p>About this time comes Hearn's last letter to his sister:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">My dear little Sis</span>,</p>
+
+<p>"What you say about writing for English papers, etc., is interesting,
+but innocent. Men do not get opportunities to dispose of any MS. to
+advantage without one of two conditions. Either they must have struck a
+popular vein&mdash;become popular as writers; or they must have <i>social</i>
+influence. I am not likely to become popular, and I have no social
+influence. No good post would be given me,&mdash;as I am not a man of
+conventions, and I am highly offensive to the Orthodoxies who have
+always tried to starve me to death&mdash;without success, happily, as yet. I
+am looking, however, for an English publisher, and hope some day to get
+a hearing in some London print. But for the time being, it is not what I
+wish that I can get, but what I can. Perhaps your eyes will open wide
+with surprise to hear that I shall get nothing, or almost nothing for my
+books. The contracts deprive me of all but a nominal percentage on the
+2nd thousand.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this is only a line to thank you for your sweet little letter. I
+have Marjory's too, and shall write her soon. Love,</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Lafcadio.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"P.S.&mdash;I reopened this letter to add a few lines on second thought.</p>
+
+<p>"You wrote in your last about Sir F. Ball. His expression of pleasure
+about my books may have been merely politeness to a pretty lady,&mdash;my
+sweet little sister. But it may have been genuine&mdash;probably was partly
+so. He could very easily say a good word for me to the Editors of the
+great Reviews,&mdash;the <i>Fortnightly</i>, <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, etc.&mdash;though I
+am not sure whether his influence would weigh with them very greatly.</p>
+
+<p>"At all events what I need is 'a friend at Court,'&mdash;and need badly.
+Perhaps, perhaps only, my little sis could help me in that direction. I
+think I might ask you,&mdash;when possible, to try. The help an earnest man
+wants isn't money: it is opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>"We have a cozy little home in Kobe, and Kobe is pretty, but I fear I
+shall have to leave it by the time this reaches you. Therefore perhaps
+it will be better to address me: 'c/o James E. Beale, <i>Japan Daily
+Mail</i>, Yokohama, Japan.' I shall soon send Kajiwo's last photo with some
+more fairy tales written by myself for your 'bairns.'</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"Love to you,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"L. H."</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As Lafcadio Hearn's biographer, I almost shrink from saying that this
+was the last letter of the series written to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson.
+It somehow was so satisfactory to think of the exile having resumed
+intercourse with his own people, and with his native land; but with
+however deep a feeling of regret, the fact must be acknowledged that he
+suddenly put an end to the intercourse for some unaccountable reason. He
+not only never wrote again, but returned her envelope, empty of its
+contents, without a line of explanation. Mrs. Atkinson has puzzled over
+the enigma many times, but has never been able to fathom
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+the reason for such an action on the part of her eccentric half-brother.
+There was nothing, she declares, in her letter to wound even his
+irritable nerves. At one time she thought it might have been in
+consequence of the attempts of various other members of the family to
+open a correspondence with him; he reiterated several times to Mrs.
+Atkinson the statement that "one sister was enough." I, on the other
+hand, think the key may with more probability be found in a passage from
+one of his letters written at this time, saying he had received letters
+from relatives in England that had made his thoughts not blue, but
+indigo blue. A longing had entered his heart that each year henceforward
+became stronger, to return to his native land, to hold communion with
+those of his own race; this nostalgia was rendered acute by his sister's
+letters, his literary work was interfered with and his nerves upset; he
+therefore made up his mind suddenly to stop the correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>The person who behaved thus was the same erratic creature, who, having
+previously made an appointment, on going to keep it, rang the bell and
+then, seized with nervous panic&mdash;ran away; or had fits of nervous
+depression lasting for days because a printer had put a few commas in
+the wrong place or misspelt some Japanese words. Hearn possessed supreme
+intellectual courage, would stick to his artistic "pedestal of faith"
+with a determination that was heroic, but where his nerves were
+concerned he was an arrant coward. If letters, or arguments with
+friends, flurried him, or awakened uncongenial thoughts or memories, he
+was capable of putting the letters away unread, and breaking off a
+friendship that had lasted for years.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking his silence might be caused by ill-health, Mrs. Atkinson wrote
+several times. The only answer she received was from Mr. James Beale of
+the <i>Japan Mail</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">"Japan Mail </span>
+<span style="margin-right: 7em;"><i>Office</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 8em;">"<i>Yokohama</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em;>"><i>July</i> 9<i>th</i>, 1896.</span></p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Madam</span>,</p>
+
+<p>"I hasten to relieve your anxiety in regard to your brother's health. I
+have just returned from an expedition in the North, and previous to
+leaving about a month ago, was on the point of asking Hearn if he could
+accompany me, because it was a part of the country which he has never
+visited, but about that time I received a letter from him in which he
+stated that he was very busy (I believe he has another book on the
+stocks), and I did not mention the matter when I wrote. His letter was
+written in a very cheerful strain and indicated no illness or trouble
+with his eyes. In regard to the latter I have heard nothing since the
+spring of '95, when, through rest from study, they had recovered their
+normal condition. As Hearn once lived in a very isolated town on the
+West Coast I used to receive letters and other postal matter for him and
+do little commissions for him here, and I remember at times English
+letters passing through my hands. These were all carefully reposted to
+him as they came, and I should say that your letters had undoubtedly
+reached him.</p>
+
+<p>"No apology is necessary on your part, as I am pleased to afford you
+whatever consolation you may find in the knowledge of the fact that your
+brother is alive and well. I think I may venture to say that if he has
+neglected his friends it is due to being busy.</p>
+
+<p>"I send you his address below.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 12em;">"Yours faithfully,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-right: 4em; font-variant: small-caps;">"Jas. Ellacott Beale.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"<i>No. 16, Zashiki,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;"><i>"Shichi-chome, Bangai,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;"><i>"Naka Zamate-dori,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;"><i>"Kobe, Japan.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Mrs. M. C. Buckley-Atkinson.</span></p>
+<p>"Since writing the foregoing I have learned that your brother has been
+appointed to a post in the University. The announcement will appear in
+to-morrow's <i>Mail</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"This appointment will necessitate Hearn's removal to the capital, and
+as the vacation expires on September 15, the address at Kobe I have
+given will not find him. As soon as his Tokyo address reaches me I will
+send it to you.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 4em;">"J. E. B."</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As a set-off to this unaccountable break in his correspondence with his
+sister, I would like to end this chapter with a touching and pathetic
+letter, addressed to Mrs. Watkin at Cincinnati, and another to his "Old
+Dad," friends of over twenty years' standing, but unfortunately am not
+able to do so. Hitherto Hearn's affection had been given to Mr. Watkin;
+of his female belongings he had seen but little. Now apparently, Mrs.
+and Miss Effie Watkin ventured to address the "great man," as their
+husband's and father's eccentric Bohemian little friend had become. To
+Mrs. Watkin he touches on the mysteries of spiritualism which were
+scarcely mysteries in the Far East; some day he hoped to drop in on all
+the circle he loved and talk ghostliness. Some hints of it appeared, he
+said, in a little book of his, "Out of the East." He imagined Mr. Watkin
+to be more like Homer than ever. He himself had become grey and
+wrinkled, fat, too, and disinclined for violent exercise. In other
+words, he was getting down the shady side of the hill, the horizon
+before him was already darkening, and the winds blowing
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 259]</span>
+out of it cold. He was not in the least concerned about the enigmas, he
+said, except that he wondered what his boy would do if he were to die.
+To his "Old Dad" he writes a whimsically affectionate letter, his old
+and dearest friend, he calls him. Practical, material people predicted
+that he was to end in gaol, or at the termination of a rope, but his
+"Old Dad" always predicted he would be able to do something. He was
+anxious for as much success as he could get for his son's sake. To have
+the future of others to care for certainly changed the face of life; he
+worked and hoped, the best and only thing to do.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<h3>TOKYO</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>" ... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of
+circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line
+of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always
+too much for my own peace of mind,&mdash;places, things, and
+persons,&mdash;and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and
+becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a
+great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an
+All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil
+falls, himself in each and all."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span>
+of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,&mdash;and he made many
+for the sake of his wife and family&mdash;was the giving up of his life in
+the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its <i>Yashikis</i> and
+ancient shrines&mdash;to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The
+comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high
+salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing
+was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the <i>Kobe
+Chronicle</i>, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the
+ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate
+horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling
+surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have
+been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place
+pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle.</p>
+
+<p>His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as
+Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo&mdash;of
+the old stories and picture-books&mdash;still
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+existed in her provincial mind; she knew all the famous names, the
+bridges, streets, and temples.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the
+beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would
+do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description
+of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived
+ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing fa�ade, a structure that
+would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or
+London.</p>
+
+<p>After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the
+capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21,
+Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was
+the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house
+with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a
+"rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so
+beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.</p>
+
+<p>In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to
+remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at
+Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary
+work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.</p>
+
+<p>When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of
+the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo
+suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in
+dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the
+quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a
+<i>sake</i>-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the
+neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where
+Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great
+trees, dreaming out of space, out of time.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+<p>The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university.
+One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one
+joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any
+one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must
+have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!"</p>
+
+<p>Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his
+celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the
+Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly
+realistic&mdash;the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here
+the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted
+American suburb&mdash;near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several
+centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor;
+then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and
+bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the
+shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which
+burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and
+bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in
+them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or
+time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess,
+was difficult. But Setsu was happy&mdash;like a bird making its nest, she was
+fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly
+weather it was.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo,
+there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively
+tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the
+Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor,
+seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable
+and sensitive disposition,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+the affection and respect entertained for him by his pupils at the
+various colleges in which he taught, and the manner in which he was
+given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at variance with
+the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers.</p>
+
+<p>His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and
+delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals,
+and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a
+people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if
+England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an
+impossible task.</p>
+
+<p>In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his
+interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while
+professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be
+forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and
+Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo
+University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students.
+Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They
+are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their
+intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the
+surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal,
+therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical
+explanation of technique and style.</p>
+
+<p>The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in
+which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in
+a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the
+order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where
+intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the
+adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy
+and caste, caused disloyalty
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 264]</span>
+and place-hunting to spread in new form, through every condition of
+society, and almost into every household. Nothing, he said, was ever
+stable in Japan. The whole official world was influenced by
+under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea off a coast of
+tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling round the
+writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with fear for
+his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation about
+facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from
+dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he
+would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part
+would talk about things as they ought to be,&mdash;bang, fizz, chaos and
+confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or
+clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted
+for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."</p>
+
+<p>The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship
+were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.</p>
+
+<p>Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to
+dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a
+university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official
+banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty
+invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical
+colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he
+exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first
+the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold
+at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of
+gold&mdash;luckily for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+the Emperor to the university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat,
+and headgear that inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on
+you!" All the professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and
+snow&mdash;no overcoats allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice
+actually permitted to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got
+cold, but nothing more for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious
+thing in the Far East&mdash;'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the
+ancient ceremony was beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not
+beautiful. My little wife tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a
+robber were listening to you upon the roof of the house, he would get
+angry.' So I am only saying to you: 'I don't see that I should be
+obliged to take cold, merely for the privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of
+course this is half-jest, half-earnest. There is a reason for
+things&mdash;for anything except&mdash;a plug hat...."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during
+the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn,
+representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful
+memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he
+alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who
+had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five
+years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the
+Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about
+them."</p>
+
+<p>With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever
+seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of
+French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic.
+Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the
+Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only
+because he inaccurately imagined
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+the Boers to have been the original owners of Dutch South Africa.
+Protestant missionaries he detested, looking upon them as iconoclasts,
+destroyers of the beautiful ancient art, which had been brought to Japan
+by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the other hand, favoured the preservation
+of ancient feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices,
+therefore, on the subject of Roman Catholicism were considerably
+mitigated during his residence in Japan. He describes his landlord, the
+old <i>sake</i>-brewer, coming to definitely arrange the terms of the
+lease of the house. When he caught sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too
+pretty,&mdash;you ought to have been a girl."... "That set me thinking,"
+Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his father about pretty girls,&mdash;what
+shall I do with him? Marry him at seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to
+grim and ferocious Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I
+am now beginning to think that really much of ecclesiastical education
+(bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded upon the best
+experience of man under civilisation; and I understand lots of things
+which I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."</p>
+
+<p>He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion
+one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as
+a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century
+false,&mdash;everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and
+Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies
+in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and
+recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.</p>
+
+<p>After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn
+retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was
+dedicated:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center">TOKYO</p>
+<p class="smcenter">"to my friend<br />
+Amenomori Nobushige<br />
+poet, scholar and patriot."</p>
+
+<p>We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he
+left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that
+Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous
+correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on
+the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To
+Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial
+surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the
+place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the
+approach of a man's fiftieth year&mdash;perhaps the only land to find the new
+sensation is in the Past,&mdash;floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead
+sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to
+feel the charm of the Far East&mdash;or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for
+me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality?
+Alas! I don't know...."</p>
+
+<p>Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little
+genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and
+apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese,
+however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all
+occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm
+of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own
+world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.</p>
+
+<p>Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at
+Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm
+human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.</p>
+
+<p>In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+the World" she mentions McDonald of Yokohama&mdash;in brown boots and
+corduroys&mdash;as escorting her to various places of interest during her
+short stay in Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the
+introduction of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place
+almost immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald
+in one of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.</p>
+
+<p>"After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most
+peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a
+certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the
+ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio."</p>
+
+<p>Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that
+above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in
+uniform,&mdash;a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up
+till midnight, talking about things.</p>
+
+<p>The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of
+Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour
+wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never
+seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for
+the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Ant�us I feel
+always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality,
+not so much of a <i>literary</i> man however."</p>
+
+<p>The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the
+breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks,
+the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had
+touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him
+material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"&mdash;only real
+facts&mdash;not names or dates&mdash;real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy.
+He felt that all the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>
+life of the open ports is not commonplace; there were heroisms and
+romances in it; and there was really nothing in this world as wonderful
+as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in Japan a marvel that
+was hidden as much as possible&mdash;"especially hidden from dangerous
+chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn."</p>
+
+<p>If he could get together a book of short stories&mdash;six would be
+enough&mdash;he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he
+could.</p>
+
+<p>Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his
+friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past
+life&mdash;that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the
+outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying
+that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you
+can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for
+twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the
+disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>The communion between these two was more like that between some popular,
+athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by
+the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two
+middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official
+capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first
+letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an
+audacious proceeding that few ventured upon.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to
+his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street&mdash;the charming
+way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his
+interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs.</p>
+
+<p>In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's
+visits. A rocking-chair,&mdash;rare piece
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+of furniture in a Japanese establishment&mdash;a spirit lamp, and an American
+cigar-ash holder.</p>
+
+<p>McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn
+was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and
+lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was
+doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald,
+therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of
+all sorts.</p>
+
+<p>"With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man!
+How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have
+only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'"</p>
+
+<p>They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed
+and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their
+dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and
+"blue soul"&mdash;names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at
+the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was
+tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at
+Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed
+with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable
+in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years.</p>
+
+<p>"What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall
+ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,&mdash;with
+philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher
+(Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is
+altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the
+world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in
+these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the
+little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an
+indefinite way that some divine attribute was his.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+<p>McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief
+in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti.
+Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to
+try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his
+intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he
+wished him to write fiction&mdash;he wanted him to make some profit out of
+his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really
+paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write
+more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that
+very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which
+alone can furnish the material. They can <i>divine</i>, but must have some
+chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like
+Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them
+and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who
+think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social
+existence."</p>
+
+<p>Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or
+even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to
+officialdom&mdash;but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take
+care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy
+to college there must remain merely a possibility.</p>
+
+<p>The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two
+friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental
+tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession,
+and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary
+tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get
+behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.</p>
+
+<p>He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen
+from afar off. Thursday last, he tells
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 272]</span>
+McDonald, three enemies dug at his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.</p>
+
+<p>He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him,
+who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you
+would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her
+'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"</p>
+
+<p>The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind
+of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals&mdash;six-legged
+calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if
+not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite
+subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories
+of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and
+their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.</p>
+
+<p>But his friends!&mdash;they were the real destroyers, they praised his work,
+believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings
+and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly.
+Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him
+they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the
+sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost&mdash;"against whom sin shall not be
+forgiven,&mdash;either in this life, or in the life to come."</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or
+cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet
+here I am, smoking a divine cigar&mdash;out of my friend's gift-box&mdash;and
+brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I
+right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought
+never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these
+protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and
+again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+cigars, drink good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little
+man had, with characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a
+great-coat, McDonald wrapped him up in his own to send him home&mdash;an
+incident which Hearn declared he would remember for its warmth of
+friendship until he died. Another time, when he complained of toothache,
+McDonald got the navy doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary
+cause. Hearn gives a humorous account of this incident. He found that
+when he returned home the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he
+said, had been modest and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had
+been Mount Vesuvius, the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave
+of '96, and the seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical
+combination.</p>
+
+<p>It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to
+the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings
+seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When
+he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least
+notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper
+again&mdash;treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his
+attacks of temper at Cincinnati.</p>
+
+<p>So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's,
+lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally
+stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed
+duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the
+sale of the copyright of his books in the United States.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<h3>USHIGOME</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>
+"Every one has an inner life of his own,&mdash;which no other eye
+can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed,
+although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we
+betray a faint glimpse of it&mdash;sudden and brief, as of a door
+opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all
+Dopplegangers?&mdash;and is not the invisible the only life we
+really enjoy?"</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span>
+spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at
+Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other
+sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue.</p>
+
+<p>To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things,
+sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that
+rustled through the bamboo-grove.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could
+indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's
+Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else.</p>
+
+<p>This master of impressionist prose confessed&mdash;in his diffident and
+humble manner where his art was concerned&mdash;that now for the first time
+he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's
+"Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised,
+also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but
+in England.</p>
+
+<p>The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his
+pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that
+"he had lost his pen of
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 275]</span>
+fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada that could not sing."</p>
+
+<p>No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of
+hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking
+that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit
+of the public.</p>
+
+<p>Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors,
+and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University,
+at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a
+Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything
+was favourable to absorption in his work.</p>
+
+<p>He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one
+hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling
+well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write."
+Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a
+new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes
+he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a
+month&mdash;perhaps a year&mdash;perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his
+drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many
+stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the
+drawer of his mind when he passed away.</p>
+
+<p>Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of
+excitement and temper&mdash;phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen&mdash;and
+though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was
+slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign
+husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss
+might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's
+common-sense.</p>
+
+<p>"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years
+after his marriage&mdash;"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely
+Japanese household,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+or direct Japanese according to his own light, things are so opposite,
+so eccentric, so provoking at times,&mdash;so impossible to understand.... By
+learning to abstain from meddling, I have been able to keep my servants
+from the beginning, and have learned to prize some of them at their
+weight in gold."</p>
+
+<p>Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese
+union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various
+letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching
+home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not
+bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the
+valise?... Oh! but you <i>are</i> queer&mdash;always, always dreaming! And don't
+you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"</p>
+
+<p>On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his
+face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got
+possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next
+day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He
+acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."</p>
+
+<p>She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one
+day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy
+sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the
+murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden
+and simple things&mdash;"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the
+Japanese poem says&mdash;we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals.
+"He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish
+sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a
+catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he
+laughed the whole household laughed, too."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+<p>His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was
+kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with
+them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his
+merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's
+nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude
+towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the
+cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would
+play "<i>onigokko</i>," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in
+the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in
+learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song,
+for instance&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">"Yu-yake!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">Ko-yake!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Ashita wa tenki ni nare."</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">"Evening-burning!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">Little-burning!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Weather, be fair to-morrow!"</span><br />
+<br />
+or the Song of "Urashima Taro."</p>
+
+<p>He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating
+quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these
+which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming,
+distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In
+one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse
+has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of
+storm and impending disaster which is wonderful.</p>
+
+<p>He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling,
+crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle
+severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see.
+But in Kazuo's and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+his wife's company, he explored every corner of the district where he
+lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he walked with bent head,
+and they followed silently so as not to disturb his meditations. There
+was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya, Ochiai, and the
+neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little note-book, and
+frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as they passed
+along.</p>
+
+<p>An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite
+resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this
+piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so
+miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for
+some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the
+university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly
+stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and
+contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore,
+smoking his Japanese pipe.</p>
+
+<p>Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his
+professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half
+of his stay at Tokyo,&mdash;whilst his health indeed still permitted the
+indulgences&mdash;to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the
+club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one
+at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make
+jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond:
+"Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."</p>
+
+<p>Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and
+smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the
+twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with
+fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse,
+though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+I think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided
+the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and
+in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine,
+the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to
+recall."</p>
+
+<p>Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough
+to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese
+books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept
+them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and
+more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He
+imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim
+of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas
+were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal
+mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden
+fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers,
+ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.</p>
+
+<p>We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune,
+which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were
+fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony
+blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese
+hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination
+with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found
+frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows
+not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection
+with the incident.</p>
+
+<p>But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast,
+where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for
+sea-bathing, that he was in his element.</p>
+
+<p>The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+for him, and during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them,
+dressing as they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed,
+he preferred the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen
+far more than that of college professors.</p>
+
+<p>As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi,
+who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every
+description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's
+description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting
+boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw
+sandals, gourds for holding <i>sake</i>, and bottles of lemonade, while
+surmounting all was the <i>kamidana</i>&mdash;the shelf of the gods&mdash;with its
+<i>Daruma</i>, or household divinity.</p>
+
+<p>Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at
+Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim
+relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the
+gale&mdash;floating in the mists&mdash;shuddering in the leaf&mdash;flickering in the
+light of waters&mdash;or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf,
+to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a
+boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and
+imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating
+round him.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at
+Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published
+after his appointment as professor of English at the university was
+"Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East."
+Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said
+to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work
+was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at
+Matsue, Kobe,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of reminiscence,
+scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary mill.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha
+Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on
+"Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous
+statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for
+substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: <i>and the outer-man
+is the ghost."</i></p>
+
+<p>In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions
+and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and
+substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and
+over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy.</p>
+
+<p>In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that
+the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West.
+Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of
+words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he
+fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of
+occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is
+far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much
+of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much
+prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound
+by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first
+moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous,
+and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on
+the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove
+that he is incapable of feeling them.</p>
+
+<p>All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and
+suggestive instead of detailed. "<i>Ittakkiri</i>" (entirely vanished, in the
+sense of "all told"), is a term
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+applied contemptuously to the poet who, instead of an indication, puts
+the emotion itself into words.</p>
+
+<p>The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom
+consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs,
+panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies,
+curtains and women's cr�pe silk underwear, they are written by every one
+and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes
+poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his
+thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple
+poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you
+can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The
+translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street,"
+contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep
+feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island
+Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them
+are charming.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">
+"To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">
+Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">
+"Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">
+The flowing of water, the Way of Love."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating
+this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to
+Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so,
+as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character.
+Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant
+Friendship."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this
+time with Buddhistical theories....
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+"To any really scientific imagination, the curious analogy existing
+between certain teachings of Eastern faith,&mdash;particularly the Buddhist
+doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the
+phenomenal result of acts and thoughts,&mdash;might have suggested something
+much more significant than my cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are
+offered merely as intimations of a truth incomparably less difficult to
+recognise than to define."</p>
+
+<p>The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful
+a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote&mdash;the immense poetry
+of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a
+hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with
+faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the
+mighty day.</p>
+
+<p>The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable&mdash;a memory
+of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad
+millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme
+of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour
+when thought itself must fade.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>"Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated</p>
+
+<p class="smcenter">to<br />
+Mrs. Alice von Behrens<br />
+for auld lang syne.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was
+one of his New York acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of
+this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the
+Japanese poem on the first page.</p>
+
+<p>To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+quite know what to do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he
+says, he has been and gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the
+whole thing perfectly packed and labelled and addressed in various
+languages, dedicated to Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods.
+To save himself further trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to
+do whatever they pleased about terms&mdash;and not to worry him concerning
+them. Then he felt like a man liberated from prison&mdash;smelling the
+perfumed air of a perfect spring day.</p>
+
+<p>In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the
+fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement
+of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The
+splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness
+to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the
+Now,&mdash;a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that
+maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of
+Heaven,&mdash;eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust ... Thus and only
+thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes&mdash;the spectral
+past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and
+the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one
+soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory."</p>
+
+<p>"Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs.
+Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang
+Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book
+is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written,
+and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches,
+inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a p�an, as it
+were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because
+of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">
+"Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">
+... Ah! the autumn rains!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing
+butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">to-day."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<h3>NISHI OKUBO</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending
+in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold
+the selfsame Moon."&mdash;<i>Buddhist poem translated by</i>
+<span class="smcap">Lafcadio Hearn</span>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from
+21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his
+wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan.
+It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain
+Fujisaki&mdash;one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate
+friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners'
+Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show
+of azaleas is held once a year.</p>
+
+<p>After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as
+it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi
+for her occupation.</p>
+
+<p>Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike
+acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow
+now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most
+of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a
+considerable circulation in England.</p>
+
+<p>There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary
+knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for
+the difficulties in which he
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+so repeatedly found himself. "I have given up thinking about the
+business side of literature, and am quite content to obtain the
+privilege of having my books produced according to my notions of
+things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald.</p>
+
+<p>On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,&mdash;assisted by his
+wife,&mdash;he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he
+suddenly heard an <i>uguisu</i> (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove
+outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his
+wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made
+enough for you and the children."</p>
+
+<p>During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his
+eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was
+obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the
+paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as
+copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of
+setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers
+of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any
+necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in
+conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would
+have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float
+round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding.
+Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the
+practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical
+life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity
+flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most
+probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his
+Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+ought," he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's
+work,&mdash;to prove of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny,
+tireless and regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and
+see. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging,
+kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,&mdash;and trying to live. Then
+pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,&mdash;and be astonished and
+pleased."</p>
+
+<p>"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no
+two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of
+each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can,
+without reference to nationalities or schools."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the
+highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his
+strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole
+song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and
+religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people.</p>
+
+<p>At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had
+suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental an�mia
+common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things,"
+as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not."
+Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance.
+Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it
+already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he
+did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead
+of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain
+thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency
+was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly
+apparitions in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude of supernatural
+visions, a procession stretching back out of life into the night of
+forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library, weaving his
+dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his work as to have
+forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the rapping of his
+little pipe against the <i>hibachi</i>, the intermittent scratch of his
+pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down, while the
+bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with uplifted
+hand and enigmatic smile.</p>
+
+<p>Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from
+memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and
+realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his
+curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his
+house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath
+his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his
+wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of
+Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky
+and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac
+spread of the <i>myiakobana</i>, the blazing yellow of the <i>natal�</i>, the
+flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the
+growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey
+sand-crickets, the shrilling <i>semi</i>, and the little red crabs astir
+under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs,
+that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the <i>uguisu</i> and
+the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.</p>
+
+<p>Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the
+social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have
+Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers'
+ends will
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's incidental
+sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by any of our
+English essayists.</p>
+
+<p>Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems
+suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After
+some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies
+when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on
+the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained
+after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent
+inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small
+things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his
+window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising
+above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.</p>
+
+<p>In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully,
+almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject
+of human desire and attainment.</p>
+
+<p>"He was two years old when&mdash;as ordained in the law of perpetual
+recurrence&mdash;he asked me for the Moon.</p>
+
+<p>"Unwisely I protested:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach
+it.'</p>
+
+<p>"He answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock
+it down.'</p>
+
+<p>" ... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately
+truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.</p>
+
+<p>"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that
+brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,&mdash;upon insects and
+fishes and birds and mammals,&mdash;and tried to account for it by some
+inherited memory
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 291]</span>
+of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom....</p>
+
+<p>"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish
+could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,&mdash;do not we, children
+of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,&mdash;longings
+that if realised could only work us woe,&mdash;such as desire for the
+continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which
+once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often
+subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?</p>
+
+<p>"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the
+child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us
+to wish for very much more than the Moon,&mdash;even for more than the Sun,
+and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."</p>
+
+<p>He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife
+tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became
+more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings,
+supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He
+had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now
+the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and
+become "<i>one</i>" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with
+the rapture of wind and sea&mdash;was his. The fact of his own existence was
+so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of
+life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.</p>
+
+<p>"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,&mdash;that I touch
+myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three!
+I shall see the sun again!</p>
+
+<p>"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will
+come a night never to be broken by any dawn&mdash;... Doubt the reality of
+the substance ...
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+the faiths of men, the gods,&mdash;doubt right and wrong, friendship and
+love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;&mdash;there will
+always remain one thing impossible to doubt,&mdash;one infinite blind black
+certainty.... And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think:
+the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent for ever
+away;&mdash;the Sheol is naked before us,&mdash;and destruction hath no covering.</p>
+
+<p>"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that
+I shall cease to exist&mdash;which is horror!... But&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>"Must I believe that I really exist?..."</i></p>
+
+<p>Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and
+ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have
+been. Before the beginnings of time I was;&mdash;beyond the uttermost
+circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but
+seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without
+shore I am;&mdash;and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face
+of my depth....</p>
+
+<p>"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of
+things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;&mdash;and the gloom slowly
+lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and
+multiplied. And the dimness flushed.</p>
+
+<p>"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty
+Purifier,&mdash;symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also
+mine!..."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn
+describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he
+moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal
+intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of
+pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night,
+the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere.</p>
+
+<p>"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the
+policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be
+painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her
+back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that
+she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of
+Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful
+Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side;
+and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight
+hundred"&mdash;which represent the customary abbreviation of the word <i>yaoya</i>
+(vegetable-seller)&mdash;any <i>yaoya</i> being supposed to sell eight hundred or
+more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog;
+but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.</p>
+
+<p>His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of
+newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the
+garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the
+little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on
+"Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?</p>
+
+<p>"The air&mdash;the delicious air!&mdash;is full of sweet resinous odours shed from
+the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the
+neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises
+the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the
+South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies
+of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; <i>semi</i> are whizzing;
+wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy
+repairing their damaged habitations....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+<p>" ... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy.
+They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great
+trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads
+washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other
+visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean
+town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to
+attempt an essay on Ants."</p>
+
+<p>After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful
+woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants,
+and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his
+ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants'
+talk, he would hear of something to his advantage&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes
+with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things
+inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."</p>
+
+<p>After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a
+still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic
+law, he thus ends his essay:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures
+capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.</p>
+
+<p>"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power
+supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no
+gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would
+seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency'
+in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems
+nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics
+fundamentally opposed to human egoism."</p>
+
+<p>In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect
+Musicians" that reveals his erudite and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+minute care in the study of "things Japanese." He describes the first
+beginning of the custom of keeping musical insects, tracing it down from
+ancient Japanese records to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era
+in 1789. From the time of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect
+musicians, and improving the quality of their song from generation to
+generation. Every detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen
+vessels half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with
+fresh food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth
+of the insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and
+universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest
+poets;&mdash;the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the
+voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of
+forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in
+whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms
+of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in
+the mechanical,&mdash;their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties
+of ugliness;&mdash;but in the knowledge of the natural,&mdash;in the feeling of
+the joy and beauty of earth,&mdash;they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet
+perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has
+wasted and sterilised their paradise,&mdash;substituting everywhere for
+beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly
+hideous,&mdash;that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend
+the charm of that which we destroyed."</p>
+
+<p>During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect
+musicians," a grass-lark or <i>Kusa-Hibari</i>. "The creature's cage was
+exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so
+small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides
+of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 296]</span>
+only a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito&mdash;with a pair of
+antenn� much longer than his own body, and so fine that they could only
+be distinguished against the light.</p>
+
+<p>"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than
+his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...</p>
+
+<p>"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber
+... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the
+room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness,
+a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric
+bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes
+swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish
+resonance....</p>
+
+<p>"Now this tiny song is a song of love,&mdash;vague love of the unseen and
+unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known
+in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many
+generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the
+fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in
+a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt
+thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was
+sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the
+exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
+It is a song of organic memory,&mdash;deep, dim memory of other quintillions
+of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses
+of the hills. Then that song brought him love,&mdash;and death. He has
+forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he
+sings now&mdash;for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust
+of the past,&mdash;he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of
+time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+it. They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a
+mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then
+he goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the
+unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant,
+never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy
+music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold
+in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I
+have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a
+barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm
+of the delicate voice,&mdash;telling of one minute existence dependent upon
+my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,&mdash;telling me
+also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost
+within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the
+vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and
+thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of
+his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely,
+nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,&mdash;an atrocious end, for he had
+eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,&mdash;especially Hana the
+housemaid!</p>
+
+<p>"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst
+that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human
+crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."</p>
+
+<p>During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight,
+every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject&mdash;the
+polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title
+"Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the
+crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+in the country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work
+which is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of
+long years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."</p>
+
+<p>Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these
+Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product
+of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the
+work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk
+again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion
+he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so
+big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or
+lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing
+at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off
+him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a
+little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the
+sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The
+privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be
+his.</p>
+
+<p>In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and
+comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation."
+It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were
+fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving
+descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+<h3>HIS DEATH</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>" ... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper
+and a dimmer sea, and ever separating farther and farther one
+from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon
+the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor
+frames, and all that is left of their once fair colours, must
+melt forever into the colourless Void...."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ten</span> years after his arrival in Japan the lode-star of Lafcadio Hearn's
+life and genius rose above the far eastern horizon, to cast her clear
+and serene radiance on the shadowed path that henceforth was but a
+descent towards the end. We conclude that "The Lady of a Myriad Souls"
+had written an appreciative letter on the subject of his work, and his,
+dated January, 1900, was in answer to hers.</p>
+
+<p>The thread was taken up where it had been dropped, the old affection and
+friendship reopened, unchanged, unimpaired.</p>
+
+<p>Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion
+of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people,
+his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy&mdash;his
+Benjamin&mdash;in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is
+only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly
+he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of
+the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight."
+"I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as
+the Japanese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of
+strong men,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins." With intense
+longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western lands from
+which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so isolated
+that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst Englishmen
+again ... with all their prejudices and conventions."</p>
+
+<p>The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he
+has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited
+civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but&mdash;such a
+stubborn thing is human nature&mdash;sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of
+the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that
+Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born,
+let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love,
+worship as they worship."</p>
+
+<p>At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might
+wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was
+during the period of his enthusiasm for "things Japanese." When he came
+to issue with the officials at Kumamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change
+was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an
+occidental&mdash;one of his own people.</p>
+
+<p>All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life
+he had passed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different
+standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad,
+to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in
+the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had
+forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action
+in nationalising himself a Japanese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his
+son is a Japanese, born in Japan under Japanese conditions, and unless
+he throws off all family ties
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+and responsibilities, which, being the eldest son, are&mdash;according to
+communal law in Japan&mdash;considerable, he must submit to this inexorable
+destiny. In his father's adopted country the military or naval
+profession is closed to him, however, in consequence of his defective
+eyesight, and both would have been closed to him also in England.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had
+expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son,
+made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same
+answer was given on every side. He is a Japanese, and must conform to
+the dictates of the Japanese authorities. They might permit him to go
+away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his
+father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality.
+Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-class education at the Waseda
+University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to
+separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart
+if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had anticipated, he was forced out of the
+Imperial University, on the pretext that as a Japanese citizen he was
+not entitled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone
+Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was
+offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible
+for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to
+professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet
+he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The
+long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during
+thirteen years for Japan, and sacrificed everything for Japan, I have
+been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the
+country. For while the politico-religious combination that has
+engineered this matter
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 302]</span>
+remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any position in any
+educational establishment here for even six months."</p>
+
+<p>In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this
+juncture, it is well to remember that Japan was struggling for
+existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied
+powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be
+soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one
+official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind
+to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the
+possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the
+means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking
+into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard,
+perhaps, but the Japanese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or
+they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been
+set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia
+was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to
+the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible
+privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost
+impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been
+accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation
+rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must
+also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the
+Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign
+teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier
+for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed
+at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the
+ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his
+disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls?
+and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the
+uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of
+years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him
+to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far
+from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,&mdash;sturdy and not likely
+to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I
+must devote the rest of my life to looking after him."</p>
+
+<p>And she&mdash;his wise friend&mdash;knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's
+isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that
+awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action
+and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Very true," was Hearn's answer&mdash;and well did he know, for had not he,
+the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the
+position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day?
+"No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid:
+the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,&mdash;and I flee, and
+bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might
+be, that a man should not be,&mdash;except as to bodily strength.... I taught
+him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit
+of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil&mdash;what
+chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly
+pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?"</p>
+
+<p>The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">"Sense with keenest edge unused,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Lovely feet as yet unbruised,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">On the ways of dark desire;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Sweetest hope that lookest smiling</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">O'er the wilderness defiling!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">"Why such beauty, to be blighted,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">By the swarm of foul destruction?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Why such innocence delighted,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">When sin stalks to thy seduction?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">All the litanies e'er chanted,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Shall not keep thy faith undaunted.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">"I have pray'd the Sainted Morning</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">To unclasp her hands to hold thee;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">From resignful Eve's adorning</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">Stol'n a robe of peace to enfold thee;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">With all charms of man's contriving</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Arm'd thee for thy lonely striving.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">"Me too once unthinking Nature,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">&mdash;Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Fashion'd so divine a creature,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">Yes, and like a beast forsook me.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">I forgave, but tell the measure,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Of her crime in thee, my treasure."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It seems as if he were haunted by memories of his own thwarted childhood
+and shipwrecked youth. If possible he wished to guard and protect his
+Benjamin from the pitfalls that had beset his path, knowing that the
+same dangers might prevail in Kazuo's case as in his own, and that there
+might be no one to protect and guard him.</p>
+
+<p>A charming piece of prose, from which I give a few extracts, was found
+amongst Hearn's papers after his death. The manuscript, lent to me by
+Mrs. Atkinson, lies by my hand as I write; it is entitled "Fear."</p>
+
+<p>"An old, old sea-wall, stretching between two boundless levels, green
+and blue. Everything is steeped in white sun; and I am standing on the
+wall. Along its broad and grass-grown top a boy is running towards
+me,&mdash;running in sandals of wood,&mdash;the sea-breeze blowing aside the long
+sleeves of his robe as he runs.... With what sudden incommunicable pang
+do I watch the gracious little figure leaping in the light.... A
+delicate boy, with the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+blended charm of two races.... And how softly vivid all things under
+this milky radiance,&mdash;the smiling child-face with lips apart,&mdash;the
+twinkle of the light quick feet,&mdash;the shadows of grasses and of little
+stones!...</p>
+
+<p>"But quickly as he runs, the child will come no nearer to me,&mdash;the slim
+brown hand will never cling to mine. For this light is the light of a
+Japanese sun that set long years ago.... Never, dearest!&mdash;never shall we
+meet,&mdash;not even when the stars are dead!"</p>
+
+<p>By the exercise of a considerable amount of diplomacy Mrs. Wetmore
+succeeded at this time in inducing Jacob Gould Schurmann, president of
+Cornell University, to enter into an arrangement with Hearn for a series
+of lectures on Japan.</p>
+
+<p>As of old, she believed him capable of conquering Fate, in spite of the
+despotism of fact as exemplified in the loss of eyesight and broken
+health; she felt sure he could interest an American audience by the
+material he had to offer, and the scholarly way in which he knew how to
+utilise it.</p>
+
+<p>His answer to the suggestion of the lectures is characteristic:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"O fairy! what have you dared to say? I am quite sure that I do <i>not</i>
+know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or
+politics, or history. (You did not say 'politics' or 'history,' however,
+and that seems to be what is wanted.) But perhaps you know <i>what</i> I know
+better than I myself know,&mdash;or perhaps you can give me to eat a Fairy
+Apple of Knowledge. At present I have no acquaintance even with the
+Japanese language: I cannot read a Japanese newspaper: and I have
+learned only enough, even of the <i>kana</i>, to write a letter home. I
+cannot lie&mdash;to my Fairy; therefore it is essential that I make the
+following declaration:&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Then he repeats the statement made in the preface of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+"Japan, an Interpretation." For these lectures prepared with so much
+industry and care were destined ultimately to go to the making of that
+beautiful and lucid exposition of the history and thought of a great
+people.</p>
+
+<p>The world has to be grateful to President Schurmann for withdrawing from
+his contract, and cancelling the offer made to Hearn for the delivery of
+lectures at the university.</p>
+
+<p>The excuse that illness had broken out at Cornell was hardly a
+sufficient one. There is little doubt that unfavourable reports of
+Hearn's state of health, and doubts as to the possibility of his being
+able to lecture in public, had drifted to Cornell, and the president,
+acting for the best interests of his university, did not feel justified
+in abiding by his proposals.</p>
+
+<p>With that extraordinary mental elasticity that characterised him all his
+life, Hearn made the best of the situation, and set to work, polishing
+and repolishing his twenty-two lectures until they reached the high
+level of style that distinguishes "Japan, an Interpretation." His
+courage was the more extraordinary as, filled with the idea that he was
+at last going to America, he had gone into every detail of meeting his
+friend. "I would go straight to your Palace of Fairy before going
+elsewhere," he writes to Mrs. Wetmore, "only to see you again&mdash;even for
+a moment&mdash;and to hear you speak in some one of the myriad voices would
+be such a memory for me, and you would let me 'walk about gently
+touching things.'..." Then in another letter comes a sigh of regret,
+and as it were farewell. "But your gifts, O Faery Queen have faded away,
+even as in the Song ... and I am also fading away."</p>
+
+<p>After the failure of his projected visit to America, a suggestion was
+made by the University of London that he should give a series of
+lectures there. But here was the "Ah-ness" of things. Had Hearn's health
+permitted he would probably have been in England in 1905, where
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+he would have been received with honour. The Japanese had fought Russia
+and beaten her. People became wildly enthusiastic about Japan: the
+libraries were besieged with inquiries for Hearn's books,&mdash;just at the
+eleventh hour, when he had become a name, he died!</p>
+
+<p>All his life his dream had been to be independent, to be able to travel.
+Referring to a gentleman who was in Japan, he once said, "I envy him his
+independence. Think of being able to live where one pleases, nobody's
+servant,&mdash;able to choose one's own studies and friends and books."</p>
+
+<p>The offer of an easy post was made to Hearn about this time as professor
+of English in the Waseda University founded by Count Okuma. He closed
+with it at once, thus putting an end to all negotiations with the
+University of London.</p>
+
+<p>His youngest child, Setsu-ko, was born this year, and all idea of
+leaving Japan was henceforth abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>In his last letter to Mrs. Wetmore, dated September, 1904&mdash;the month in
+which he died&mdash;he touches on the dedication he had made to her in his
+book, "A Japanese Miscellany." To the last the same sympathy and
+understanding reigned between them. Patiently she exhorted, comforted.
+Her wise counsel and advice soothed his torn nerves and aching heart to
+the end. So this affection, untouched by the moth and rust of worldly
+intercourse, went down with him "into the dust of death."</p>
+
+<p>Slowly but surely the years with their chequered story were drawing to
+an end. The sum of endeavour was complete, the secrets Death had in its
+keeping were there for the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some
+of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same
+impression&mdash;a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine
+consideration
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+for others, the thought of the future of his wife and children,
+triumphing over suffering and death.</p>
+
+<p>He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he
+was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say
+my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep
+thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was
+strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I
+made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our
+house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither
+in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said."</p>
+
+<p>While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up
+and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he
+died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her
+<i>tokonoma</i> she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a
+moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I
+could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had
+passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve
+hours were over!</p>
+
+<p>Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the
+daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree
+in the garden,&mdash;not much to look at&mdash;but it was a blossom blooming out
+of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant
+Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi.</p>
+
+<p>"I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at
+it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is
+here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful,
+but will soon die under the approaching cold.'</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+<p>"You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking
+that the <i>Kaerizaki</i>, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid
+farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...."</p>
+
+<p>In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's
+death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of
+September 26th, after supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he
+was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The
+pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he
+wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in
+bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a
+little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the
+world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+<h3>HIS FUNERAL</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong,
+as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange
+possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal
+records in the Universal life,&mdash;every thought of good or ill
+or aspiration,&mdash;and the Buddhistic Karma would be a
+scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the
+thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds
+would be forever acting invisibly on us."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Perhaps</span> of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with
+Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than
+his funeral.</p>
+
+<p>It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a
+Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no
+religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the
+last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions"
+in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any
+boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all
+fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were
+swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious
+palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space.</p>
+
+<p>Yet&mdash;Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien
+to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his
+latter years&mdash;at his death his body was taken possession of by priests,
+who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over,
+and conducted the burial service with every fantastic
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+accomplishment of Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple!</p>
+
+<p>A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss
+Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration
+for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him
+lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama
+paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession
+would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on
+September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in
+Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired
+the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the
+pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a
+"ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and
+hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little
+children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of
+shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under
+the relentless light of the afternoon sun.</p>
+
+<p>He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and
+unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest
+ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper
+<i>gohei</i>; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge
+bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas
+carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the
+grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne,
+palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office
+it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing
+what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+of good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn.</p>
+
+<p>While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed
+into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two
+groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little
+daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while
+the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son,
+Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university
+professors, went to the right.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial
+service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments
+chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo.</p>
+
+<p>After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and
+led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse,
+touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of
+incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife,
+when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven,
+in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped
+some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the
+brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the
+ceremony ended and the congregation left the church.</p>
+
+<p>Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body
+would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of
+cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students
+were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of
+the day was at an end.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+<h3>VISIT TO JAPAN</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Every dwelling in which a thinker lives certainly acquires a
+sort of soul. There are Lares and Penates more subtle than
+those of the antique world; these make the peace and rest of
+a home."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss
+Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening.
+Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law,
+announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi
+Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the
+red tape&mdash;the bales of red tape&mdash;that surround social as well as
+official transactions in Japan.</p>
+
+<p>Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of
+introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's
+coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the
+Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club
+library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had
+recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for
+delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and,
+though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system
+leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters;
+in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do
+with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+also reminded us that Mrs. Koizumi did not understand a word of English;
+she must have recourse to an interpreter before communicating with her
+Irish sister-in-law, but, above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs.
+Atkinson had addressed her letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by
+which no properly constituted Japanese postman would find himself
+justified in recognising Hearn's widow. By nationalising himself a
+Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as his occidental inheritance went,
+had vanished forever. He and his wife were only known at Tokyo as Mr.
+and Mrs. Koizumi.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about
+Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been
+extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the
+friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in
+consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on
+sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on
+Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses
+from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that
+his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to
+Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami
+was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her,
+and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs,
+and insisted on his visitors doing the same.</p>
+
+<p>The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is
+"another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese;
+it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything
+unexpected&mdash;all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised
+country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a
+Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately
+in a jinrikisha to see
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have fallen into one another's
+arms, and a close intimacy would have been begun. Not so in Japan.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 492px;">
+<a name="fp314" id="fp314"><img src="images/fp314.jpg" width="492" height="700"
+alt="Kazuo (Hearn&#39;s Son, Aged about Seventeen)." title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Kazuo (Hearn&#39;s Son, Aged about Seventeen).</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr.
+Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful
+sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a
+letter will turn up."</p>
+
+<p>Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in
+consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's
+advice.</p>
+
+<p>I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first
+pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's
+interview with the old Buddhist priest.</p>
+
+<p>Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where,
+embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of
+pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine.</p>
+
+<p>From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a
+pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I
+experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression,
+common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a
+dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a
+special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic
+light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering
+eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to
+the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range
+of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through
+the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its
+familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese
+picture-books&mdash;the sacred, the matchless mountain&mdash;Fuji-no-yama.</p>
+
+<p>There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+from out the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision
+of the old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three
+hundred volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the
+interpreter Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise
+between them, while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat,
+and the song of the <i>uguisu</i> from the plum-tree grove, we heard the
+murmur of their voices.</p>
+
+<p>"That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been....
+Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best
+painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any
+action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits
+outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such
+progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach
+such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force
+also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves
+increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last
+that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation
+have no existence."</p>
+
+<p>Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while
+seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures
+pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady,
+dressed in the national Japanese costume&mdash;a kimono of dark iron-grey
+silk&mdash;the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed
+also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his
+feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of
+the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese
+half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but
+the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
+<p>Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas,
+good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced,
+Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik,
+of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished
+dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her
+person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible
+honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and
+elaborate coiffure&mdash;the usual erection worn by her country-women&mdash;she
+might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large
+English establishment.</p>
+
+<p>The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a
+shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried,
+instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally
+used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and
+indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of
+memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it
+had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and
+from the Imperial University.</p>
+
+<p>After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision,
+leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He
+was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the
+background.</p>
+
+<p>At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he
+laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another
+race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic
+changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he
+was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton
+Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and
+near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered
+his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown hair
+and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a queer
+little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to learn
+by heart."</p>
+
+<p>Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary
+likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese
+expression&mdash;a mask of reserve as it were&mdash;fell like a curtain over his
+face,&mdash;he was Japanese again.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible;
+his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a
+sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic
+in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative
+understand what he wished to say.</p>
+
+<p>It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have
+been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the
+Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely
+forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason,
+who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves
+considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly
+possessed&mdash;that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had
+been so sensitive&mdash;a soft and musical voice.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England,
+and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's
+father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain
+round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her
+bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then
+told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese
+woman to wear any article of jewellery.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 465px;">
+<a name="fp318" id="fp318"><img src="images/fp318.jpg" width="465" height="700"
+alt="Carleton Atkinson." title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Carleton Atkinson.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+<p>Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable
+time&mdash;Japanese visits usually do&mdash;Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for
+the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised
+that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this
+invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save
+Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next
+day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo.</p>
+
+<p>The M�tropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the
+hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where
+Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn,"
+describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making
+for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of
+Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi
+Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the
+Spring Equinox (<i>Shunki Korei-sai</i>). There is an autumn and a spring
+equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating
+population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren,
+into the streets. The ladies were in their best <i>kimonos</i>, their hair
+elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them
+bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler
+hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying
+American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features
+that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and
+woman. A pretty <i>musum�'s</i> ivory-coloured oval face against the
+cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a
+delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically
+picturesque than a Tokyo
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 320]</span>
+street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry of rain when hundreds of
+these ineffective shelters with their quaint designs of chrysanthemums,
+cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly opened. Alas! in ten years'
+time, like many other quaint and beautiful Japanese productions, these
+oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away into the region of
+faintly-remembered things.</p>
+
+<p>The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of
+the men had a little too much <i>sake</i> on board, their tipsiness was only
+betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes,
+indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple
+walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling
+of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of <i>sake</i>, smells of seaweed soup,
+smells of <i>daikon</i> (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a
+sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows
+behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky
+arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of
+sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams,
+and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an
+interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges,
+down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams,
+we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with
+babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their
+mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of
+Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male
+children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was
+there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas, and
+still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed <i>kuruma</i> men, did our
+journey last, through the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+quarter of the foreign legations, past government offices and military
+stations, beside the moat surrounding the mikado's palace, with its
+grass slopes and pine-clad fosse, down declivities and up others,
+through endless lanes, bordered by one-storeyed houses standing in
+shrubberies behind bamboo fences. At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose
+<i>kuruma</i> led the way, halted before a small gateway, surmounted by
+a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we understood afterwards, with
+Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs. Passing through, we found
+ourselves opposite the entrance of a lightly-built two-story house,
+rather resembling a suburban bungalow in England. Directly we entered we
+were transported into a different era. Here no modern Japan was visible.
+On the threshold, waiting to receive us, was an "august residence maid,"
+kneeling, palms extended on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head
+touching the matting, and wondered if it belonged to Hana, the
+unsympathetic Hana who had let the grass-lark die. Beside her was
+Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child, in a brilliantly-coloured
+<i>kimono</i>, while on the step above stood Professor Tanabe, who had
+been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an intimate friend of the
+Koizumi family, living near by, and acting occasionally as interpreter
+for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture&mdash;as an eastern philosopher, for
+instance&mdash;he would have made for Moroni or Velasquez, with the delicate
+grey and cream background of the Japanese <i>tatami</i> and paper
+<i>shoji</i>. He had the clear olive complexion and
+intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and
+thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood
+above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to
+his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he
+receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us
+welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of
+his
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 322]</span>
+own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a presence,
+and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was trying; for the
+little girl had raised her forehead from the matting, and, with hands on
+knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us sideways like a
+bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential liftings of the eyes
+and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals from a row that stood
+close by, helped us to take off our boots and put on the sandals. We
+then remarked that she was not at all unsympathetic-looking, but a nice,
+chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We hoped devoutly we had no holes in our
+stockings, and after a considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got
+through the ordeal in time to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who
+appeared beside Professor Tanabe on the step above us, softly inviting
+us to "honourably deign to enter her unworthy abode."</p>
+
+<p>The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so
+arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the
+<i>engawa</i> (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been
+Hearn's study. The <i>fusima</i> or paper screens separating the two rooms
+were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and
+stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it
+was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus
+flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase,
+but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the <i>Butsudan</i>, or
+family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner.</p>
+
+<p>Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the
+spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped.</p>
+
+<p>At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and
+sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an
+Interpretation," and so
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+many other wonderful books, and I felt as I looked at that room of
+Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive than the quick. The
+walls&mdash;or rather the paper panels and wood laths that did duty for
+walls&mdash;were haunted with memories.</p>
+
+<p>I pictured the odd little figure&mdash;dressed in the <i>kimono</i> given him by
+Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems&mdash;"Surely just the
+kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"&mdash;with the
+prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in
+the ancient, patient manner" on his <i>zabuton</i>&mdash;smoking his <i>kiseru</i>, or
+standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets
+and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning
+over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's
+Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk.</p>
+
+<p>There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a
+sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie
+stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and
+clamour of the city outside&mdash;it gave an impression of restfulness, of
+calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless
+matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the
+Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels
+that, like the <i>fusima</i>, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room.
+I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study
+and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for
+paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before
+that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese
+houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had
+occupied the corner where now stands the <i>Butsudan</i>, contaminating that
+wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent,
+crystalline atmosphere"
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke. These hardy folk told us
+that they were always catching coughs and colds when they had the stove
+and glass windows, so they took both out, and put back the paper
+<i>shoji</i> and the charcoal brazier.</p>
+
+<p>It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which
+Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his
+study. The <i>andon</i>&mdash;tallow-candle&mdash;stuck in a paper shade&mdash;national
+means of lighting a room&mdash;had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's
+reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little
+table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber
+tube.</p>
+
+<p>Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single <i>kakemono</i>, or
+piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making
+room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought
+and life&mdash;that Hearn blended so deftly in his work&mdash;joined hands. Round
+the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were
+placed, filled with books, English most of them&mdash;De Quincey, Herbert
+Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against
+the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the
+<i>Butsudan</i> rested volumes of Browning and Kipling.</p>
+
+<p>I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old
+prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had
+been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a
+Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as
+hanging on the ceiling?</p>
+
+<p>It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a
+depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay <i>godong</i> given to
+the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all
+valuable and artistic
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing of the past; thieving
+is rife; it is well also to protect them from fire, earthquakes and
+floods.</p>
+
+<p>Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the
+ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate
+grey ground.</p>
+
+<p>On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a <i>kakemono</i> or scroll-picture
+representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs
+clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese
+ideographs in the corner&mdash;by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present
+from Kazuo to his father.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard,
+was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were
+Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour
+had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one.
+Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the
+hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance
+of some sort.</p>
+
+<p>Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to
+go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo
+that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's
+study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond
+measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They
+own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like
+our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a
+climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as
+crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful
+circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves
+uncomfortable in what
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 326]</span>
+seemed to me such an irritating and futile way. That any sane people
+should eat a succession of horrible concoctions made up of raw fish,
+lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted of Pears' soap,
+whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an afterthought,
+eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed on
+Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at
+least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a
+courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy.</p>
+
+<p>The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain
+dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage
+stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of
+the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our
+trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins
+it was an omen of death.</p>
+
+<p>I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when
+I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use
+knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a
+story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the
+professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet
+under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him,
+could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position
+intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing
+into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch
+your legs and be comfortable."</p>
+
+<p>After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell
+athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a
+bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the
+right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was
+a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the
+bank
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 327]</span>
+a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a mass of
+snowy white bloom.</p>
+
+<p>But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the
+cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and
+within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs.
+Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that
+Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them.
+Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to
+his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies,"
+daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to
+smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the
+daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough
+Corrib.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+<h3>SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the
+magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It
+lingers now in patches only, and bands,&mdash;like those long
+bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of
+Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour
+you still can find Horai&mdash;but not elsewhere.... Remember that
+Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,&mdash;the
+Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,&mdash;never
+again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi&mdash;through the medium of
+Professor Tanabe&mdash;asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on
+Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had
+died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks
+and the lamp were lighted before the <i>Butsudan</i> and a repast laid out in
+honour of the dead.</p>
+
+<p>That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya
+Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the
+flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted,
+and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to
+spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to
+the M�tropole Hotel.</p>
+
+<p>The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they
+went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility
+was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit
+one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>
+europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any
+other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of
+a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No
+sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was
+connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked
+upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.</p>
+
+<p>The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us
+in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as
+encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally
+different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions
+of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their
+charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an
+expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me,
+reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts
+of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by
+European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic
+meaning. A <i>Shirabyoshi</i> lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara
+quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district
+of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of
+their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead
+kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the
+streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered
+in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese
+maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread,
+instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there,
+seated on <i>zabutons</i> in a little shop, as large&mdash;or rather as small&mdash;as
+life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little
+<i>musum�s</i>, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I
+passed along that I had
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+acquired another proof of the "surprising <i>otherness</i> of things" to
+insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary land of Nippon.</p>
+
+<p>I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese
+houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who
+had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her
+"Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn
+had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I
+thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and
+any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow
+and children.</p>
+
+<p>A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and
+cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens,
+and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a
+<i>zabuton</i> (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense
+silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at
+intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance
+of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys
+and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a
+manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of
+irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the
+tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The
+moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was
+as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too
+courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a
+dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what
+communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and
+left a will&mdash;Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>
+his contemptible abode to smoke a pipe&mdash;further than that he knew
+nothing. The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko
+Daigaku), where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum
+where the heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there
+received also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that
+was distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to
+conduct me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be
+Hearn's favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste
+exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about
+the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any
+sort of favour by his colleagues.</p>
+
+<p>In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent
+their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided
+between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the
+temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were
+provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an
+extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the
+northern coast.</p>
+
+<p>A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with
+these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering
+up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the
+dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible
+lettering on moss-grown tombstones and <i>sotobas</i>, gazing at sculptures
+of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the
+heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into
+insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai
+Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by
+the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image
+that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian
+had invested his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>
+conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister legends; but the
+same strange sense of infinity broods over both. Solemn, impenetrable,
+amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits
+patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this Japanese coast, tidal
+waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this
+bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and
+chances passing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips.
+Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly
+alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of
+miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met
+and forgathered. No one knows if a master mind directed the hands of the
+artificers that hewed out the great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of
+bronze to shape the mighty image of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem
+the endeavour of a people to incarnate the idea that eternity presents
+to man the vagueness and vastness of something beyond and above
+themselves. The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the
+desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break
+as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha,
+while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell
+mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair,
+joy and grief will pass away as a storm passes across the heavens,
+bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and
+suffering of human life&mdash;infinite calm, infinite rest.</p>
+
+<p>"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on
+Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound
+and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he
+attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented,
+with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he
+had hitherto subscribed?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p>
+<p>It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the
+shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its <i>shoji</i> was comforting
+after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come
+prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning
+among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August
+One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows,
+genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit,
+while on the upper step of the <i>genkan</i> (entrance-room) with extended
+hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first,
+when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove
+occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was
+moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom
+she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels
+in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present
+always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even
+though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely."
+Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to
+hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us,
+when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and
+pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental
+widows when referring to the departed.</p>
+
+<p>The doors of the <i>Butsudan</i> were set wide open, and on the <i>kamidan</i>, or
+shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and
+burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast
+of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were
+placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a
+bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that
+had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was
+Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to
+Mrs.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>
+Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third had
+been buried with the writer of <i>Japan</i>, beneath his tombstone in
+the Zoshigaya Cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>As we stood in the study opposite the <i>Butsudan</i> the ghostly charm, the
+emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded
+the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of
+children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection,
+crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo,
+describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as
+though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without
+saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that
+hangs in the study.</p>
+
+<p>Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste,
+subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit.
+Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that
+gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy
+the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling
+down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out
+a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had
+belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter
+Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and
+curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one
+representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the
+donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment&mdash;a donkey
+being an unknown animal in Japan&mdash;when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another
+represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and
+groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>
+simple people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.</p>
+
+<p>It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for
+a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the
+brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not
+perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur
+attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon
+the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of
+difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some
+sort&mdash;everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good
+or bad omen.</p>
+
+<p>Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because
+her mother&mdash;for politeness' sake, I imagine&mdash;told her that Mrs. Atkinson
+was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same
+respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys,
+were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance
+recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the
+subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he
+had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to
+the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of
+the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese,
+declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in
+mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many
+others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted
+by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine
+race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially,
+indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and
+intelligent.</p>
+
+<p>What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>
+made in <i>kimonos</i> and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish
+eyes and Irish smile&mdash;for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from
+the land of their father's birth&mdash;with the background of bookcases full
+of English books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese <i>kakemonos</i> and
+ideographs.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely
+have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up.
+The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days
+"freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone
+down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."</p>
+
+<p>I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of
+unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a
+household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her
+knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for
+Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient,
+indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the
+<i>Butsudan</i>, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern
+education as a material weakness?</p>
+
+<p>"The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says
+Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and
+naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the
+further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As
+the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right,
+the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the
+opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."</p>
+
+<p>After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of
+"tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)&mdash;his Papa San's
+favourite cake, Kazuo told us&mdash;had been handed round and partaken of,
+jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery.
+As
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight
+fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove,
+stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was
+the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo
+parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were
+going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh
+ponies&mdash;along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by
+evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean
+inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an
+unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind
+whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the
+horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but
+little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of
+exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather
+distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots,
+enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the
+impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by
+government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was
+volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking
+along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last
+reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same
+shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the
+top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo
+garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the
+stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two
+smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On
+either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab
+was the inscription&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"&mdash;"Believing Man Similar to
+Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight
+<span class="pagenum">[Pg 338]</span>
+Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment."</p>
+
+<p>The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside
+the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the
+background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the
+thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the
+cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness
+characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin
+coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the
+plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in
+front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn
+wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand,
+as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman,
+Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the
+moment, buried&mdash;an alien amongst aliens&mdash;in a Buddhist grave, under a
+Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own
+people.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONCLUSION" id="CONCLUSION"></a>CONCLUSION</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lafcadio Hearn's</span> was a personality and genius
+which people will always
+judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary
+common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an
+odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and
+rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised
+the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human
+morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi,
+or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of
+his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who
+consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow
+his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst
+the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme
+prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages";
+while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in
+locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament.</p>
+
+<p>If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the
+worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities
+behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature,
+would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology"
+that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may
+have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of
+a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the
+whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one&mdash;"not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+that he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary
+satanically proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he
+could recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't
+going to cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed
+with cheap wood underneath&mdash;it looks all right, only because you don't
+know how we patch up things."</p>
+
+<p>Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal,
+will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on
+which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary
+interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's
+work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute.</p>
+
+<p>He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of
+absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it.
+Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more,
+discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal&mdash;the
+ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries:
+oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more
+elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and
+self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in
+exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many
+a day by cultured readers and thinkers.</p>
+
+<p>Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique
+place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and
+because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy&mdash;the
+eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of
+enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him&mdash;as Miss Bisland does
+in the Preface to the last volume of Letters&mdash;great as Jean Jacques
+Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of
+the "Contrat Social"
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social and political
+upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own day. Hearn was
+incapable of initiating any important movement, he never entered into
+the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental horizon. He
+could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and pour forth
+a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his deductions
+from significant artistic movements in the history of occidental
+civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so because he
+so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so, and he was
+equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared to him was
+right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it out with him,
+he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was quite incapable,
+indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own, and he never was
+of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the spaces of
+thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another, he swooped
+to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform himself of
+details before discussing them.</p>
+
+<p>As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely
+conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the
+modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in
+the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of
+Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature
+in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan
+was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan
+rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive
+sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of
+all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that
+"he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents
+inventions shall be killed!"</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span></p>
+<p>Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his
+political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever
+camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again
+whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival
+Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a
+season.</p>
+
+<p>It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in
+his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the
+banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He
+dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the
+Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than
+Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous
+interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison
+between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque
+whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the
+dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when
+he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty,
+the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes
+hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones
+bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for
+a shadow and lost it."</p>
+
+<p>Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to
+the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower
+stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness
+found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of
+such experience&mdash;from a literary point of view&mdash;is proved by the force
+of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are
+remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with
+its
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+<i>frisson</i>, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness,
+breathes the very essence of Romanticism.</p>
+
+<p>Literary brother to Loti and R�nan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their
+sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic
+longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with
+longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on
+the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to
+return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the
+slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had
+quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to
+long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he
+regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and
+towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the
+sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his
+acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the
+appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the
+memory of his Japanese home&mdash;the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan
+and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might
+catch a butterfly.</p>
+
+<p>Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited,
+without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes,
+he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the
+borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for
+the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this
+strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that
+is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very
+strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it
+made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting
+dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 344]</span></p>
+<p>His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a
+literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that
+awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"...
+The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in
+the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought
+nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking
+exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work
+is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of
+his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental
+hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical
+narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that
+flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art
+was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental
+wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain
+healthy habit of thought and life.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his
+capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true,
+he had forfeited his birthright to produce a <i>P�cheur d'Islande</i>; but on
+most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed.
+He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain
+he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were
+apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a
+certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he
+found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and
+tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and
+epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The
+Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The
+subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken
+from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+on the "Colour Blue," probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology."
+Yet, in spite of small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps
+his own characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival
+Lowell's "Soul of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in
+America before he went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to
+Lowell in "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings
+from end to end, yet Kipling, in his letters to the <i>Pioneer</i> on
+Japan, afterwards published in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is
+insensibly more influenced by Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by
+Kipling.</p>
+
+<p>As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously
+exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to
+admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori,
+all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession
+of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper
+significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He
+endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the
+emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his
+genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations
+and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at
+times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk
+surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain
+coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms,
+and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the
+wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the
+talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent
+circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the
+cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism.</p>
+
+<p>Querulously he complained that people would not take
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>
+him seriously, that they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may
+have been in some of the conclusions he drew from superficial
+manifestations, and his outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too
+pronounced to please the matter-of-fact man who knows not what
+enthusiasm means. "It is only in the hand of the artist," some one has
+said, "that Truth becomes impressive." You can hardly take up a
+newspaper now-a-days without finding a quotation from Hearn on the
+subject of Japan. His rhythmic phrases seem to fall on men's ears like
+bars of melodious music, his picturesque manner of relating prosaic
+incidents turns them into poetic episodes, convincing the most
+practical-minded that in dealing with a country like Japan,
+interpretation does not solely consist in describing the thing you see,
+but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and visualises what is
+invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality and profound
+significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie in Hakata, the
+town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the enormous bronze
+head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal mirrors,
+contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure of the
+god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands would be
+needed to mould the figure&mdash;an unpractical and extravagant sacrifice of
+beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than merely the
+gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul of its
+owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it feels all
+her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion; then in his
+fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about the remnants
+of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on their
+surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into their
+depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these memories
+in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display in front
+of the Buddha
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+statue becomes far more than what it seems. We
+human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and
+the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the
+faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with
+that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he
+interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a
+susceptible people.</p>
+
+<p>As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by
+some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was
+drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to
+Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing
+his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to
+those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the
+primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint
+villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open
+ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American
+clothes&mdash;then and then only will they be able to understand what an
+artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation
+being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his
+opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view,
+over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to
+accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have
+stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially
+subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward
+vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed,
+if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and
+appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and
+dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in
+his expressions of literary and political opinion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p>
+<p>In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to
+the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the
+tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances
+were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most
+salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved
+him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable
+nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his
+mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New
+Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good
+fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen
+years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been
+swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in
+the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless
+cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his
+means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for
+him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was
+his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last
+years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst
+the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness
+of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with
+his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending
+his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest
+surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him.</p>
+
+<p>An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His
+work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed
+by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is,
+indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and
+persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses
+it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+by the Divine Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that
+the more appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct
+for art, the smaller will be his success with the general public. But
+never was his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of
+pecuniary gain. From the earliest years of his literary career, his
+delight in composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity,
+rather than delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in
+the working. According to him, nothing was less important than worldly
+prosperity, to write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most
+damnable, infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug.</p>
+
+<p>To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this
+short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that
+matters, and "the only success in life."</p>
+
+<p>Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life.
+To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"One minute's work to thee denied</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">Stands all Eternity's offence"&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>he quotes from Kipling.</p>
+
+<p>This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite
+the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange
+contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never
+was at issue either with himself or destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent
+of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through
+hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning
+neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease,
+Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one
+object, his thoughts fixed on one aim.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 350]</span></p>
+
+<p>In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a
+spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of
+the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy,
+when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable
+is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ...
+her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life
+and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad
+generations that have arisen and passed away.</p>
+
+<p>What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap
+publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and
+invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on
+the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing
+of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work
+aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the
+exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that
+the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out.</p>
+
+<p>As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the
+beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things,
+emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and
+passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life,
+making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were
+beautiful to die for."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg 351]</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<table style="width:75%;" border="1" summary="index jump table">
+  <tr>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_A">A</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_B">B</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_C">C</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_D">D</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_E">E</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_F">F</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_G">G</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_H">H</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_I">I</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_J">J</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_K">K</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_L">L</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_M">M</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>   <a href="#IX_N">N</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_O">O</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_P">P</a></td>
+    <td>  Q</td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_R">R</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_S">S</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_T">T</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_U">U</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_V">V</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_W">W</a></td>
+    <td>  X</td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_Y">Y</a></td>
+    <td>  <a href="#IX_Z">Z</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_A" name="IX_A"></a><span class="smcap">Akira</span>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>
+<li>Alma Tadema, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>
+<li>Amenomori Nobushige, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>
+<li>American criticism, an, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+<li>Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+<li>Ancestral tablet, the, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+<li>"Ants," essay on, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>
+<li>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>Arnoux, Leopold, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>
+<li>Asama-Yama, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+<li>Atkinson, Mrs., <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>letters to, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>-<a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</li>
+  <li>visits Japan, <a href="#Page_313">313</a> <i>et seq.</i></li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+<li>Atkinson, Carleton, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+<li>Atkinson, Dorothy, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>
+<li>Avatars, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_B" name="IX_B"></a><span class="smcap">Baker, Constance</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>
+<li>Baker, Page M., <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+<li>Ball, Sir F., <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+<li>Bangor, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+<li>Baudelaire, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>Beale, Mr. James, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>
+<li>Behrens, Mrs., <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+<li>Berry, Rev. H. F., <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+<li>Bisland, Miss Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>marriage of, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
+  <li>letters to, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</li>
+  <li>joint-editor of <i>Cosmopolitan</i>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Borrow, George, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.</li>
+<li>Boston, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+<li>Brenane, Mrs. Justin, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+<li>Bridges, Robert, quoted, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>
+<li>British Museum, image of Buddha in, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>
+<li>Bronner, Milton, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+<li>Brown, Mr., <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+<li>Brownings, the, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+<li>Buddha of Enoshima, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>
+<li>Buddhism, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+<li>Butcher, Miss, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_C" name="IX_C"></a><span class="smcap">Calidas</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+<li>Chamberlain, Basil Hall, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>letters to, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>"Chinese Ghosts," <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+<li>"Chita," <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+<li>Cholera at Kobe, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
+<li>Cincinnati, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a> <i>et seq.</i></li>
+<li>Cincinnati Brotherhood, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li>
+<li>Civilisation, attack on, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+<li>Cockerill, Colonel John, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+<li>Collins, Wilkie, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Commercial, The</i>, Hearn joins, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li>
+<li>"Concerning Lafcadio Hearn" (G. M. Gould), <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</li>
+<li>Conventual Orders, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+<li>Corbishly, Monsignor, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>
+<li>Corfu, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>-<a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+<li>Correagh, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+<li>Crawford, Mrs., <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+<li><span class="pagenum">[Pg 352]</span>Crescent City, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+<li>Crosby, Lieutenant, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>
+<li>Cullinane, Mr. and Mrs., <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_D" name="IX_D"></a>"<span class="smcap">Dad</span>." <i>See</i> Watkin.</li>
+<li>Dai Batsu of Enoshima, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+<li>Dai Batsu of Kamakura, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>
+<li>"Dancing Girl, The," <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+<li>Darwin, Charles, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</li>
+<li>Daunt, Mr. Achilles, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li>
+<li>Delaney, Catherine, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+<li>Dengue fever, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+<li>De Quincey, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>"Dragon Flies," <a href="#Page_285">285.</a>.</li>
+<li>"Dream of a Summer's Day," <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+<li>Dublin, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <i>et seq.</i></li>
+<li>Du Maurier, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>"Dust," Hearn's essay on, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_E" name="IX_E"></a><span class="smcap">Elwood, Frank</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+<li>Elwood, Mrs., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+<li>Elwood, Robert, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+<li>Emerson, Miss Margaret, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Enquirer, The</i>, Hearn on staff of,
+  <a href="#Page_74">74</a>-<a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+<li>"Eternal Feminine," article on, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>
+<li>"Exotics and Retrospectives," <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_F" name="IX_F"></a>"<span class="smcap">Fantastics</span>,"
+  <a href="#Page_x">126</a>.</li>
+<li>"First Principles," Spencer's, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+<li>Flaubert, Gustave, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+<li>Foley, Althea, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.</li>
+<li>Ford Castle, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+<li>Formosa, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>
+<li>Forrest, General, funeral of, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>
+<li>Foxwell, Professor, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>
+<li>Franco-Prussian War, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>
+<li>Froude, James, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+<li>Fuji, first sight of, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>
+<li>Fuji-no-Yama, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+<li>Fujisaki, Captain, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_G" name="IX_G"></a>"<span class="smcap">Garden folk lore</span>,"
+  <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>
+<li>Gautier, Theophile, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>
+<li>"Ghostly Japan," <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+<li>"Gleanings in Buddha Fields," <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+<li>"Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>
+<li>Gould, Dr. George Milbury, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>
+<li>Greek culture, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>.</li>
+<li>Gulf winds, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_H" name="IX_H"></a><span class="smcap">Hall</span>, H. H.,
+  <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>
+<li>Halstead, Mr., <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</li>
+<li>Hamamura, cemetery of, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+<li>Hana, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Harper's Weekly</i>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+<li>Harrison, Frederic, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>
+<li>Hawkins, Armand, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Lafcadio,
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>birth, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</li>
+  <li>Hibernian ancestors, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>;</li>
+  <li>English origin, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>;</li>
+  <li>the interpreter of Buddhism, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;</li>
+  <li>maternal lineage, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</li>
+  <li>Hellenic associations of birthplace, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</li>
+  <li>memories of Malta, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</li>
+  <li>reminiscences of childhood, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
+  <li>separation of his parents, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
+  <li>adopted by Mrs. Brenane, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
+  <li>his defective eyesight, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</li>
+  <li>relations with Mr. Molyneux, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
+  <li>views of ideal beauty, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
+  <li>at Tramore, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</li>
+  <li>at school at Ushaw, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
+  <li>literary tastes at school, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li>
+  <li>unattractive appearance, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</li>
+  <li>in London, <a href="#Page_52">52</a> <i>et seq.</i>;</li>
+  <li>literary vocation, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</li>
+  <li>Paris, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</li>
+  <li>Cincinnati, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</li>
+  <li>his shyness, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</li>
+  <li>reaches the depths, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</li>
+  <li>servant in boarding-house, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>;</li>
+  <li><span class="pagenum">[Pg 353]</span>secretaryship, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
+  <li>on staff of <i>Enquirer</i>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
+  <li>ascends Cincinnati church spire, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</li>
+  <li>his translations, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</li>
+  <li>and Althea Foley, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</li>
+  <li>and Marie Levaux, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+  <li>joins staff of <i>The Commercial</i>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+  <li>at Memphis, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</li>
+  <li>destitution, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+  <li>fever, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</li>
+  <li><i>Times Democrat</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li>
+  <li>method of argument, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+  <li>intellectual isolation, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+  <li>intolerance of amateur art, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</li>
+  <li>characteristics, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
+  <li>visits West Indies, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;</li>
+  <li>letters, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</li>
+  <li>marriage, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>,<a href="#Page_179">179</a>
+    -<a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</li>
+  <li>arrangement with Harpers, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
+  <li>political opinions, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</li>
+  <li>visits Mr. Watkin, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
+  <li>the Krehbiels, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
+  <li>musical sense, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
+  <li>arrives in Yokohama, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+  <li>terminates contract with Harpers, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</li>
+  <li>Professor Chamberlain, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</li>
+  <li>philosophical opinions and character, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</li>
+  <li>appointment in Matsue, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</li>
+  <li>Japanese estimate of, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li>
+  <li>passion for work, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</li>
+  <li>family, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+  <li>naturalisation, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
+  <li>symptoms of physical failure, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
+  <li>devotion to family, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;</li>
+  <li>emotional trances, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</li>
+  <li>love of animals, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</li>
+  <li>death, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <i>et seq.</i>;</li>
+  <li>his religion, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+  <li>funeral, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+  <li>children, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>;</li>
+  <li>personality, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>;</li>
+  <li>biassed deductions, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>;</li>
+  <li>literary judgments, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>;</li>
+  <li>his romanticism, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>;</li>
+  <li>quotations from, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</li>
+  <li>his opinion of Japanese, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;</li>
+  <li>estimate of his work, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Hearn, Charles Bush, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Mrs. Charles, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Mrs., <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
+<li>"Reminiscences" of, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Rev. Daniel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Leopold Kazuo, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Rev. Thomas, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Miss, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Miss Lillah, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Richard, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>
+<li>Hearn, Susan, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> <i>et seq.</i></li>
+<li>Hearn family in Waterford, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+<li>Henderson, Mr. Edmund, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</li>
+<li>Hendrik, Ellwood, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>letters to, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Heron, Francis, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+<li>Heron, Sir Hugh de, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+<li>Hijo, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>
+<li>Hirn, Professor, letter to, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+<li>Holmes, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+<li>Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>
+<li>Huxley, Professor, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_I" name="IX_I"></a><span class="smcap">Ichigaya</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+<li>"Idolatry," <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+<li>Imperial University, Japanese, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>
+<li>"In Ghostly Japan," <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+<li>"Insect Studies," <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>
+<li>"Intuition," <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>
+<li>Ionian Islands, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+<li>Izumo, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_J" name="IX_J"></a><span class="smcap">Japan</span>,
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>discipline of official life in, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li>
+  <li>spirit of, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>;</li>
+  <li>old Japan, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation," <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>
+<li>Japanese character, analysis of, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.</li>
+<li>Japanese constitution promulgated, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>
+<li><span class="pagenum">[Pg 354]</span>Japanese day, a, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>
+<li>Japanese funeral, a, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>
+<li>"Japanese Miscellany, A," <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+<li>Japanese regimen, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>
+<li>Japanese school classes, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>
+<li>Japanese training of children, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>
+<li>Jefferies, Richard, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Jitom Kobduera Temple, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+<li>Jiu-jitsu, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>
+<li>Jizo-Do Temple, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_K" name="IX_K"></a><span class="smcap">Kentucky</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</li>
+<li>Keogh, Miss Agnes, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+<li>Kinegawa, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+<li>Kingsley, Charles, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>
+<li>Kinjuro, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li>
+<li>Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.</li>
+<li>Kitinagasa, Dori, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>
+<li>Kobduera, Temple of, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+<li>Kobe, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Kobe Chronicle</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>
+<li>Koizumi, Mrs. Setsu, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a> <i>et seq.</i>,
+  <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;
+  <ul class="IX">
+    <li>"Reminiscences" of, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</li>
+    <li>letter of, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Koizumi, Idaho, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.</li>
+<li>Koizumi, Iwayo, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.</li>
+<li>Koizumi, Kazuo, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>,
+<a href="#Page_317">317</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>.</li>
+<li>Koizumi, Setsu-ko, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.</li>
+<li>"Kokoro," 65, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>
+<li>Krehbiel, Henry, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>
+<li>Kumamoto, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>
+<li>Kusa-Hibari (grass-lark), <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>
+<li>Kusimoki marahige, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>
+<li>"Kwaidan," <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+<li>Kyoto, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>
+<li>Kyushu, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_L" name="IX_L"></a><span class="smcap">"Lady of a Myriad Souls" (Miss Bisland)</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_113">113</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_124">124</a>-<a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+<li>Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Levaux, Marie, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+<li>"Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn" (Wetmore), <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>
+<li>Literary College, Tokyo, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+<li>Loti, Pierre, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+<li>Lough Corrib, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+<li>Louisiana, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+<li>Lowell, Percival, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.</li>
+<li>"Luck of Roaring Camp" (Bret Harte), <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_M" name="IX_M"></a><span class="smcap">Malta</span>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+<li>Martinique, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>
+<li>Mason, Mr. W. B., <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>
+<li>Matas, Dr. Rudolf, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>
+<li>Matsue, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-<a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>
+<li>McDermott, Mr., <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>
+<li>McDonald, Capt. Mitchell, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>.</li>
+<li>Memphis, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>-<a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+<li>"Midwinter, Ozias," <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+<li>Mifflin, Houghton &amp; Co., <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.</li>
+<li>Millet, Fran�ois, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>
+<li>Mionoseki, ironclads at, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</li>
+<li>Moje, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>
+<li>Molyneux, Henry, and Mrs., <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</li>
+<li>Montreal, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>
+<li>"Moon Desire," <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>
+<li>Morris, William, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>"Mountain of Skulls," <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+<li>"My First Romance," <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+<li>"My Guardian Angel," <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+<li>Mythen, Kate, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><span class="pagenum">[Pg 355]</span><a id="IX_N" name="IX_N"></a><span class="smcap">
+  Nagasaki</span>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+<li>New Orleans, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_93">93</a>-<a href="#Page_101">101</a>;
+  <ul class="IX">
+  <li>yellow fever at, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</li>
+  <li>Exposition at, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>New York, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>
+<li>"Nightmare Touch," <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+<li>Nishi Okubo, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a> <i>et seq.</i></li>
+<li>Nishida Sentaro, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_O" name="IX_O"></a><span class="smcap">Okuma, Count</span>,
+<a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>
+<li>Osaka, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>
+<li>O Saki, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.</li>
+<li>Otani, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+<li>Otokichi, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.</li>
+<li>"Out of the East," <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>,
+<a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_P" name="IX_P"></a><span class="smcap">Papellier, Dr.</span>,
+<a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>
+<li>Pater, Walter, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+<li>Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+<li>Pre-Raphaelites, aims of, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>"Principles of Ethics" (Spencer), cited, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_R" name="IX_R"></a><span class="smcap">Rachel</span>, picture of,
+<a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</li>
+<li>"Raven, The," <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>
+<li>Redhill, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+<li>"Romance of the Milky Way, A," <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.</li>
+<li>Rossetti, D. G., <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>Rousseau, Jean Jacques, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>.</li>
+<li>Ruskin, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_S" name="IX_S"></a><span class="smcap">Sackville, Lionel, Duke of Dorset</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+<li>"St. Ronite," <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>
+<li>Santa Maura, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+<li>Schurmann, J. G., <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>
+<li>Seaton, Viscount, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>"Serenade, A," <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+<li>Setsu-ko (Koizumi), <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>
+<li>"Shadowings," <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+<li>Shinto worship, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+<li>"Shirabzoshi" or "Dancing Girl," <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>
+<li>Shunki Korei-sai, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>
+<li>Spencer, Herbert, cited, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>-
+  <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.</li>
+<li>Steinmetz, General, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+<li>Stevenson, R. L., <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>"Stray Leaves," <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>
+<li>Suruga, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+<li>"Sylvestre Bonnard," <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_T" name="IX_T"></a><span class="smcap">Takata</span>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+<li>Tanabe, Professor, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a> <i>et seq.</i>,
+  <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>
+<li>Tennyson, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>Thomson, Francis, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+<li>"Toko, The," <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li>
+<li>Tokyo, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>
+<li>"Torn Letters," <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+<li>Toyama, Professor, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+<li>Tramore, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>-<a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li>
+<li>Treves, Sir Frederick, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+<li>"Trilby," <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>Tunison, Mr. Joseph, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>
+<li>"Two Years in the French West Indies," <a href="#Page_108">108</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>
+<li>Tyndall, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_U" name="IX_U"></a><span class="smcap">"Ujo</span>," <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>
+<li>Ume, Professor, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>
+<li>Ushaw, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_40">40</a>-<a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+<li>Ushigome, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>-<a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_V" name="IX_V"></a><span class="smcap">Vickers, Thomas</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+<li>"Voodoo Queen," <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_W" name="IX_W"></a><span class="smcap">Waseda University</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>
+<li>Waterford, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+<li>Watkin, Henry ("Dad"), <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>
+<li><span class="pagenum">[Pg 356]</span>Watkin, Miss Effie, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>
+<li>Weatherall, Mrs., quoted, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+<li>Weldon, Charles, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</li>
+<li>West Indies, Hearn in, <a href="#Page_148">148</a> <i>et seq.</i></li>
+<li>Westmeath, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+<li>Wetmore, Mrs. (Miss Bisland q. v.), <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>
+<li>Wexford, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+<li>Whistler, James, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>Wiseman, Cardinal, at Ushaw, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+<li>Worthington, Mr., <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.</li>
+<li>Wrennal, Father William, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_Y" name="IX_Y"></a><span class="smcap">Yaidzu</span>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>
+<li>"Yakumo," <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+<li>Yashiki garden, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+<li>Yokohama, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>
+<li>Yone Noguchi, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>
+<li>Young, Mr. Robert, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>
+<li>Young, Mrs., <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+<li>"Yuko," <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+<li>Yvetot, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><a id="IX_Z" name="IX_Z"></a><span class="smcap">Zoshigaya</span>,
+  <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<div class="tnote"><h2>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES.</h2>
+
+<p>Inconsistent hyphenation preserved as in the original.</p>
+
+<p>The List of Illustrations was changed to match the captions of the
+illustrations, and the page numbers were adjusted to show their position
+after the illustrations were moved so not to split paragraphs.</p>
+
+<p>On page 51, the comma after "indirectly does me a right" was replaced
+with a period.</p>
+
+<p>On page 52, in the footnote "Lafacadio" was changed to
+"Lafcadio".</p>
+
+<p>On page 71, "acquiline" was changed to "aquiline".</p>
+
+<p>On page 82, "Marysville" was changed to "Maysville".</p>
+
+<p>On page 83, "indigant" was changed to "indignant".</p>
+
+<p>On page 118, the period inside the quote was changed to a comma.</p>
+
+<p>On page 120, "important person that" was changed to "important person
+than".</p>
+
+<p>On page 138, "Houkousai" was changed to "Hokusai".</p>
+
+<p>On page 145, "pyschological" was changed to "psychological".</p>
+
+<p>On page 163, "Hokousai" was changed to "Hokusai".</p>
+
+<p>On page 177, "adoped" was changed to "adopted".</p>
+
+<p>On page 202, "Lillian" was changed to "Lilliah".</p>
+
+<p>On page 203, the added spaces were in the original, to indicate missing
+words. Those missing spaces have been retained here.</p>
+
+<p>On page 210, "Koizume" was changed to "Koizumi".</p>
+
+<p>On page 245, "kizeru" was changed to "kiseru".</p>
+
+<p>On page 260, "bad" was changed to "had".</p>
+
+<p>On page 264, "spead" was changed to "spread".</p>
+
+<p>On page 275, "library,." was changed to "library,".</p>
+
+<p>On page 282, "Ultitimately" was changed to "Ultimately".</p>
+
+<p>On page 291, "condi tions" was changed to "conditions".</p>
+
+<p>On page 315, "out" was changed to "our".</p>
+
+<p>On page 334, "portaits" was changed to "portraits".</p>
+
+<p>On page 336, a closing quotation mark was places after "Finis:
+sweetness and sympathy."</p>
+
+<p>On page 353, "Th�ophile" was changed to "Theophile".</p>
+
+<p>On page 355, in the Index, the "Sackville" entry was moved to the "S"
+section and was identified with small caps as the first "S" word,
+instead of "St. Ronite", and "Shirabzoshi" was replaced with
+"Shirabyoshi".</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAFCADIO HEARN ***
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,12262 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lafcadio Hearn
+
+Author: Nina H. Kennard
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2010 [EBook #33345]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAFCADIO HEARN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Ernest Schaal and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             LAFCADIO HEARN
+
+
+
+
+      The Hearn crest is "on
+      a mount vert a heron
+      arg.," and the motto
+      "Ardua petit ardea."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.]
+
+
+
+
+                             LAFCADIO HEARN
+
+                                   BY
+                            NINA H. KENNARD
+
+
+              _CONTAINING SOME LETTERS FROM LAFCADIO HEARN
+                   TO HIS HALF-SISTER, MRS. ATKINSON_
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+                                 MCMXII
+
+
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1912, by
+                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                              REMEMBRANCE
+
+
+          No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the
+          thread,--softer than moonshine, thinner than
+          fragrance, stronger than death,--the Gleipnir-chain
+          of the Greater Memory.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+
+
+When Death has set his seal on an eminent man's career, there is a not
+unnatural curiosity to know something of his life, as revealed by
+himself, particularly in letters to intimate friends. "All biography
+ought, as much as possible, to be autobiography," says Stevenson, and of
+all autobiographical material, letters are the most satisfactory.
+Generally written on the impulse of the moment, with no idea of
+subsequent publication, they come, as it were, like butter fresh from
+the churning with the impress of the mind of the writer stamped
+distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's written to Flaubert,
+or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend Stilling, is worth
+pages of embellished reminiscences.
+
+The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a
+particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he
+himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon
+with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate
+sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of
+his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek
+an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence
+the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs.
+Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to
+Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary
+period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years
+of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting,
+giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and
+passionately enthusiastic nature.
+
+During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to Chamberlain
+were written, he initiated a correspondence with his half-sister, Mrs.
+Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His erratic nature, tamed
+and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo, turned with yearning
+towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years, and these Atkinson
+letters, though not boasting the high intellectual level of those to
+Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate playfulness, and
+in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under a new and
+delightful aspect.
+
+There has been a certain amount of friction with his American editress,
+owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use these
+letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to criticisms
+and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual outspoken
+fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original form, to allow
+them to pass into the hands of any one but a person intimately connected
+with the Hearn family; but I can assure Mrs. Wetmore and Captain
+Mitchell McDonald--those kind friends who have done so much for the sake
+of Hearn's children and widow--that Mrs. Koizumi, financially, suffers
+nothing from the fact of the letters not having crossed the Atlantic.
+
+Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to make
+extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss
+Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also
+to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests' House, Ferbane, for having put me
+in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to
+Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently
+Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to
+give me much information concerning his college career.
+
+I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan, to Mr. W. B.
+Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter
+and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who
+gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the
+period of his engagement as sub-editor to the _Kobe Chronicle and Japan
+Mail_.
+
+But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of
+Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs.
+Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and
+"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co.,
+Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In
+Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs.
+Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper
+for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French West Indies"; and,
+above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote
+from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's "Letters," for without
+quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to
+write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn
+became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a
+Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached
+England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound
+of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was
+animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the
+Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will
+be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in
+England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great
+deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere."
+
+How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed
+amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he
+looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in
+that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually
+growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day
+stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be
+studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the
+subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in
+exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and
+interest--the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold
+undisputed sway in the Far East.
+
+    _Southmead_,
+        _Farnham Royal_, 1911.
+
+
+
+
+                            CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAP.                                                   PAGE
+
+       I EARLY YEARS                                           1
+
+      II BOYHOOD                                              23
+
+     III TRAMORE                                              33
+
+      IV USHAW                                                40
+
+       V LONDON                                               52
+
+      VI CINCINNATI                                           65
+
+     VII VAGABONDAGE                                          81
+
+    VIII MEMPHIS                                              88
+
+      IX NEW ORLEANS                                          93
+
+       X WIDER HORIZON                                       102
+
+      XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS                111
+
+     XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS                          124
+
+    XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE                                137
+
+     XIV WEST INDIES                                         148
+
+      XV JAPAN                                               160
+
+     XVI MATSUE                                              172
+
+    XVII MARRIAGE                                            179
+
+   XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI                                 187
+
+     XIX KUMAMOTO                                            199
+
+      XX OUT OF THE EAST                                     231
+
+     XXI KOBE                                                238
+
+    XXII TOKYO                                               260
+
+   XXIII USHIGOME                                            274
+
+    XXIV NISHI OKUBO                                         286
+
+     XXV HIS DEATH                                           299
+
+    XXVI HIS FUNERAL                                         310
+
+   XXVII VISIT TO JAPAN                                      313
+
+  XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO                         328
+
+         CONCLUSION                                          339
+
+         INDEX                                               351
+
+
+
+
+                LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                          FACING
+                                                            PAGE
+
+    LAFCADIO HEARN AND HIS WIFE.               _Frontispiece_
+
+    MAJOR CHARLES BUSH HEARN (HEARN'S FATHER).                16
+
+    MRS. ATKINSON (HEARN'S HALF-SISTER).                     204
+
+    KAZUO (HEARN'S SON) AND HIS NURSE.                       220
+
+    KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).                  228
+
+    DOROTHY ATKINSON.                                        232
+
+    KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).              314
+
+    CARLETON ATKINSON.                                       318
+
+
+
+
+                             LAFCADIO HEARN
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+                              EARLY YEARS
+
+     "Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other
+     microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more,
+     indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless
+     ultimates--imaging sky, and land, and life--filled with
+     perpetual mysterious shudderings--and responding in some wise
+     to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In
+     each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences
+     infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in
+     every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn
+     from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal
+     peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a
+     dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that
+     appears to be is but the thrilling of it--sun, moon, and
+     stars--earth, sky, and sea--and mind and man, and space and
+     time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the
+     Shadow-maker shapes for ever."
+
+
+On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his
+grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio,
+Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura."
+
+The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink
+faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or
+mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the
+appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and
+remarkable figures of the end of the last century.
+
+Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin
+of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or
+curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock--mixture of
+Saxon and Celt--which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal
+lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United
+Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's
+grandfather--as has been stated--came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke
+of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The
+Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace,
+and about the same time--as recognition for services done, we
+conclude--became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of
+Westmeath.
+
+A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County
+Waterford--has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside
+place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers
+at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev.
+Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman
+Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present
+cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of
+the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is
+through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship
+with the County Westmeath portion of the family.
+
+As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an
+impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records
+certainly of several Daniel Hearns--it is the Christian name that
+furnishes the clue--occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire
+and Somersetshire.
+
+In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of
+Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty
+years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally
+"cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the
+Herons--pronounced Hearn--to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a
+well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's
+"Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of
+Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights."
+
+Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his
+name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'--heron with wings
+down--for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at
+the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the
+place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries,
+are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the
+various modifications of the word--namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern,
+Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic
+languages it is _irren_, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. _Hirn_,
+the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin _errare_
+and Frankish _errant_, with the Celtic _err_ names are related, though
+the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West
+Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in
+the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies
+of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or
+gipsies, is referred to.
+
+I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly
+maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their
+veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of
+gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered
+to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her
+head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger
+said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that
+Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons
+and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to
+show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible
+sign of Romany descent.
+
+Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members
+of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and
+black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his
+mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his
+second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element--quite
+distinct from the Japanese type--is so strong as to have impressed
+itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most
+remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The
+near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft
+voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton
+Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of
+the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies
+themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is
+not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio
+Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may,
+on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were
+looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India.
+
+On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full
+of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to
+state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn
+belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek;
+Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand,
+maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the
+agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine
+Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at
+various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his
+mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese
+census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to
+return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands.
+The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian,
+half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese
+origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on
+his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes,
+migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the
+Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original
+Venetian Maltese.
+
+"We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite
+addition--the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us,
+stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an
+exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life
+all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested
+themselves--the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the
+revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the
+oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited
+from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.
+
+From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country
+for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel
+of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in
+the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family
+distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she
+bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father
+Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to
+see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.
+
+Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while
+quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He
+never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by
+the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He
+was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic
+and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew--"Veritable blunderers," as
+Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world."
+
+Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some
+photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to
+represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good
+deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have
+never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked
+something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother.
+I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of
+soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the
+'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my
+firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular
+directions--guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions
+most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong
+characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a
+resemblance in his children by two different mothers--and I want so much
+to find out if the resemblance is also psychological."
+
+Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his
+father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army
+List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant
+surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical
+Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849
+infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At
+Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and
+strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English
+government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor,
+additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they
+arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were
+quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands.
+
+Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this
+half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the
+entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many
+stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in
+their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female
+portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes
+this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to
+join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics
+were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not
+return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore,
+necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep;
+the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous
+ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.
+
+But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there
+is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways.
+Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with
+equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious
+tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for
+the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had
+never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use.
+
+Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish
+country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by
+Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County
+Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress.
+A lock of hair was enclosed:--
+
+                    "Dearest and nearest to my heart,
+                     Thou art fairer than the silver moon,
+                     And I trust to see thee soon."
+
+There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with
+the following:--
+
+          "Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love
+           And evermore will beat for thee!!"
+
+"Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power
+of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.
+
+Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a
+countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and
+she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still
+smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa
+Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they
+met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo,
+but communication between the islands was frequent.
+
+As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland,
+of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in
+consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more
+than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted
+opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary
+wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as
+in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a
+daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she
+was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount
+of friction.
+
+Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient
+Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there
+by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island,
+excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern
+extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock
+whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends."
+Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled
+together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the
+altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that
+clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the
+divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling
+down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known
+as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a
+glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous
+haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.
+
+Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been
+born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world--the world
+that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty--impressed
+itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted
+shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral
+dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with
+its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for
+instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a
+dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court--his mother,
+presumably--chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the
+celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and
+temples of the ancient Leucadia.... Awakening, he heard, in the night,
+the moaning of the real sea--the muttering of the Tide of the Returning
+Ghosts.
+
+Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military
+occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were
+withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his
+regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight
+typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son
+should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his
+service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta.
+How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had
+left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.
+
+Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having
+been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer
+things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a
+monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint
+the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy
+may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have
+been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old.
+He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of
+the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn
+proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard.
+Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the
+way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"--indeed, all
+his belongings--were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it
+was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task
+entrusted to him.
+
+Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at
+Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred
+to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready
+pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript;
+the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and
+punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are
+very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous
+routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of
+social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the
+interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a
+text from the Gospels and Epistles.
+
+Because of the political and religious animus existing between
+Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more
+prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England.
+All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were
+members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious
+movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial
+functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with
+which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a
+Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious
+observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard
+Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation,
+thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in
+Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate
+opinions.
+
+On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard
+arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7
+o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a
+day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless
+and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady!
+Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition
+to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter
+from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear,
+beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears
+of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us."
+Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by
+our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as
+attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an
+interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs.
+Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the
+misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later,
+in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a
+word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to
+perfectly harmless actions and statements.
+
+Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son,
+having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves
+and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is
+easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding
+herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the
+murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major
+portion of the capital of Ireland.
+
+The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests
+Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory.
+She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and
+unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to
+cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the
+life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of
+the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the
+impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was
+capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe
+castigation.
+
+When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in
+imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he
+imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from
+their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them.
+In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to
+dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.
+
+When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the
+idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually
+became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission
+of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He
+then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the
+sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the
+eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another
+time, another heaven.
+
+Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he
+does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his
+cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers,
+after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name
+of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
+
+When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he
+felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated,
+with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as
+his own.
+
+"My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister,
+Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this
+reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark,
+with large black eyes--very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap
+it. I slapped it--simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was
+immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I
+deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in
+such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered
+amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane--"Sally Brenane,"
+Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin
+Brenane--a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means--and had
+adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak,
+bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in
+common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the
+people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted
+to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed
+for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The
+delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime
+favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady
+was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman
+Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and
+property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband.
+
+In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn
+found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands,
+something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent
+fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which
+the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she
+was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for
+Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes,
+accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in
+strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance
+as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded
+round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them.
+
+Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in
+marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was
+allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably
+laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman,
+when she went for her daily drive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's
+diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies.
+Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles
+had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on
+August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great
+hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the
+latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an
+entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton."
+
+The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was
+apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of
+storm!
+
+Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace and
+charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the
+light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and
+unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and
+ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about
+the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by
+chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the
+only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free
+again, and was living as a widow in Dublin.
+
+What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be
+surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary.
+"October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking
+well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once
+more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little
+boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we
+were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of
+Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained
+of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we
+are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay.
+
+An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We
+are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst
+stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw
+herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now,
+whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern
+nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person,"
+Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we
+only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people
+on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of
+silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that
+the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack
+was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year
+later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea.
+
+Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the
+battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and
+returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some
+little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the
+scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this
+time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred
+feet under the dinner-table.
+
+[Illustration: Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).]
+
+It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew,
+or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these
+years--the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father
+and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his
+mother's brain.
+
+In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
+which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety,
+strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says,
+"remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin
+soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order
+for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy
+with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of
+brotherhood, I was totally indifferent--especially for the reason that
+he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I
+followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him
+downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What
+afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was
+scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again."
+
+The following reminiscence requires little comment:--
+
+"I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was
+afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds
+above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way.
+Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and
+knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady
+came to meet us. She seemed to me tall--but a child cannot judge stature
+well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed
+to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down
+and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I
+found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given
+me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never
+to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I
+told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was
+frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I
+remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not
+tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after."
+
+The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's
+stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and
+Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time
+in Dublin.
+
+Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny,
+odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult
+to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long,
+lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent,
+myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he
+tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from
+him.
+
+"Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells
+of--the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan
+to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the
+same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her
+hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said
+angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly
+beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face
+hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we
+wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down
+easily. 'Ah!' she said:--'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my
+hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a
+large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When
+I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I
+cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and
+rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her
+mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and
+went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I
+think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a
+grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was
+cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But _how_ I would
+love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day--great
+huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels.
+
+"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a
+little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together
+like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then
+much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than
+now. I rather think I should like to see her."
+
+Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun
+was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more
+wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at
+Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life.
+
+In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from
+Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea
+is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma,
+the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a
+magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and
+the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love
+that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to
+be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only
+of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles
+Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on
+Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever
+person, beloved by her children and all her family connections,
+especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of
+stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her
+telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light
+before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to
+sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a
+charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would
+keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the
+years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become
+ridiculously old."[1]
+
+[1] "Out of the East," Gay & Hancock.
+
+"The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister,
+when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see
+me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had
+become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his
+head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very
+angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him
+again.
+
+"I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big
+beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him
+by some tale told her about his life in Paris."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's
+luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after
+her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her
+interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no
+proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some
+members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see
+her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa
+Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the
+vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and
+misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the
+tablets of her memory.
+
+After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles
+Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa
+Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the
+record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major
+Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.
+
+Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded
+with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of
+Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition
+that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith.
+
+Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was
+housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that
+made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy
+at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of
+those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his
+grand-aunt.
+
+Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard
+in Paris.
+
+Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article
+written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati
+friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked
+his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His
+father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson,
+"printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember
+he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote
+to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid
+you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she
+wished me to, and I was lazy."
+
+Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on
+his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of
+Indian fever, on board the English steamship _Mula_ at Suez, thus ending
+a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years.
+
+With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end.
+We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined
+nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame,
+remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's
+advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness--that tenderness
+generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the
+arena of life.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+                                BOYHOOD
+
+     "You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with
+     which we look at a thing--half-angered by inability to
+     analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think
+     the feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says,
+     'the doors have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt
+     in looking at that tree, was it only your pleasure, no,--many
+     who would have loved you, were looking through you and
+     remembering happier things. The different ways in which
+     different places and things thus make appeal would be partly
+     explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences
+     reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest.
+     But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness
+     as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then
+     how much dead love lives again, how many ecstasies of the
+     childhoods of a hundred years must revive!"
+
+
+Most of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs. Brenane seems to have been
+passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper Leeson Street; at Tramore, a
+seaside place on the coast of Waterford in Ireland; at Linkfield Place,
+Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry Molyneux, a Roman Catholic
+friend of Mrs. Brenane's--destined to play a considerable part in the
+boy's life--and in visiting about among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose
+name was legion.
+
+Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house,
+Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have
+records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his
+sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio
+stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea
+was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now.
+
+Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to
+have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from
+thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous
+idea--common to most of Hearn's biographers--has originated from Hearn
+himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales,
+but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious
+genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore
+preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere.
+Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions
+of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's
+"Wanderings in Wales."
+
+Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful
+dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan,"[2] one of Hearn's last
+books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of
+which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the
+dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in
+his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as
+any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the
+forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his
+memory, and calls them "Welsh hills."
+
+[2] The publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who
+ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China,
+when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the
+allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real
+Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and
+strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his
+life for a friend."
+
+The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes,
+under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known
+character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if
+all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied
+her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the
+audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong.
+
+Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of
+Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent
+resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib,
+his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper
+place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth--
+
+          "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
+           Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..."
+
+The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who
+was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles
+Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for
+her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a
+coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance
+of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke
+suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and
+everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose
+to his eyes.
+
+In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus
+alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in
+the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a
+child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I
+forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been
+eight or nine years old--I might have been twelve. And that's all."
+
+It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who
+could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday.
+
+Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These
+visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's
+life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered,
+spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon
+Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience
+of the artistic productions of the Far East.
+
+One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a
+sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in
+every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient
+gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence
+these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a
+lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid
+description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the
+midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather
+beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the
+roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the
+Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.
+
+By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to
+manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it
+would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought
+to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much
+alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was,
+moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an
+incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same
+feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except
+when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is
+finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only
+learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their
+opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of
+life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so
+as a child; I was a perfect imp."
+
+Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his
+children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself
+was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to
+taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild
+imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief--traps
+arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened,
+the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he
+selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a
+hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and
+said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono'
+(flatterer) and run away and hide myself."
+
+He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when
+she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days
+after, she would discover it half-rotten.
+
+Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and
+touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the
+charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally
+Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an
+old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a
+lap-dog."
+
+But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was
+one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore,
+and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great
+extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison
+Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys,
+and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that
+was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was
+staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book
+Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he
+left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion
+with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy,
+of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the
+transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs.
+Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling,
+whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled,
+for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared
+himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion
+over the Celtic mind.
+
+Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a
+prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled
+"Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung
+and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy.
+
+He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by
+himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had
+children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings,
+ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried
+with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not
+forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind
+the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier
+there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the
+greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not
+"ghosts."
+
+The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
+Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he
+maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain,
+brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before
+the accident at Ushaw.
+
+The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish
+glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the
+ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from
+beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from
+eyestrain.
+
+After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen
+envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his
+small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a
+book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre
+de la Pitie et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on
+his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to
+the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen
+through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant
+incidents made too important.
+
+"Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall
+scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial
+self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in
+me--thus producing obvious incongruities."
+
+"My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish
+mind by a certain cousin Jane--apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a
+convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow
+intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell
+fire if he did not believe in God.
+
+When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by
+fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later,
+dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him
+a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It
+included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss
+Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint
+translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human
+Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological
+book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were
+apparently uninfluenced by her religious views.
+
+In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane,
+Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its
+smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic
+churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it
+was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business
+men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in
+England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of
+those who wanted to come and go daily to London.
+
+Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically
+to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at
+various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband
+in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street.
+
+When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt--we see his name assigned by the
+Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866--the house at Redhill was
+given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled
+permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to
+leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time
+had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment.
+
+Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew
+of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the
+second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the
+incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance.
+
+Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction--but was not
+sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of
+Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on
+the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and
+called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he
+goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was
+dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the
+property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the
+reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just
+what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she
+was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands
+of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was
+suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been
+brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four
+or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt
+told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was
+soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on
+the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in
+having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an
+annuity of (I think, but am not sure) L500. 'Henry,' who had 'made
+himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property
+into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own,
+as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into
+the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards
+sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them
+in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told
+to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon
+after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many
+things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor,
+but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find
+out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled
+his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a
+daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'--at fourteen. I
+used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a
+year or two....
+
+"Well,--there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any
+more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under
+pressure of work, I have to say good-bye.
+
+                             "Lovingly ever,
+                                "LAFCADIO HEARN."
+
+In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she
+told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used
+to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't
+think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if
+accurately known, give revelation about some other matters."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+                                TRAMORE
+
+     "If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in
+     early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to
+     that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if
+     you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the
+     fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once
+     breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean,
+     and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers....
+     When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars
+     dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning
+     hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of
+     the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long
+     intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some
+     memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand
+     and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'?
+
+     "So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself
+     revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles
+     away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has
+     the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and
+     shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant
+     of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new,
+     is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace
+     you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails
+     are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the
+     gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky
+     and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly
+     ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a
+     delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life
+     restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder
+     of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your
+     eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the
+     awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its
+     own thick breath.'"
+
+
+Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end
+of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the
+picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite
+resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light
+wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule
+supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves
+come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break
+with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay
+presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever
+on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.
+
+There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when
+impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is
+stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's
+brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea
+listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of
+sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent
+of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness,
+something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse,
+raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos,
+sometimes of inspiration.
+
+Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so
+bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes
+unconsciously, memories of these childish days.
+
+At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years
+later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there
+came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at
+something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether
+suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo
+hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black
+beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable
+in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly
+there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a
+coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of
+which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....
+
+Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had
+listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he
+remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world,
+the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion
+was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries,
+the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.
+
+The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a
+fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"[3] shows his inspiration at its best.
+Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the
+_Commercial_, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls
+the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the
+marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain
+has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of
+last century.
+
+[3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was
+published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
+published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
+
+"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic
+production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that
+constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then
+memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with
+sudden light. _Chita_, at the Viosca Cheniere, conquering her terror of
+the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters
+curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the
+dawn--like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; _Chita_
+learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which,
+the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds,
+darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in
+level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own
+childish existence at Tramore.
+
+For him, as for _Chita_, there was no factitious life those days, no
+obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb
+revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no
+cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in
+gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter
+in the trees without.
+
+When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long
+days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his
+especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest
+for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every
+Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian
+warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are
+to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.
+
+Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he
+was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many
+additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often
+too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered
+for his habit of "drawing the long bow."
+
+Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly
+during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was
+not distinguished by accuracy of statement.
+
+The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those
+surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford
+fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from
+wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world.
+While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was
+building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light
+of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which
+none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul
+entrenched itself.
+
+Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears
+filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he
+saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens
+and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and
+divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of
+beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it,
+recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and
+existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing
+of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from
+countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from
+the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."
+
+It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in
+the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as
+having been found amongst his papers after his death.
+
+His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with
+a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any
+religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual
+sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly,
+stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however,
+exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing
+figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all
+the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure
+after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear.
+Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he
+remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan
+statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the
+gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediaeval creed
+seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.
+
+The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow;
+the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books
+disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places,
+but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was
+placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many
+figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had
+been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross
+strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of
+beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational
+value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried
+persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By
+this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....
+
+After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things
+began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green
+of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before
+unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for
+he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty
+and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees,
+in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At
+moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so
+deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him
+a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.
+
+A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he
+had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the
+"Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of
+her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and
+difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city
+of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+                                 USHAW
+
+     "Really there is nothing quite so holy as a College
+     friendship. Two lads, absolutely innocent of everything in
+     the world or in life, living in ideals of duty and dreams of
+     future miracles, and telling each other all their troubles,
+     and bracing each other up. I had such a friend once. We were
+     both about fifteen when separated. Our friendship began with
+     a fight, of which I got the worst; then my friend became for
+     me a sort of ideal which still lives. I should be almost
+     afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other
+     so): but your letter brought his voice and face back--just as
+     if his ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder."
+
+
+St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, is situated on a slope of the Yorkshire
+Hills, near Durham. In the estimation of English Roman Catholics, it
+stands next to Stonyhurst as an educational establishment. Since Patrick
+Lafcadio Hearn's days it has counted amongst its pupils Francis Thomson,
+the poet, and Cardinal Wiseman, the archbishop, both of whom ever
+retained an affectionate and respectful memory of their Alma Mater.
+
+Lafcadio Hearn was sent there from Redhill in Surrey, arriving on
+September 9th, 1863, at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Brenane is not likely
+to have been a determining influence in sending him to college. For all
+her narrow-minded piety, the old lady was warm-hearted and intensely
+attached to Lafcadio, and must have known how unfitted he was for
+collegiate life in consequence of constitutional delicacy and defective
+eyesight.
+
+We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his religious
+education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs.
+Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a
+hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been
+prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the
+Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early
+impressions.
+
+That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is
+incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to
+preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says:
+"You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the
+priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic
+Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the
+pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic."
+
+Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a
+school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the
+part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the
+authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the
+"mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was
+quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This
+disposes of one of the many Hearn myths.
+
+That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities
+of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the
+Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject"
+was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit
+that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in
+his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and
+conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of
+forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in
+Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire
+absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching.
+
+All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against
+prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against
+restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst
+those whom the French term _desequilibres_, one of those ill-poised and
+erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to
+madness.
+
+Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism
+was artistic and aesthetic.
+
+Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and
+informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient
+Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as
+exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof.
+
+"I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my
+back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I
+could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe
+that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to
+explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the
+folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I
+immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my
+imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground,
+but also to become the sky!"
+
+That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of
+discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were
+the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded
+ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very
+stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist?
+
+If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been
+at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a
+contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the
+little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his
+prototype, Flaubert, there was a _fond d'ecclesiastique_ in Hearn's
+nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry,
+and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and
+pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line?
+
+It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional
+youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a
+university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his
+eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped
+himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger,
+better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from
+Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is
+plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry,
+French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to
+instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre
+Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely
+ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
+remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition
+for three years of his residence at Ushaw.
+
+He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance on
+many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were
+cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions
+of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight
+in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible
+dream of modern aesthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.'
+
+"Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas, and
+the Sagas, and the Chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of the
+Vikings and Berserks, he had at his finger ends, because they were
+mighty and awesomely grand."
+
+Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from Kobe,
+in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me incapacitated
+to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of having
+dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge of some
+one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of
+so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything I
+learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some
+of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..."
+
+In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D----, one of those in his class
+at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you much about
+him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember him as a boy
+about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming with delight
+at some of his many mischievous plots with which he disturbed the
+College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or three classes,
+or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But he was always
+considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and the terror of
+his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I fancy very
+popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody, but he
+loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or of
+glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,'[4] who was one of
+his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many whippings, wrote
+poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in fact, quite
+irresponsible."
+
+[4] I give this name as it is written in Canon D----'s letter.
+
+Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of Ushaw
+College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:--
+
+"He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one
+could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in
+evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks
+of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very
+respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped
+muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc.
+
+"As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his
+class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly
+first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who
+were considered very good English writers--for boys. In other subjects,
+he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose he exerted
+himself except in English.
+
+"I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to say
+and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from the
+Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and brightness,
+disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He was so very
+curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that you felt he
+might do anything in different surroundings."
+
+Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat the
+same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this
+subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably
+getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati,
+Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being
+given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little
+fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it.
+
+His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was
+exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very
+close to his eyes. He had a great taste for the strange and weird, and
+had a certain humour of a grim character. There was always something
+mysterious about him, a mystery which he delighted in increasing rather
+than dissipating. The confession which he is supposed to have made to
+Father William Wrennal that he hoped the devil would come to him in the
+form of a beautiful woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the
+desert, was worthy of his fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic
+mischief and humour.
+
+Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been
+Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary
+talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel.
+His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed
+and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already
+noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what
+chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once
+rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had
+never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects,
+and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque.
+Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low
+red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces, and glinting
+on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts
+shrieking in the gale--these were favourite topics of conversation, and
+in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich.
+
+"I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I
+were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in, I
+think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'[5]
+This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not
+permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A
+note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this
+library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was
+eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now
+more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a
+correct copy of it:--
+
+[5] "High Figures" is the name of a class or "School" (as we call
+"classes" at Ushaw), _e.g._ Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax,
+Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or class for
+two years, _e.g._ High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to be
+moved up into the next class, Grammar. Each class has its own library,
+so that a boy in the class of High Figures would not be allowed to
+intrude into the Library of the school or class above him, Grammar.
+
+          "'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door,
+            Massive and quaint, of the days of yore;
+            When the spectral forms of the mighty dead
+            Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread;
+            When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak
+               Shrieks forth his note so wild,
+            And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak
+               In the moonlight soft and mild,
+            When the dead in the lonely vaults below
+               Rise up in grim array
+            And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow,
+               Weird forms, unknown in day;
+            When the dismal death-bells clang so near,
+               Sounding o'er world and lea,
+            And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear
+               Like the moan of the sobbing sea.'
+
+"He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the
+initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make
+sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd.
+His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then
+romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when
+the passing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for
+school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of
+his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he
+were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the
+College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell
+summoned us again to study.
+
+"A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio
+said his address was longer--'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near
+Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, Space,
+God.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest.
+
+"You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland or
+Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during the
+vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I believe
+I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having told me
+anything of his relations with his family, or of his childhood."
+
+It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter
+written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a
+heading to this chapter.
+
+At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of Hearn's
+subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one
+of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to slip from his
+hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation
+supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by
+the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched out at
+school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in Jesuitical
+schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in Dublin in the
+hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation.
+
+Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They
+must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton,
+has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been
+disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the Japanese army.
+
+There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea
+of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of
+the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he imagined, to
+the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of
+youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe
+limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests,
+and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which
+Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos.
+
+Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He
+never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much
+disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in
+appearance, especially to women, always pursued him.
+
+Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power,
+Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power.
+
+Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he
+alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist,
+declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more
+mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective
+sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the
+conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as
+it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into
+others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The
+quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind.
+"I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being
+haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he
+says, in his essay on "Dust."
+
+The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and
+accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of
+his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No
+doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of
+the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept
+him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power.
+
+It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw.
+Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of
+action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons
+were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question
+of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence
+of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his
+grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees.
+
+Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his
+holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as
+time went on.
+
+Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable any
+longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded her
+that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and declared
+her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a Christian
+household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that she, who
+only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned a home
+of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail himself of
+Molyneux's hospitality.
+
+At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage
+which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane
+bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane,
+had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady.
+The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the
+Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore.
+
+Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited it
+would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont to
+say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a
+necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value
+betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I
+am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself
+to things of the imagination and spirit."
+
+Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live upon,
+might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating vague
+philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of being
+driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and children?
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+                                 LONDON
+
+     "In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to
+     self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a
+     little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody
+     else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of
+     Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly
+     abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no
+     escape, save by an iron ladder.
+
+     "As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each
+     rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had
+     quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the
+     least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the
+     climber."[6]
+
+[6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+
+A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied
+her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at
+Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in
+London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To
+them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly
+comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only
+ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr.
+Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was
+cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open,
+or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and
+plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and
+excitable imagination.
+
+The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law.
+It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling
+against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and
+luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne
+and chicken mayonnaise on board.
+
+Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a
+biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance.
+Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping,
+was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he
+had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he
+might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work.
+
+As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take
+refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by
+his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to
+submit to discipline or restraint of any kind.
+
+Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this
+period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some
+of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to
+finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home,
+surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in
+spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of
+his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was
+forced to become a servant.
+
+This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of
+fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he
+arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for
+there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in
+Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his
+destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was
+probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr.
+Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses.
+
+With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum
+given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the
+first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio
+that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles
+away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying
+himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all
+the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by
+official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can
+imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during
+the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no
+dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or
+trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going.
+
+At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the
+experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to
+the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to
+the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up.
+He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never
+possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of
+the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness
+was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the
+psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive
+recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that
+the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to
+spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self,
+lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most
+efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.
+
+Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then,
+as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or
+when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of
+rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the
+body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight
+and acute dyspepsia.
+
+Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from
+communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he
+possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in
+silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and
+aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.
+
+Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and
+misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he
+showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and
+sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external
+influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If
+those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him
+forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse
+himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.
+
+After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in
+front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of
+achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you
+are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic
+material?
+
+Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that
+literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling,
+as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance,
+that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that
+the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient
+sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly
+the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until
+at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. Analysing the
+feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand
+exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary
+utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for
+months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising;
+for our best work is often out of the unconscious."
+
+Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other
+men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination
+which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his
+blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of
+life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which
+was possible to a man of his temperament.
+
+"All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the
+right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within
+hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within
+hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying
+through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all,
+his own genius.
+
+"Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One
+must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson,
+recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making."
+
+Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows
+and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the
+undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of
+the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at
+Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid
+surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the
+sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great
+metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,
+strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea
+of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range
+of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the
+ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of
+the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in
+imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted
+fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum,
+where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he
+pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of
+Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly
+at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid
+another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation
+or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire
+some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of
+the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain?
+Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally
+divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft
+serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet
+give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into
+conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I
+have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the
+immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding
+sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good
+and true.'"
+
+We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the
+white-winged ships, "swift Hermae of traffic--ghosts of the infinite
+ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of
+which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed
+little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day
+destined to become the interpreter.
+
+We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were
+the sheets--destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical
+stuff--that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not
+destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the
+aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.
+
+"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a
+girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two
+little words--'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw
+her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the
+passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a
+double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain--pain and pleasure,
+doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and
+dead suns.
+
+"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be
+of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there
+never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the
+utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the
+myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar
+even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no
+doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of
+pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may
+revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual
+being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of
+generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the
+darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest
+moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7]
+
+[7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock.
+
+It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England
+in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the
+wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the
+future.
+
+Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in
+every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and
+the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at
+Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his
+fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his
+candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of
+art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in
+writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in
+dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of
+October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers,
+called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to
+lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of
+sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The
+_Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published
+in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of
+Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the
+intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to
+Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first
+time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans,
+and _kakemonos_ embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his
+whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon
+marbles."
+
+Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and
+evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy
+and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single
+theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text,
+seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature
+in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by
+Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he
+maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been
+written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy."
+
+Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to
+Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the
+creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached
+his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have
+wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that
+came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to
+think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been
+fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter,"
+indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters
+contributed to the _Commercial_ from New Orleans. There is a certain
+pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and
+character of _Midwinter_ made to his imagination. "What had I known of
+strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as
+hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had
+known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in
+corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and
+cheated and starved."
+
+Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his
+lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period
+intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain
+endeavoured to penetrate.
+
+Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven,"
+alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who
+had 'run away from a Monastery _in Wales_,' and who still had part of
+his monk's garb for clothing."
+
+In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency
+to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow,
+told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at
+the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had
+been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His
+brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says
+that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France,
+and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that
+Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to
+Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has
+been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic
+colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of
+every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of
+the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or
+destroyed.
+
+Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads
+to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and
+good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman
+Catholic institution of the _Petits Precepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen.
+Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he
+took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he
+went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle
+Richard, who was living there at the time.
+
+Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor,
+disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort
+of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The
+church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore,
+not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as
+far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and
+renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.
+
+It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage
+of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris,
+where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to
+express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to
+clutch the Unattainable."
+
+A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital
+memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.
+
+It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war,
+when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and
+luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the
+world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin,"
+while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon
+Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists
+who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of
+their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_,
+and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were
+inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the
+painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, Francois Millet, in
+poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing
+"The Sowers" and "The Angelus."
+
+Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of
+Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle
+it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's.
+Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however
+lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers.
+However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty
+to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.
+
+It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that
+ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the
+moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for
+itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of
+Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of
+Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of
+his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented
+exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit,
+which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and
+Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He
+could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves
+of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in
+praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the
+originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.
+
+It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert
+Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands,
+Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the
+same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about
+the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also
+frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which
+he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"--"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes
+later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.
+
+In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who
+had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed
+to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he
+was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's
+brother-in-law.
+
+It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to
+propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have
+well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any
+inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+                               CINCINNATI
+
+     "... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus
+     and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the
+     Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every
+     one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the
+     Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't
+     kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and
+     I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my
+     soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome
+     question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply
+     telling her, 'I don't know.'"[8]
+
+[8] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+
+In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later,
+Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English
+printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I
+asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know
+anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay
+you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can
+feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming
+department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of
+tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr.
+Watkin's frugal meals."
+
+In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation
+that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his
+shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in
+the year 1859.
+
+"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"
+
+"To write, sir."
+
+"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first,
+try your hand at writing later on."
+
+Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied
+reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge
+of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to,
+but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other
+than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one
+time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy,
+Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant,
+regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's
+weird tales.
+
+The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely
+near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had
+befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy,
+and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself
+was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a
+something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air
+of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says,
+hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each
+other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a
+ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his
+printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned
+at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality,
+and conceived an immediate affection for the boy.
+
+Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left
+France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop
+in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati.
+
+Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of
+events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In
+his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had
+been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself
+in considerable difficulties.
+
+Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he
+tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the
+names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is
+sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading
+of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian
+publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the
+same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago
+in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food,
+he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian
+peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of
+brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the
+vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a
+beauty and charm that never were hers--and under the title of "My First
+Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers.
+
+After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have
+touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of
+misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement
+in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he
+had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to
+seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot."
+
+"My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson,
+when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very
+lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the
+apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.
+
+"I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew
+nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out
+of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's
+photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had
+to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then
+I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to
+sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen
+from the house."
+
+This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as
+having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister
+and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses,
+unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at
+that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen.
+
+His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft,
+delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his
+hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure
+of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the
+frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he
+thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were
+of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining
+stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures
+like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The
+horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they
+were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was,
+yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did
+not.
+
+"I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a
+business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling
+the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary
+calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph
+Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I
+looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was touchy--went
+off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends refused to do anything
+further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of doors. At last I became
+a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires, shovelled coals, etc., in
+exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on the floor of the
+smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half years, finding time
+to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap Weekly
+Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for them. I tried other
+occupations also--canvassing, show-card writing, etc. These brought
+enough to buy smoking tobacco and second-hand clothes--nothing more."
+
+It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never
+applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are
+not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop,
+with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even
+sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a
+disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of
+money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry
+Molyneux's brother-in-law.
+
+In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"[9] Dr. George Milbury Gould
+alludes to this gentleman in the following terms:--
+
+[9] Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
+
+"There is still living, an Irishman, to whom Lafcadio was sent from
+Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was
+placed. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870."
+
+"He was not sure," says Gould in his account of an interview with Mr.
+Cullinane, "whether Mrs. Brenane was really Hearn's grand-aunt; the fact
+is, he declared that he knew nothing, and no one knew anything true of
+Hearn's life. Asked why the lad was shipped to him, he replied, 'I do
+not know--I do not even know whether he was related to my
+brother-in-law, Molyneux, or not.'"
+
+From these statements Gould infers that the boy couldn't stop in any
+school to which he was sent, that he was apparently an unwelcome charge
+upon his father's Irish relations. Every one, indeed, who had anything
+to do with him made haste to rid themselves of the obligation.
+
+The friendship with Mr. Watkin, the old English printer, was destined to
+last for the term of Hearn's life.
+
+Many of Hearn's friends in America have insinuated that Mr. Watkin
+exaggerated the strength of the tie that bound him to Lafcadio Hearn;
+but Hearn's letters to his sister bear out all the statements made in
+the introduction to the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." Even
+when Hearn succeeded in obtaining occupation elsewhere, he would return
+to Mr. Watkin's office during leisure hours, either for a talk with his
+friend, or, if Mr. Watkin was out, for a desultory reading of the books
+in the "library," the appellation by which the two or three shelves
+containing Mr. Watkin's heterogeneous collection was dignified. He was
+of no use in Mr. Watkin's business owing to defective eyesight, but when
+he returned after his day's work elsewhere, literary, political and
+religious subjects were discussed and quarrelled over.
+
+As was now and afterwards his custom with his friends, in spite of daily
+intercourse, Hearn kept up a frequent correspondence with Mr. Watkin.
+This correspondence has been edited and published by Mr. Milton Bronner
+under the title of "Letters from the Raven." Edgar Allan Poe had died in
+1849, but the influence of his weird and strange genius was still
+pre-eminent in America. Early in their acquaintance Hearn established
+the habit of addressing Mr. Watkin as "Old Man" or "Dad," while on the
+other hand the boy, in consequence of his sallow complexion, black hair,
+and admiration for Poe's works, was known as the "Raven." During the
+long years of their correspondence, a drawing of a raven was generally
+placed in lieu of signature when Lafcadio wrote to Mr. Watkin. Many of
+these pen-and-ink sketches interspersed with other illustrations here
+and there through the letters show considerable talent for drawing, of a
+fantastic sort, that might have been developed, had Hearn's eyesight
+permitted, and had he not nourished other ambitions.
+
+Some of the letters are simply short statements left on the table for
+Mr. Watkin's perusal when he returned home, or a few lines of nonsense
+scribbled on a bit of paper and pinned on a door of the office.
+
+Often when Hearn was offended by some observation, or a reprimand
+administered by the older man, he would "run away in a huff." Mr.
+Watkin, who was genuinely attached to the erratic little genius and
+understood how to deal with him, would simply follow him, tell him not
+to be a fool, and bring him back again.
+
+In the fourth autobiographical fragment, found amongst Hearn's papers
+after his death, is one entitled "Intuition." He there alludes to Watkin
+as "the one countryman he knew in Cincinnati--a man who had preceded him
+into exile by nearly forty years."
+
+In a glass case at the entrance to a photographer's shop, Hearn had come
+across the photograph of a face, the first sight of which had left him
+breathless with wonder and delight.... The gaze of the large dark eyes,
+the aquiline curve of the nose, the mouth firm but fine--made him think
+of a falcon, in spite of the delicacy of the face.... He stood looking
+at it, and the more he looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed
+to grow like a fascination. But who was she? He dared not ask the owner
+of the gallery. To his old friend Watkin, therefore, he went and at once
+proposed a visit to the photographer's. The picture was as much a puzzle
+to him as to Hearn.
+
+For long years the incident of the photograph passed from Hearn's memory
+until, in a Southern city hundreds of miles away, he suddenly perceived,
+in a glass case in a druggist's shop, the same photograph.
+
+"Please tell me whose face that is," he asked.
+
+"Is it possible you do not know?" responded the druggist. "Surely you
+are joking?"
+
+Hearn answered in the negative. Then the man told him--it was that of
+the great tragedienne, Rachel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cincinnati is separated from Kentucky by the Ohio. It is there but a
+narrow river, and the Cincinnati folk were wont to migrate into Kentucky
+when there were lectures on spiritualism, revivalist meetings, or
+political haranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to
+make the journey when the day's work was done.
+
+Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of thought.
+We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle" as well
+as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its astral
+visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of
+tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects
+through space.
+
+These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later,
+Hearn was on the staff of the _Enquirer_ as night reporter, his "Dad"
+often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as the
+water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi valley.
+
+At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the _Enquirer_ staff
+visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's Home"
+(he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati where
+business people of small means spend their declining years. An account
+of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The writer
+described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many pigeon-holes,
+holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels of Tual"--the
+letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman tottered when the
+reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings, and as he
+balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told, in a voice
+heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and how their
+friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition with the
+years.
+
+"I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloomy
+views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny
+reminded me of Poe at his best--or worst, as you might call it; only, in
+my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to my place
+when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a raven
+varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour he was
+in when he sketched it."
+
+Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can hardly
+be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of his
+statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to see
+him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be quite
+accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having spent
+nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures after his
+arrival, of his having worked as type-setter and proof-reader for the
+Robert Clarke Co., before seeking employment at Mr. Watkin's office.
+
+It was while he was sleeping on the bed of paper shavings behind Mr.
+Watkin's shop that he acted as private secretary to Thomas Vickers,
+librarian in the public library at Cincinnati. He mentions Thomas
+Vickers at various times in his letters to Krehbiel, and refers to rare
+books on music and copies of classical works to be found at the library.
+
+During all this period, wandering from place to place, endeavouring to
+find employment of any kind, the boy's underlying ambition was to obtain
+a position on the staff of one of the large daily newspapers, and thus
+work his way to a competency that would enable him to devote himself to
+literary work of his own.
+
+"I believe he would have signed his soul away to the devil," one of his
+colleagues says, "to get on terms of recognition with either Colonel
+John Cockerill, then managing editor of the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
+Mr. Henderson, the city editor of the _Commercial_." Though Hearn may
+not have signed his soul to the devil, he certainly sold his genius to
+ignoble uses when he wrote his well-known description of the tan-yard
+murder. His ambition however was gratified. A reporter who could thus
+cater to the public greed for horrors was an asset to the Cincinnati
+press.
+
+We have an account, given by John Cockerill, twenty years later, of
+Hearn's first visit to the _Enquirer_:--
+
+"One day there came to the office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow,
+strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and
+bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding
+terms.
+
+"When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for
+outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in
+the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to what
+he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and
+tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted
+brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and
+indescribable.
+
+"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I
+was astonished to find it charmingly written....
+
+"From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote
+special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as
+anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him
+to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of
+the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work,
+for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper
+was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his
+prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit,
+scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more
+annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those
+days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as
+sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him
+as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense
+resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the
+beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither
+wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city
+staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive
+powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled
+about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out
+charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings
+fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth
+ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba
+dances."
+
+A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was
+Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous
+steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the
+city from that exalted position.
+
+Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the
+performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not
+listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there
+was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the
+climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that
+he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the
+remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.'
+Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished
+their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns
+describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained
+from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have
+seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose."
+
+Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the
+paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his
+wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them
+and to his fellow-reporters.
+
+After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in
+the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning,
+under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its
+wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations
+from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire.
+
+Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the
+Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create
+something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the
+latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified
+considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art,
+he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and
+finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right
+phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position,
+the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to
+vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined
+conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist
+of Hearn's quality.
+
+Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first
+translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification
+of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales,
+included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he
+undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de
+Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man
+cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I
+translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass
+without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I
+think nothing ought to be suppressed."
+
+As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech
+at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's
+productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and
+Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets
+and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the
+matter of social morality.
+
+When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp"
+was refused admittance to the pages of a San Francisco magazine as
+likely to shock the sentiments of its readers and injure the circulation
+of the periodical in consequence of the morals of the mother of the
+_Luck_, we are not surprised that Hearn's attempt to introduce the
+American public to the masterpieces of the French Impressionist School
+was foredoomed to failure. There is a certain naive, determined defiance
+of convention in his insistence on gaining admiration both from his
+friends and the public for productions that were really quite unsuited
+to general circulation at that time in America. We find him, for
+instance, recommending the perusal of "Mdlle. de Maupin" to a clergyman
+of the Established Church and sending a copy of Gautier's poems to Miss
+Bisland in New Orleans.
+
+"I shall stick," he says, "to my pedestal of faith in literary
+possibilities like an Egyptian Colossus with a broken nose, seated
+solemnly in the gloom of my own originality, seeking no reward save the
+satisfaction of creating something beautiful; but this is worth working
+for."
+
+It is a noteworthy fact and one that may be mentioned here that, in
+spite of his extraordinary mastery of the subtleties of the French
+language, he always spoke French with an atrociously bad accent. "He had
+a very bad ear," his friend, Henry Krehbiel, tells us in his article on
+"Hearn and Folk Music," "organically incapable of humming the simplest
+tune; he could not even sing the scale, a thing that most people do
+naturally."
+
+From these Cincinnati days dates Hearn's hatred of the drudgery of
+journalism, "a really nefarious trade," he declared later; "it dwarfs,
+stifles and emasculates thought and style.... The journalist of to-day
+is obliged to hold himself in readiness to serve any cause.... If he can
+enrich himself quickly and acquire comparative independence, then,
+indeed, he is able to utter his heart's sentiments and indulge his
+tastes...."
+
+Amongst his colleagues on the staff of the _Enquirer_ Hearn was not
+popular. He was looked upon as what Eton boys call a "sap"; his
+fussiness about punctuation and style, soon earned for him the sobriquet
+of "Old Semi-Colon." This meticulous precision on the subject of
+punctuation and the value of words remained a passion with him all his
+life. He used to declare he felt about it as a painter would feel about
+the painting of his picture. He told his friend, Tunison, that the word
+"gray" if spelt "grey" gave him quite a different colour sensation.
+
+We remember his delightful outburst in a letter to Chamberlain, that has
+been so often quoted. "For me words have colour, form, character: they
+have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations;--they have moods, humours,
+eccentricities:--they have tints, tones, personalities," etc., etc.
+
+Though Hearn did not get on with others of the newspaper staff, he
+formed ties of intimacy with several choice spirits then moving in the
+best literary circles of Cincinnati and now well known in the literary
+life of the United States.
+
+Henry Krehbiel, recognised in England and America as an eminent music
+lecturer and critic, was one of his most intimate friends. Joseph
+Tunison was another; he afterwards became editor of the _Dayton
+Journal_, and, as well as Krehbiel, wrote sympathetically of the little
+Irishman after his death, expressing indignation at the scurrilous
+attacks made upon his reputation by several papers in the United States.
+"He was a wonderfully attractive personality, full of quaint learning,
+and a certain unworldly wisdom. He had a fashion of dropping his friends
+one by one; or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing;
+whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit it
+would be hard to say. But he never spoke ill of them afterwards. It was
+not his way to tell much about himself; and what he did say was let out
+as if by accident in the course of conversation on other topics.... It
+was impossible to be long in his company without learning that his early
+years had been years of bitterness. His reminiscences of childhood
+included not only his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, but also a
+beautiful blonde lady, who had somehow turned his happiness to misery."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+                              VAGABONDAGE
+
+     "Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black skin that
+     remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to
+     me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should
+     it not be beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is,
+     and has been so acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced
+     slave-owning races. Either Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps,
+     told the world that after long living in Africa, the sight of
+     white faces produced something like fear (and the evil
+     spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost
+     their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the
+     fairer, the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in
+     the North, of its kind. But it is not, surely, comparable
+     with the wonderful beauty of colour in other races."[10]
+
+[10] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin
+& Co.
+
+
+As to Hearn's more intimate life at this time there are many
+contradictory accounts. Published facts and the notoriety of legal
+proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and generally manage to work
+their way through any deposit of inaccurate scandal or imaginative
+rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set forth; otherwise how
+emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by discipline and
+self-control out of the depths into which at this time he fell?
+
+The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman,
+"Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries,
+which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of
+his unbalanced mental equipment.
+
+On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing
+reporter's work for the _Enquirer_ he fell under the "Shadow of the
+Ethiopian."
+
+In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain
+was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown
+off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through
+the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental
+vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and struggle.
+
+"He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs.
+Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I
+do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint
+in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat
+extremes of hate and love--a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature.
+Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had
+been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a
+different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood
+that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and
+lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If
+we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been
+better for those dependent on us."
+
+The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged. Hearn,
+then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to return from
+work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the morning. She was a
+handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed
+him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the
+circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and
+compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near
+Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863
+President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted
+into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself.
+
+In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She
+saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they
+talked much of her early days and years of slavery.
+
+His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no one
+so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave
+herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found
+himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible
+position.
+
+After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to
+assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books.
+The _Enquirer_ had articles running through several issues in 1906 on
+the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after his
+death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws of
+Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage
+between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone
+through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto,
+or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole."
+
+It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his work
+called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it would
+have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of French
+writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so great an
+influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for alien races
+and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness, primitive impulses,
+as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and admiration of strange
+people, were a vital part of the impressionist creed, constituted,
+indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations of their unwholesome
+opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared his preference for the
+women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's earlier novels were but the
+histories of love affairs with women of "dusky races," either Eastern or
+Polynesian.
+
+Hearn, as we have said before, was an exemplification of the theory of
+heredity. The fancy for mulattos, Creoles and orientals, which he
+displayed all his life, is most likely to be accounted for as an
+inheritance from his Arabian and oriental ancestors on his mother's
+side. He but took up the dropped threads of his barbaric ancestry.
+
+All his life he preferred to mix in the outer confines of society; the
+"levee" at Cincinnati; the lower Creoles and mixed races at New Orleans;
+fishermen, gardeners, peasants, were chosen by preference as companions
+in Japan. He railed against civilisation. "The so-called improvements in
+civilisation have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see,
+hear, or find anything out. You are improving yourself out of the
+natural world. I want to get back amongst the monkeys and the parrots,
+under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an eternally lilac and
+luke-warm sea--where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an
+exertion.... Civilisation is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery!
+Surely a palm two hundred feet high is a finer thing in the natural
+order than seventy times seven New Yorks."[11]
+
+[11] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+Hearn was a born rebel, and every incident of his life hitherto had
+goaded him into further rebellion against all constituted authority.
+That a race should be trampled upon by one regarding itself as superior
+was a state of things that he could not contemplate without a protest,
+and by his action he protested in the most emphatic manner possible. He
+never took into consideration whether it was wise to do so or not.
+Later, when the turbulent spirit of youth had settled down to accept the
+discipline of social laws and conventions, he took a very different view
+of the racial question in the United States and confessed the want of
+comprehension he had displayed on the subject. Writing years afterwards
+to a pupil in Japan, he alludes to the unfortunate incident in
+Cincinnati. He resolved to take the part of some people who were looked
+down upon in the place where he lived. He thought that those who looked
+down upon them were morally wrong, so he went over to their side. Then
+the rest of the people stopped speaking to him, and he hated them. But
+he was then too young to understand. The trouble was really caused by
+moral questions far larger than those he had been arguing about.
+
+Hearn was certainly correct in thinking that, from the point of view of
+the people amongst whom he was living, an attempt to legalise a union
+with a coloured woman was an unpardonable lapse from social law. Not
+only then, but for years afterwards, public opinion was strongly
+influenced against him in consequence of this lamentable incident. Even
+at the time of his death, in 1904, a perfect host of statements and
+distorted legends exaggerating all his lapses from conventional
+standards were raked up. Amongst other accusations, they declared that
+when in New Orleans he was the favoured admirer of Marie Levaux, known
+as "The Voodoo Queen."
+
+Page Baker, the editor of the _Times Democrat_ immediately came forward
+to defend Hearn from the charge. Referring to the Voodoo Queen, the
+article says: "All this wonderful tale is based upon the fact that
+Hearn, like every other newspaper man in New Orleans who thought there
+might be a story in it, entered into communication with a negro woman,
+who called herself 'Marie Levaux,' and pretended, falsely as was
+afterward shown, to know something of the mysteries of Voodooism.
+
+"Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on investigating
+for himself what he wrote about; but what the _Sun_ states is not only
+untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern city like New
+Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If Hearn had been
+the man the _Sun_ says he was, he could not have held the position he
+did a week, much less the long years he remained in this city.... He
+certainly was not conventional in the order of his life any more than he
+was in the product of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and
+silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge upon him."
+
+In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the _Enquirer_, and in
+the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the _Commercial_, but he had
+too seriously wounded the susceptibilities of society in Cincinnati to
+make existence any longer comfortable, or, indeed, possible. The
+uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit his delicate
+constitution. He longed to get away.
+
+Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great
+South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were
+evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New
+Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey
+north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South,
+his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a
+November morning, were oddly connected with _Jean ah-Poquelin_. Even
+before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond the
+wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar sheds,
+to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion.
+
+A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes of the
+statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any difference of
+opinion with the editor of the _Commercial_. In fact, money for the
+journey was given to him as well as a roving commission for letters from
+Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+                                MEMPHIS
+
+     "So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of
+     Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they
+     will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the
+     Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns of
+     wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes
+     bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the perfume
+     of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot
+     help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea
+     mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that
+     moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed--vivifying,
+     illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion--the
+     sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple.
+     You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when
+     the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ
+     ..."[12]
+
+[12] Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
+Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
+
+
+It was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio Hearn, with forty dollars in
+his pocket and a head full of dreams, started for Memphis on his way to
+New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr. Edward Henderson, editors of the
+_Commercial_, and his old friend, Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami
+depot to bid him God speed.
+
+Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio
+rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey
+from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced,
+and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several
+days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication
+in the northern city he had left was Henry Watkin. Hieroglyphs of
+ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in
+moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis,
+that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost
+defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions.
+
+On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In
+a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its
+head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His
+finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a
+day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to
+lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel.
+
+I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias
+Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this
+time to the _Commercial_. These letters, his first professional work,
+except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St.
+Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging
+industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit,
+giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which,
+combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed
+him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day.
+
+A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the
+identification in the files of the _Commercial_ of these "Midwinter"
+letters.
+
+He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the
+Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered
+windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up
+appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted
+about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It
+gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great
+misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came,
+the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden
+uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of
+stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy
+brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists
+lingering like shades upon its banks.
+
+"Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial
+Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and
+heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would
+appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus."
+
+Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at
+Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough,
+rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the
+life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical
+pioneer--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a
+kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation."
+
+Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a
+storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the
+Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading
+army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild
+charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that
+the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader,
+were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union."
+
+To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking
+the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the
+cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the
+_Thompson Dean_ there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every
+corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy
+spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at
+night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following
+him in the dark.
+
+It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself alone
+in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary hours of
+the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from
+vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am
+writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and
+perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is
+accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose
+you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would
+write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again,
+only by years--until the times and places of old friendships were
+forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams.
+
+At last the New Orleans steamer, the _Thompson Dean_, arrived, and Hearn
+floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and also,
+inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the flood-tide of
+his genius. A letter contributed to the _Commercial_, describing the
+"Fair Paradise of the South," the great sugar country, in which he now
+found himself, shows how he was gaining in the manipulation of his
+material, also gaining in the power of appreciating the splendour of the
+vision, the inmost ultimate secret Nature ever reveals to those who can
+comprehend and decipher it.
+
+As the little half-blind genius sat on the cotton bales on the deck of
+the _Thompson Dean_ those autumn days, peering forth one moment, the
+next with nose close to the paper, his pen scratching rapidly,
+describing the marvellous pictures, setting down the impressions that
+slipped by on either hand, all the joy of an imprisoned tumultuous soul
+set free, mentally and morally free, must have come to him. It breathes
+in every line, in every paragraph of his work. And not only was this
+passionate joy his, but also the exhilarating assurance of knowing that
+by self-denial, industry and the determination to succeed he had
+achieved and perfected the power to describe and expound the marvellous
+pageant to others. From the horizon widening in front of him, through
+the "Great South Gate," from "The Gulf" and the Tropics, from Martinique
+and Florida came the health-giving breeze, carrying on its wings
+courage, regeneration, and the promise of future recognition and fame.
+
+Many were his backslidings, even to the extent of meditating suicide
+during the first years of his sojourn in New Orleans, but never did he
+fall so morally low as at Cincinnati. That life of sordidness and
+ignominy was left behind, the unclean spirit exorcised and cast forth!
+He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set
+throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and
+response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man
+again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise
+on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight
+of his soul.
+
+Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the page
+athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the _Commercial_; some magic,
+bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor, inducing him
+to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his "Ozias Midwinter"
+correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the ordinary reading
+public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+                              NEW ORLEANS
+
+     "The infinite gulf of blue above seems a shoreless sea, whose
+     foam is stars, a myriad million lights are throbbing and
+     flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with
+     perfume prevails over the land,--made only more impressive by
+     the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy
+     voices of business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton
+     presses closed, and the city is half empty. So that the time
+     is really inspiring. But I must wait to record the
+     inspiration in some more energetic climate."
+
+
+It is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin that we are able to follow his
+more intimate feelings and mode of life at this period of his career. He
+was at first extravagantly enthusiastic about the quaint beauty and
+novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the
+climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the
+city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was
+to be found in this half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her
+pitiful decay, it still was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view
+of New Orleans was soon dissipated by pressing financial anxiety.
+
+He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of
+beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for
+twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to
+sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds,
+as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need
+of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was
+unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper
+correspondence.
+
+Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of
+residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of
+Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven
+sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes
+himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed
+with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to
+the fire, smoking his pipe of "_terre Gambiese_," conjuring up fancies
+of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while a "voice
+from the far tropics called to him across the darkness."
+
+It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he
+started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his
+sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three
+days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of
+the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and
+brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate,
+it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for
+mastering the ignoble necessity for making expenditure tally with
+revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with
+the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a
+fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in
+the matter of ways and means.
+
+Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his
+literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his
+shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only
+enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a
+penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_
+hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his
+helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business
+affairs from sending a reply for some weeks.
+
+His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time,
+surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched
+close by.
+
+"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when
+referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty
+and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American
+city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter
+that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for
+the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American
+city appals me--because I remember."
+
+The _Hermes_ of AEschylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer
+of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The
+same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not
+only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows
+it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was
+absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and
+eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and
+expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in
+any other city in the world.
+
+From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's
+Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can
+conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its
+multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric
+facades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its
+picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves,
+dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out
+of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green
+batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron,
+framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine
+the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as
+they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses
+decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels,
+American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards
+and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings.
+
+We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river
+bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of
+the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow
+of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria
+and the Gulf.
+
+He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal
+splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide
+its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left
+untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined,
+refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to
+allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.
+
+We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through
+the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the
+great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow
+as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors
+from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus,
+Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing
+the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the
+face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves
+at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New
+Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as
+their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to
+distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the
+antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a
+vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some
+of his oranges, a dozen at six cents.
+
+From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the
+representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where
+plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the
+ancient regime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory
+from the carven stone.
+
+Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the
+levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living
+iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground,
+with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon
+teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the
+more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the
+anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner
+in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of
+the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The
+lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale
+was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it
+into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws
+closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened,
+flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five
+inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to
+disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw
+remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I
+thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible
+yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque,
+through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed."
+
+The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to
+Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit
+to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of
+futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their
+country that had sold them for expediency.
+
+With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of
+those who had once been opulent--the princely misery that never doffed
+its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on bread and
+orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an
+invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the _mont
+de piete_) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the pretty misery,
+young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too jocosely to have
+its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers,
+and crying for hunger after they were gone.
+
+Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn
+mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue.
+
+During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various
+intervals contributed letters to the _Commercial_. Now that his genius
+has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the
+autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value;
+but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of
+the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting.
+The American public wanted a clear and dispassionate view of political
+affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect
+trade in the state of Ohio.
+
+We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following,
+and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant
+by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:--
+
+"I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is
+not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty'
+serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of
+all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of
+silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?"
+
+In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited
+to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on
+political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion
+that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans
+signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an
+opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of
+earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself
+acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be
+credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so
+frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part
+was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head
+above water until regular work came his way.
+
+Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth
+birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file
+of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery
+in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway
+by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments.
+Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some
+unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness
+and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which,
+instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid
+frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this
+he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr.
+Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been
+through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when
+twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he
+said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in
+retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he
+damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that
+gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he
+disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same
+place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for
+the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow
+and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a
+broken capital of the Parthenon."
+
+About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city,
+desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a
+severe attack of "dengue" fever.
+
+"I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson.
+It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken
+city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky
+bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river,
+its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with
+vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale
+smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each
+day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the
+faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles,
+pillars of verandahs, lamps over government letter-boxes, glimmered the
+white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And
+lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after
+sunset.
+
+After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to
+insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he
+had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected.
+
+"I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no
+friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor
+failed," he tells his sister.
+
+In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences,
+he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a
+sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began
+within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair,
+between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in
+their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a
+coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self
+something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and
+human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart
+and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth
+living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up
+the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish
+tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the
+infinite world.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+                             WIDER HORIZONS
+
+     "There are no more mysteries--except what are called hearts,
+     those points at which individuals rarely touch each other,
+     only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a
+     ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what
+     lies out of soul-sight."[13]
+
+[13] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+
+The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf
+Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person
+in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost
+stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months
+his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular
+literary work.
+
+Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic
+admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection,
+and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from
+Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is
+said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him
+the book was dedicated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the yellow fever had passed away "there were plenty of vacancies
+waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his sister....
+
+A daily newspaper called the _Item_ was at that time issued in New
+Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its production,
+"items" taken from European and American sources filling most of its
+columns. Hearn described it as a poor little sheet going no farther
+north than St. Louis.
+
+He was offered the assistant-editorship; the leisure that he found for
+literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the
+smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as
+he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more
+consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and
+weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing
+with strange characters, invaluable as literary material--Creoles,
+Spaniards, Mexicans--all that curious, heterogeneous society peculiar to
+New Orleans.
+
+If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to
+place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so
+in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest
+pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous
+tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and
+throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and
+outcasts from the world of so-called respectability.
+
+At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same roof
+as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened
+windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious
+shrine. This was quite sufficient to associate his name with hers, and
+many were the unfounded rumours--Nemesis of the unfortunate episode with
+Althea Foley at Cincinnati--which floated northwards regarding the
+manner of his life.
+
+Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this
+time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and
+in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry
+of ancient India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and
+emotion, the illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of
+annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of
+occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the _Item_ by weird and
+mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds,
+considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing
+attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own genius.
+
+The routine of his life at this time is given in letters written to his
+"old Dad" and his friend, Krehbiel.
+
+The same ascetic scorn for material comfort, heritage of his oriental
+ancestry, seems to have distinguished him at this period in New Orleans,
+as later in Japan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the
+office, "concocting devilment" for the _Item_, his Spanish lessons with
+Jose de Jesus y Preciado, the "peripatetic blasphemy," as he named him
+afterwards, dinner at a Chinese restaurant for an infinitesimal sum, an
+hour or two spent at second-hand book-stalls, and home to bed. There is,
+I am told, an individual, Armand Hawkins by name, owner of an ancient
+book-store at New Orleans, still alive, who remembers the curious little
+genius, with his prominent eyes, wonderful knowledge on all sorts of
+out-of-the-way subjects recounted in a soft, musical voice, who used to
+come almost daily to visit his book-store. He it was who enabled Hearn
+to get together the library about which there has been so much
+discussion since his death. Next to his love of buying old books,
+Hearn's great indulgence seems to have been smoking, not cigars, but
+pipes of every make and description.
+
+The glimpses we get of him from his own letters and from reminiscences
+collected from various people in New Orleans all give the same
+impression. A Bohemian love of vagabondage, picking up impressions here
+and there, some of which were set down in pencil, some in ink; as far as
+his eyesight would permit, many were the sketches made at this time.
+None of them have been preserved, except the very clever Mephistophelian
+one sent to Mr. Watkin and reproduced in the volume entitled "Letters
+from the Raven." "He was a gifted creature," says a lady who knew him at
+this time. "He came fluttering in and out of our house like a shy moth,
+and was adored by my children."
+
+He had no ambitions, no loves, no anxieties, sometimes a vague unrest
+without a motive, sometimes a feeling as if his heart were winged and
+trying to soar; sometimes a half-crazy passion for a great night with
+wine and women and music; but the wandering passion was strongest of
+all, and he felt no inclination to avail himself of the only anchor
+which keeps the ship of a man's life in port.... Nights were so liquid
+with tropic moonlight, days so splendid with green and gold, summer so
+languid with perfume and warmth, that he hardly knew whether he was
+dreaming or awake.
+
+In 1881, Hearn succeeded in becoming a member of the staff of the
+leading New Orleans paper, the _Times Democrat_, "the largest paper," he
+tells his sister, "in the Southern States." He now seemed to have
+entered on a halcyon period of life--congenial society, romantic and
+interesting surroundings. Penetrated with enthusiasm for the modern
+French literary school as he was, he here met intellects and
+temperaments akin to his own. Now he was enabled to get his translations
+from Gautier and Baudelaire printed, and read for the first time by an
+appreciative public. "Everybody was kind," he tells his sister; "I
+became well and strong, lived steadily, spent my salary on books. I was
+thus able to make up for my deficiencies of education.... I had only a
+few hours of work each day;--plenty of time to study. I wrote novels and
+other books which literary circles approved of."
+
+With Page Baker, the owner and editor-in-chief of the _Times Democrat_,
+he formed a salutary and enduring friendship. The very difference in
+character between the two seems to have made the bond all the more
+enduring. Page Baker was a man of great business capacity, and at the
+same time keen discrimination in literary affairs. From the first he
+conceived the highest opinion of Hearn's literary ability. However
+fantastic or out-of-the-way his contributions to the columns of the
+_Times Democrat_, they were always inserted without elision. Years
+afterwards, writing to him from Japan, Hearn declares, in answer to a
+panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his Japanese books, that the
+most delightful criticisms he ever had were Page Baker's own readings
+aloud of his vagaries in the "_T. D._" office, after the proofs came
+down, just fresh from the composition room, with the wet, sharp, inky
+smell still on the paper. Baker, apparently, in 1893 sent him
+substantial help, and Hearn writes thanking him from the bottom of his
+much-scarified heart. Often amidst the cramped, austere conditions of
+his existence in Japan, he recalled these days of communion with
+congenial spirits at New Orleans, and work with his colleagues at the
+_Times Democrat_ office. "Ghosts! After getting your letter last night I
+dreamed. Do you remember that splendid Creole who used to be your city
+editor--John----?--is it not a sin that I have forgotten his name? He
+sat in a big chair in the old office, and told me wonderful things,
+which I could not recall on waking."
+
+In a letter dated July 7, 1882, Hearn tells Mr. Watkin that he had
+entered into an arrangement with Worthington, the publisher, for the
+issuing of his translation of Gautier's stories made at Cincinnati. It
+was to cost him one hundred and fifty dollars, but there was an
+understanding that this money was to be repaid by royalties on the sale
+of the book and any extra profits. He announced his intention of going
+North in a few months by way of Cincinnati, as he wished to see
+Worthington about his new publication. Though he was making, he said,
+the respectable wage of thirty dollars a week for five hours' work a
+day, he felt enervated by the climate, incapable of any long stretch of
+work, and thought change to a northern climate for a bit might stimulate
+his intellectual powers. He then touched on the changes that passing
+years had wrought in his outlook on life. "Less despondent, but less
+hopeful; wiser a little and more silent; less nervous, but less merry;
+... not strictly economical, but coming to it steadily." His horizons
+were widening, the accomplishment of a fixed purpose in life was really
+the only pleasurable experience, and the grasp of a friendly hand the
+only real satisfaction of an existence that wisdom declared a delusion
+and a snare.
+
+Hearn at times indulged in exaggerated fits of economy, the one thought
+that animated him being the idea of freeing himself from the yoke of
+dependence on the whims of employers--from the harness of journalism. He
+made up his mind to keep house for himself, so hired a room in the
+northern end of the French quarter, and purchased a complete set of
+cooking utensils and kitchen ware. He succeeded in reducing his expenses
+to two dollars a week, and kept them at that (exclusive of rent),
+although his salary rose to thirty dollars a week. Having saved a
+respectable sum, he formed the fantastical idea of trying to keep a
+restaurant, run on the lines of the cheap Spanish and Chinese
+restaurants he had been wont to frequent. "Business--ye Antiquities";
+hard, practical business! he told Krehbiel; honourable, respectable
+business, but devoid of dreamful illusions. "Alas, this is no world for
+dreaming."
+
+The venture ended as might have been expected. Hearn had not inherited
+the commercial instincts of his ancestors who sold oil and wine in the
+Ionian Islands; his partner robbed him of all the money he had invested,
+and decamped, leaving him saddled with the restaurant and a considerable
+number of debts. A swindling building society seems to have absorbed the
+rest of his savings.
+
+After these two catastrophes the little man became almost comically
+terrified at financial enterprise of any kind, even the investment of
+money in dividend-paying concerns. When Captain Mitchell McDonald later,
+in Japan, endeavoured to induce him to put his money into various
+lucrative concerns, Hearn declared that he would prefer to lose
+everything he owned than submit to the worry of investing it. The mere
+idea of business was "a horror, a nightmare, a torture unspeakable."
+
+Though apparently only journalising and translating, Hearn was piling up
+experiences and sensations, not making use of them except in letters,
+but laying down the concrete and setting the foundation for his work in
+the West Indies and Japan. "The days come and go like muffled and veiled
+figures sent from a friendly, distant party; but they say nothing, and
+if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away."
+Emerson did not take into account those apparently infertile periods in
+an artist's life, when the days come and go, but though they pass
+silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their passage
+unproductive. How invaluable, for instance, was Hearn's study of Creole
+proverbs for his "Two Years in the French West Indies." How invaluable
+for his interpretation of the Orient were the studies he undertook for
+"Strange Leaves from Strange Literature," and his six small adaptations
+entitled "Chinese Ghosts."
+
+After several refusals "Stray Leaves" was accepted for publication by
+Osgood. He thus announced the fact to his friend Krehbiel:--
+
+"DEAR K. (Private),
+
+"'Stray Leaves,' etc., have been accepted by James R. Osgood and Co.
+Congratulate your little Dreamer of Monstrous Dreams,
+
+"Aschadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah,
+
+                             "Bismillah,
+                                            "Allah-hu-akbar."
+
+The book was dedicated to "Page M. Baker, Editor of the New Orleans
+_Times Democrat_."
+
+This series of small sketches is typical of the clarity of language and
+purity of thought that invariably distinguish Hearn's work; but it lacks
+the realism, the keenness of _choses vues_, so characteristic of his
+Japanese sketches. There is none of the haunting, moving tragedy and
+ghostliness, the spiritual imagination and introspection of "Kokoro" or
+the "Exotics." Though polished and scholarly, showing refinement in the
+use of words, the interest is remote and visionary, permeated here and
+there also with a certain amount of Celtic sentimentality, a "Tommy
+Moore" flavour, somewhat too saccharine in quality. The one, for
+instance, called "Boutimar" treats of a very hackneyed subject, the
+offering of the water of youth, and life without end, to Solomon, and
+the sage's refusal, because of the remembrance suggested by Boutimar
+that he would outlive children, friends and all whom he loved; therefore
+"Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the
+cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder
+of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond
+dew of the heart, which is tears."
+
+"Chinese Ghosts," though distinguished also by that _soigneux_ flavour
+that gives a slightly artificial impression, holds far more the
+distinctive flavour of Hearn's genius. His own soul is written into the
+legend of "Pu the potter." "Convinced that a soul cannot be divided, Pu
+entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit
+of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for
+the soul of his Vase."
+
+By the publication of the "Letters from the Raven" we are enabled to
+push those to Krehbiel, published by Miss Bisland, into place, and
+assign fairly accurate dates to each of them. He tells Mr. Watkin that
+he was six months before finding a fixed residence. In August, 1878, he
+writes inviting him to come in the autumn to pay him a visit, and
+telling him of delightful rooms with five large windows opening on
+piazzas, shaded by banana-trees. This apparently is the house in St.
+Louis Street, which he describes to Krehbiel. Miss Bisland places it
+almost at the beginning of the series, but it must have been written at
+a considerably later period. How picturesque and vivid is his
+description! With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway,
+with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their
+dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a hoary
+dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball,"
+with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and
+rising to the ceiling.
+
+Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said
+to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom
+the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with
+only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his
+genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw,
+but an immaterial and spiritual world as well.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XI
+                  LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
+
+     "Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and
+     fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties
+     and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would
+     write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem
+     strange in words, appears very strange upon paper."
+
+
+Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed
+with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed,
+for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various
+friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland
+(Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the
+many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during
+the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of
+publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine
+that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which
+his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the
+outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and
+versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to
+pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and
+sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles,
+his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily
+intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and
+a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting
+considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and
+thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity.
+
+To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to
+plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it
+was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work.
+Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn
+would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion,
+especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own
+room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he
+habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument;
+these he would leave later on Gould's study table.
+
+To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face
+to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In
+his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and
+sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour.
+Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature,
+inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being
+egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd
+specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed amongst
+an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a
+necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought;
+his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of
+spirit--perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding
+him--a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted
+country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of
+temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of
+remarkable picturesqueness and reality.
+
+The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given
+possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely
+different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am
+not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual
+petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of
+relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the
+world.
+
+Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore,
+been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely
+interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto
+shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories,
+incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and
+people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to
+outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his
+half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and
+intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and
+unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the
+charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you
+would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering
+friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all,
+in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private
+inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his
+undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a
+Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are
+addressed.
+
+It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life
+that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him
+and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled
+the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual
+struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to
+Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque
+silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western
+city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom
+hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant
+to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting
+higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day
+in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever
+cometh.'"
+
+He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and
+ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the
+Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles,
+publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist,
+he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of
+the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss
+Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her
+magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable."
+
+Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a
+particle of literary jealousy in his composition.
+
+To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old
+fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain
+qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an
+Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical.
+You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and
+labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I
+cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the
+thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think."
+
+Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically
+averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald
+not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an
+opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of
+the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the
+thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can
+see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others
+would reach the same standard.
+
+In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor
+Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most
+finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his
+boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College.
+
+He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his
+advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that
+give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in
+prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he
+says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one
+side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be
+sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a
+medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose.
+
+In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio
+Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing
+no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little
+man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make his a
+trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood
+or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to
+commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of
+the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not
+see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an
+extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and
+unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic
+theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though
+you were passing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape.
+You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round
+the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical
+passage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather
+was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than
+ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his
+possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude,
+others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others
+dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage
+the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries,
+freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen.
+
+Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him
+hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance
+and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of
+people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other
+day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan
+unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there
+came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and
+sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty,
+all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that
+voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back,
+and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14]
+
+[14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he
+could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having
+learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson,
+Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating
+the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at Kumamoto
+entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's
+poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because
+Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson
+had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all
+honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century,"
+because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" reminded him of Miss
+Bisland. He pronounced Matthew Arnold to be "one of the colossal humbugs
+of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and an unutterably dreary essayist,"
+because at the moment he was animated by one of his intense enthusiasms
+for _Edwin_ Arnold, whose acquaintance Hearn had made during one of
+Arnold's visits to Japan. "Far the nobler man and writer, permeated with
+the beauties of strong faiths and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in
+some happier era, may bless mankind with the universal religion in
+perfect harmony with the truths of science, and the better nature of
+humanity."
+
+But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique or
+partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpassed, here and there
+expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when
+passing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like
+a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises
+suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of
+phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside
+the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are
+shimmering, a mass of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the
+dullest subjects--writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the subject
+of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain force, he
+suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and Shintoism.
+"There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and race
+feeling. I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a
+Polish brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells
+the story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still
+under the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least
+murmur,--'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands fell, but
+the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At last, old
+Steinmetz gave a signal--_the_ signal. The bugles rang out with the
+force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air forbidden ever to
+be sung or heard at other times--the national air (you know it)--'_No!
+Poland is not dead_!' And with that crash of brass all that lives of the
+brigade was hurled at the French batteries. Mechanical power, if
+absolutely irresistible, might fling back such a charge, but no human
+power. For old Steinmetz had made the mightiest appeal to those 'Polish
+brutes' that man, God, or devil could make, the appeal to the ghost of
+the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a
+thousand years."
+
+Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld
+Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some
+everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas,
+connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely
+recounted:--
+
+"'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years
+ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been
+surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed
+not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a
+stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then
+came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly
+sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense
+thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in
+tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang
+Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous,
+audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in
+my heart still."
+
+Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there
+were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance.
+Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among
+these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of
+Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysantheme," Hearn retained the same
+admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman
+d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaitre or Anatole
+France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will
+have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die,
+one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read
+'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."
+
+Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of
+the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told
+us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an
+argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's
+criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement,
+repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his
+soft musical voice.
+
+A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject
+of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat
+apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the
+insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a
+flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so
+accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement.
+
+Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the
+biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the
+world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little
+boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in
+Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the
+Japanese kimono.
+
+At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of
+promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he
+was a much more responsible and important person than the little
+"brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office,
+turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
+doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in
+consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping
+gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his
+complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient
+features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes,
+the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the
+other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the
+disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in
+conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always
+photographed in profile looking down.
+
+In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and
+well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited
+the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the
+musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo
+University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and
+white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made
+his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal
+manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before
+the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I
+first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to
+begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice;
+seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much,
+and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind
+ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but
+nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be
+surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and
+whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected,
+companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was
+extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a
+physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his
+tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with
+velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and
+gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and
+you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly,
+he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He
+appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I
+found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in
+Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion,
+tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious.
+Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a
+foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in
+appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our
+acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any
+better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting."
+
+Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately
+protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy,
+diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting
+attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb
+themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they
+could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in the streets of
+Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a
+queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step,
+singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould
+tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional headgear for the
+enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel shirt, that
+he habitually wore.
+
+Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a
+starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as
+a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't
+wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do.
+"Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an
+article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts!
+Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in
+itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It
+represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious
+class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons
+sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."
+
+In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is
+unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing
+winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His
+wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject
+of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his
+Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have
+nothing that was not of the best make and quality.
+
+In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd,
+nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated
+voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean
+in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you
+came in contact with him.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+                     THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS
+
+     "The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses
+     and change them several times a day; and the multitude of
+     dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to
+     the multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she
+     was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was
+     of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of
+     the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and
+     people doubted their own senses when they saw these things
+     ... and the men who most admired her could not presume to
+     fall in love with her because that would have been absurd.
+     She had altogether too many souls."
+
+
+The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course
+of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he
+had hitherto known entered his life, an influence destined to last for
+close on a quarter of a century, from these New Orleans days until the
+month of September, 1904, when he died.
+
+In all the annals of literary friendships between men and women, it is
+difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory than
+this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange
+little Irish genius.
+
+Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more tender,
+none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and friendship, as
+told in his letters.
+
+The affection between Jean Jacques Ampere and Madame Recamier is the one
+that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is
+reversed. Madame Recamier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth
+Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been
+something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable
+blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity,
+shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of
+affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him
+in the tussle of life.
+
+Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for
+Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his
+life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the
+unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable
+thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was
+disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his
+side.
+
+"There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik
+from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore,
+"whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well
+for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement."
+
+Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better
+self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed
+conviction that her love--as love is understood in common
+parlance--could never be his.
+
+And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare
+in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere
+friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not;
+she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her
+lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was
+offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a
+neophyte, also worshipped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner,
+ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family
+by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her
+parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of
+journalistic work in New Orleans.
+
+Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the _Times
+Democrat_. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the
+beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an
+appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed
+of what were known as "Hearn's admirers."
+
+His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange
+Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He
+also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then
+slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called
+them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them
+all--love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a
+thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant
+fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of
+green hashisch.
+
+One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse--
+
+               "My heart would hear her and beat
+                Had I lain for a century dead;--
+                Would start and tremble under her feet,
+                And blossom in purple and red."
+
+The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the _Times Democrat_.
+There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years,
+wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic"
+was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitchell
+McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to the
+expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor
+Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story
+in which I first used it--years and years ago. Don't return the
+thing--it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush."
+
+Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return
+the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead
+Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to
+deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is
+distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French
+Impressionist school.
+
+The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the
+unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of
+continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate
+every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by
+Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.
+
+A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love,
+yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his
+lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb
+the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the
+litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that
+which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor
+Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of
+music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and
+the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And
+at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by
+his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient
+place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle
+of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she,
+unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away
+forever.
+
+Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a
+period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The
+problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron.
+Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who
+preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence,
+dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his
+idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not
+obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself
+in the mediocrity to which she belonged.
+
+Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland
+had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange
+old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness,
+and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where
+she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a
+grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought,
+_une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could give the same
+sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the
+country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a
+particular variety of savage, that he could not understand--and was
+afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since
+then I have become grey and the father of three boys."
+
+For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's
+friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position
+of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to
+induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social
+unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this
+young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic
+beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems,
+he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby,
+has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But
+if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres francaises' (as
+Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a
+nicer copy...."
+
+Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her,
+mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her
+voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The
+gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom
+in the room--but in the future, which was black without stars!"
+
+In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for
+his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the
+same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature
+of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the
+copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the
+Tertiary epoch--three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most
+ancient branch of humanity."
+
+It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was
+written and contributed to _Harper's Magazine_ under the title of "Torn
+Letters."
+
+We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New
+York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she
+taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of
+circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and
+subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as
+you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to
+chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the
+memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best
+inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his
+genius and quickened his pen.
+
+I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when
+she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I
+looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in
+lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as
+he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers
+was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the
+Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for
+dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.
+
+In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the
+_Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent
+correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.
+
+She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think
+I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a
+pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much
+better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own
+personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does
+a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?
+
+"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow,
+but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at
+this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the
+nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of
+existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved
+simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of
+the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek
+romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic
+sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing
+but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case,
+this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work
+he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever
+attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was
+occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at
+highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches,
+the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details,
+that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and
+accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the
+descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being
+fragmentary and unfinished.
+
+After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of
+literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly,
+writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing
+her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope.
+
+"It is a formality--and you are you; and you are not a formality--but a
+somewhat--and I am only I."[15]
+
+[15] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland
+ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional
+life.
+
+During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies for
+his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two
+delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he
+was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to
+him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years.
+
+The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and
+pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a word:--
+
+"Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed solid was
+breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very
+foolish--made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter
+was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it
+is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the
+Unknown for Art's sake,--or rather, you _must_ obey them. The Spahi's
+fascination by the invisible forces was purely physical. I think I am
+right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a
+home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance
+compelling another change.
+
+"The carriage--no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or
+sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East
+River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I
+shan't put anybody's name to it."[16]
+
+[16] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to
+George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia.
+
+On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to
+call at the office of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. On her arrival at
+eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York
+for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey
+round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in
+competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss
+Bisland consented.
+
+After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she
+published her experiences in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. These
+contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are
+charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as
+the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period.
+
+Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that
+he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of
+a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers
+and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return.
+He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never
+audible in dreams.
+
+In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not
+I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in
+the _Tribune_ there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of
+unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,--an absurd sense of absolute
+loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for
+you to win your race--so that every one may admire you still more, and
+your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your
+portrait--in spite of you--appear in some French journal where they know
+how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one
+from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in
+succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of
+you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..."
+
+I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are
+any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of
+the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems
+almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give
+the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words
+but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the
+multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead
+within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face.
+
+"It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you--all the Me's
+that were--keep asking the Me that is, for something always
+refused;--and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot
+see--you can only feel; and I can see,--and I will not open to you,
+because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would
+be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep
+and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake
+up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in
+spite of yourself,--and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would
+come--and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ...
+what was it?
+
+"Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of
+it,--just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly
+exposed.... Will you ever be _like that always_ for any one being?--I
+hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at
+latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you
+will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the
+leaves."
+
+Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around
+the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of
+his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and
+then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and
+she married Mr. Wetmore.
+
+Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between the
+time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his
+professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the
+simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he
+think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the
+_jeune fille un peu farouche_, who in distant New Orleans days had
+understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's
+unsophisticated enthusiasm. She had written to him, and he gives her a
+whimsically pathetic answer, touching on memories, on thoughts, on
+aspirations, which had been a closed book for so long a period of time,
+and now, when re-opened, was seen to be printed as clearly on mind and
+heart as if he had parted with her but an hour before.
+
+About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September, 1904--the
+month in which he died--comes his last. He tells her that to see her
+handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was a great
+pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was undeserved.
+He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese Miscellany" which he
+had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its way, and perhaps you
+will later on find no reason to be sorry for your good opinions of the
+writer. I presume that you are far too clever to believe more than
+truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a few estimable
+people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...."
+
+He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing to
+her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear in
+book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on
+sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects
+and flowers, and queer small things--and leave the subject of the
+destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains
+will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the
+book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will
+recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof.
+
+"May all good things ever come to you, and abide."
+
+It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years, that
+he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any affection or
+sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may read," is this
+record of a devotion and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a
+century, lasting intact through fair years and foul, through absence,
+change of scene, even of nationality.
+
+               "Fear not, I say again; believe it true
+                That not as men mete shall I measure you...."
+
+Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for
+the estimation of human character and genius.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIII
+                          RELIGION AND SCIENCE
+
+     "For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor
+     yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man.
+     Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a
+     ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is
+     potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in
+     Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the
+     world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice
+     brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly
+     doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that
+     even now there does not remain one place on earth where life
+     has not been freely given for love or duty?"
+
+
+Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite
+marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of
+operations where effective work and fame awaited him.
+
+"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin.
+"Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little
+milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I
+have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor
+I may do well in Japan."
+
+When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the
+publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an
+artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was
+to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied
+from photographs, of the principal exhibits.
+
+On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In
+it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese
+department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a
+flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning;
+the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy
+hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting
+of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere
+copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense
+as did also the representations of the matchless mountain
+Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred
+different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of
+sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn,
+exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above
+stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled
+by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara.
+
+It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy
+world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of
+clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty
+day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he
+ascended Fuji-no-yama.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young
+Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at
+West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He
+was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn
+frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy
+was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last
+century.
+
+One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First
+Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately
+accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that
+day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the
+colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.
+
+The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest
+mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all
+human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated
+materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity,
+and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history
+of a sun."
+
+Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at
+various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness
+of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss
+the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with
+the offending individual.
+
+"A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
+rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a
+cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of
+tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The
+pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things
+visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity--all sensed
+existences--are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one
+infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...."
+
+This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first
+volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had
+taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like
+that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in
+darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of
+things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
+that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had
+appeared before.
+
+It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and
+philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in
+London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to
+have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the
+present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new
+survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of
+thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been
+proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher
+demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature.
+Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of
+Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific
+philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in
+his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral
+consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage
+of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately,
+moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than
+we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and
+faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put
+forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural
+selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it,
+"Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from
+which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were
+eliminated.
+
+These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring
+that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or
+pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as
+efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.
+
+In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and
+Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on
+Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man
+towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was
+concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and
+science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the
+learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us
+there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
+re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
+said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'"
+
+It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn,
+in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid
+most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had
+read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is
+disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of
+words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own
+wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only
+to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific
+facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.
+
+Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental
+religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical
+theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean
+only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great
+Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty."
+The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.
+
+Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to
+imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and
+self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after
+his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its
+picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away
+by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied.
+
+It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he
+emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he
+subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.
+
+Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no
+permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The
+opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound
+interest!"
+
+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 grass, 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 Mass 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 Mass,
+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 Shintoism 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 worship 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, asserting that
+the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--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 worship, the influence of spirits or
+ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same
+idea. "The real religion of Japan," 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 worship.' 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 _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason,
+who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of
+Japanese 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 worship.
+
+The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their
+heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all
+their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but
+practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every
+direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of
+modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every
+means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is
+not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at
+every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn
+describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead."
+
+Nature worship, the worship 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 Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their
+"ancestral spirits."
+
+In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form
+to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most
+ancient Japanese 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 Japan by the Shinto 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
+Japan, 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 Japanese embroidery, they will show you
+that these traceries are fine Japanese 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 Japan," 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
+crashings.... 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, entitled, "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 assured,--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 passed, 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 space of ten years,
+subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the
+passage 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, entitled "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. "Nobody 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 Hell 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 snobs; 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 friendship, 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 Japanese 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 passes 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.
+
+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 shine 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 destitution, 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 Japan. "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 entitled "Karma,"
+published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ after Hearn had left for Japan,
+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 sex, while
+absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect nature inspires a love that
+is fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman
+inspires a love that is half compassion; 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 Japan 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 passage 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, shivering 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.
+
+Japan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival
+Lowell, entitled "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 Japan was aroused, he followed her progress with
+the deepest interest. The Japanese constitution 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
+institutions, 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
+                                 JAPAN
+
+     "... 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 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 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
+Japan 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,
+entitled "A Winter Journey to Japan," 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
+passengers.... 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, passing 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 illustrations. So
+irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's illustrations
+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
+Japan.
+
+The seventeen days that he passed 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
+passengers, 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 ship, 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 canyons, 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 Japan. 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 passed 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 Japan and the Japanese.... He loved their gods,
+their customs, their dress, their bird-like, quavering songs, their
+houses, their superstitions, 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 Japan 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 Japanese
+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 Japan," 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 passed 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 illustrations
+of the articles sent to the magazine, instead of the illustrations 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 Japanese 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 Japan, 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 competition, 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
+Japanese." On his arrival, Hearn thought of obtaining a position as
+teacher in a Japanese 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 Japan, without
+passing several years exclusively amongst the Japanese people.
+
+Chamberlain, however, saw at once that Hearn's capacities were far
+superior to those necessary for a private tutorship. Having been so long
+resident in Japan, and written so much upon the country, as well as
+occupying a professorship in Tokyo Imperial University, his influence in
+Japanese 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 Japan.
+
+On several occasions Professor Chamberlain held out the kindly hand of
+comradeship 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 Mitchell McDonald, Lafcadio dedicated his "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan."
+
+                             TO THE FRIENDS
+                 WHOSE KINDNESS ALONE RENDERED POSSIBLE
+                        MY SOJOURN IN THE ORIENT
+                  PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N.
+                                  AND
+                      BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ.
+                  EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOLOGY AND
+                  JAPANESE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY
+                                OF TOKYO
+                        I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES
+                              IN TOKEN OF
+                        AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE
+
+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 friendship. 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....
+I cannot help fearing that what you mean by 'justice and temperateness'
+means that you want me to write as if I were you, or at least to measure
+sentence or thought by your standard.... If I write well of a thing one
+day, and badly another, I expect my friend to discern that both
+impressions are true, and solve the contradiction--that is, if my
+letters are really wanted."
+
+The fact is that, if Hearn took up a philosophic or scientific opinion,
+he was determined to make all with whom he held converse share them, and
+if they did not do so at once, like the despotic oriental monarch, he
+would overturn the chessboard.
+
+"The rigid character of his philosophical opinions," says Chamberlain,
+"made him perforce despise as intellectual weaklings all those who did
+not share them, or shared them in a lukewarm manner, and his
+disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to
+find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable."
+
+It was principally during the last fourteen years of his life that Hearn
+acquired the unenviable name of being ungrateful, inconstant, and
+capricious. To those friends made in his youthful days of struggle and
+adversity he remained constant, but with the exception of Mitchell
+McDonald, Nishida Sentaro, and Amenomori, it is the same story of
+perversity and estrangement.
+
+An unceremonious entry into his house, without deference to ancient
+Japanese etiquette, which enjoined the taking off of boots and the
+putting on of sandals, a sneer at Shinto ancestor worship, a difference
+of opinion on Herbert Spencer, and Hearn would disappear actually and
+metaphorically. This proves his want of heart, you say. But a careful
+study of Hearn's "Wesen" will show that his apparent inconstancy did not
+arise from a change of affection, but because his very affection for the
+people he had turned from made the taut strands of friendship more
+difficult to reunite, especially for a person of his shy temperament.
+Which of us has not recognised the greater difficulty of making up a
+"tiff" with a friend for whom one cares deeply than with a person to
+whom one is indifferent? The tougher the stuff the more ravelled the
+edges of the tear, and the more difficult to join together.
+
+At Kobe, an incident was related to us by Mr. Young, his chief on the
+_Kobe Chronicle_ and a person to whom Hearn owed much and was attached
+by many ties of gratitude and friendship. A guest at dinner ventured to
+dissent from Hearn's opinion that the reverential manner in which people
+prostrated themselves before the mikado was in no way connected with
+religious principles. Hearn shrugged his shoulders, rose, walked away
+from the table, and nothing would induce him to return. He did not,
+indeed, enter Mr. Young's house again for some days, though doing his
+work at the office for the newspaper as usual.
+
+When Hearn left Tokyo to take up his appointment at Matsue, he was
+accompanied by his friend Akira, a young student and priest, who spoke
+English and could, therefore, act as interpreter. At Kobe they left the
+railway and continued their journey in jinrikishas, a journey of four
+days with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan.
+
+"Out of the city and over the hills to Izumo, the Land of the Ancient
+Gods!" The incantation is spoken, we find ourselves in the region of
+Horai--the fairyland of Japan--with its arch of liquid blue sky,
+lukewarm, windless atmosphere, an atmosphere enormously old, but of
+ghostly generations of souls blended into one immense translucency,
+souls of people who thought in ways never resembling occidental ways.
+
+Writing later to Chamberlain, Hearn acknowledged that what delighted him
+those first days in Japan was the charm of nature in human nature, and
+in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness,
+politeness ... for in Japan even hate works with smiles and pretty
+words.
+
+For the first time Hearn was not merely describing a sensuous world of
+sights and sounds, but a world of soft domesticity, where thatched
+villages nestled in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist
+temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above a congregation of
+thatched homesteads. Can anything be more delightful than his
+description of one of the village inns, with its high-peaked roof of
+thatch, and green-mossed eaves, like a coloured print out of Hiroshige's
+picture-books, with its polished stairway and balconies, reflecting like
+mirrored surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms
+fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid
+down. The old gold-flowered lacquer ware, the diaphanous porcelain
+wine-cups, the teacup holders, which are curled lotus leaves of bronze;
+even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the
+brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions; distant as it
+was from all art-centres, there was no object visible in the house which
+did not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty and form. "Indeed, wherever
+to-day in Japan one sees anything uninteresting in porcelain or metal,
+something commonplace and ugly, one may be almost sure that detestable
+something has been shaped under foreign influence. But here I am in
+Ancient Japan, probably no European eyes ever looked upon these things
+before."
+
+After he had submitted to being bathed by his landlord, as if he had
+been a little child, and eaten a repast of rice, eggs, vegetables and
+sweetmeats, he sat smoking his kiseru until the moon arose, peeping
+through the heart-shaped little window that looked out on the garden
+behind, throwing down queer shadows of tilted eaves, and horned gables,
+and delightful silhouettes. Suddenly a measured clapping of hands became
+audible, and the echoing of _geta_, and the tramping of wooden sandals
+filled the street. His companion, Akira, told him they were all going to
+see the dance of the Bon-odori at the temple, the dance of the Festival
+of the Dead, and that they had better go, too. This dance of the
+Festival of the Dead he describes in his usual graphic way: the ghostly
+weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet--above all, the flitting
+of the marvellous sleeves, apparitional, soundless, velvety as the
+flitting of great tropical bats. In the midst of the charmed circle
+there crept upon him a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted, until,
+recalled to reality by a song full of sweet, clear quavering, gushing
+from some girlish mouth, and fifty other voices joined in the chant.
+"Melodies of Europe," he ends, "awaken within us feelings we can utter,
+sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations
+behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant,
+totally unlike anything in western melody, impossible even to write in
+those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue?
+
+"And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be
+something infinitely more old than I, something not of only one place or
+time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the
+universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught
+spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in
+some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes,--all trillings of
+summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVI
+                                 MATSUE
+
+     "Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions
+     and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty
+     spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its
+     impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
+     Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which
+     the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of
+     heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith
+     have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive."
+
+
+The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue--birth-place of the
+rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion--was one of the
+happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career.
+
+His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as
+finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years
+afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read
+about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"--then he howled and
+wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was
+only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be
+kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however,
+though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of
+enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always
+make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work,
+the one which is most read and by which he is best known.
+
+Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the
+odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue
+was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick
+warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living
+force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still
+an animating power.
+
+How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day
+and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the
+first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled
+echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most
+pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the
+pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the
+hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people
+saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant
+vendors, the sellers of _daikon_ and other strange vegetables ... and
+the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of
+kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.
+
+Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long
+nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral
+sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an
+exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the
+sun's yellow rim came into sight.
+
+From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was
+packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old
+city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country
+round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples.
+
+One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at
+night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the
+feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint
+imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some
+communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the
+world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls,
+that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish
+little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day
+of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all
+waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant
+Land."
+
+Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy
+precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the
+spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their
+ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary
+urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family
+to which Hearn's future wife belonged.
+
+To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living
+centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing
+in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past--that religion that
+lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The
+magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him,
+working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion
+of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary
+mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the
+very heart and soul of ancient Japan.
+
+If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was
+called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this
+strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could
+create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had
+selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy
+cycle of its eternal utterance.
+
+The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in
+which the real development of his genius lay; the loose, quivering
+needle of thought, that had moved hither and thither, was now set in one
+direction. The stage he was treading, though at first he did not realise
+it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a drama with eternal and
+immutable forces as scene-shifters and curtain-raisers. The qualities
+that had enabled Japan to conquer China, and had placed her practically
+in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to analyse
+and explain; to interpret the curious myths of this great people of
+little men, who, shut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of
+years, had, out of their own inner consciousness, built up a code of
+discipline and behaviour that, in its self-abnegation, its sense of
+cohesion, and fidelity to law, throws our much-vaunted western
+civilisation into the shade. Hearn brought to bear upon the
+interpretation a rare power of using words, sympathetic insight, an
+earnest and vivid imagination that enabled him to comprehend the
+strongly accentuated characteristics of a race living close to the
+origins of life; barbaric, yet highly refined; superstitious, yet
+capable of adapting themselves to modern thought; playful as children,
+yet astounding in their heroic gallantry and patriotism. His genius
+enabled him to catch a glimpse of the indisputable truth that legend and
+tradition are a science in themselves, that, however grotesque, however
+fantastic primeval myths and allegories may be, they are indicative of
+the gradual evolution of the heart and mind of generations as they arise
+and pass away.
+
+An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of
+superstition, as compared with the utility of religion. In consequence
+of his having elected to live the everyday life, and enter into the
+ordinary interests and occupations of this strange people, as no
+occidental ever had before, he was enabled to see that many Japanese
+superstitions had a sort of shorthand value in explaining eternal and
+valuable things. When it would have been useless to preach to people
+vaguely about morality or cleanliness or ordinary rules of health, a
+superstition, a belief that certain infringement of moral law will bring
+direct corporal punishment, that maligned spirits will visit a room that
+is left unswept, that the gods will chastise over-excess in eating or
+drinking, are related to the most inexorable and highest moral laws, and
+it is easy to understand how invaluable is the study of their
+superstitions in analysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the
+Japanese.
+
+"Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated Japanese think nothing,"
+said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation.
+Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated Japanese
+must you go to understand the vitality of heart and intelligence which
+through centuries of the Elder Life has evolved so remarkable a
+nationality. To set forth the power that has moulded the character of
+this far eastern people, material must be culled from the
+unsophisticated hearts of the peasants and the common folk. "The people
+make the gods, and the gods the people make are the best." Hearn did not
+attempt, therefore, a mechanical repetition of social and religious
+tenets; but in the mythological beliefs, in the legendary lore that has
+slumbered for generations in simple minds he caught the suggestion of
+obedience and fidelity to authority, the strenuous industry and
+self-denial that endowed these quaint superstitions with a potency far
+beyond the religion and meaning, or the primitive idea that caused their
+inception. Merely accurate and erudite students would call the
+impressions that he collected here, in this unfamiliar Japan, trifling
+and fantastic, but he is able to prove that the details of ordinary
+intercourse, however trifling, the way in which men marry and bring up
+their children, the very manner in which they earn their daily bread,
+above all, the rules they impose, and the punishment and rewards they
+invoke to have them obeyed, reveal more of the manner by which the
+religion, the art, the heroism of this far eastern people have been
+developed, than hundreds of essays treating of dynasties, treaties and
+ceremonials.
+
+Aided by that very quality which some may look upon as a mental defect,
+Hearn's tendency to over-emphasise an impressive moment at the expense
+of accuracy stood him now in good stead. Physical myopia, he maintained,
+was an aid to artistic work from one aspect: "The keener the view, the
+less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of
+attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like
+the eye of a hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of
+every leaf." So mental myopia united with the shaping power of
+imagination was more helpful in enabling him to catch a glimpse of the
+trend of thought and characteristics of the folk whose country he
+adopted than the piercing judgment that saw faults and intellectual
+short-comings.
+
+Many people, even the Japanese themselves, have said that Hearn's view
+in his first book of things in their country was too roseate. Others
+have declared that he must have been a hypocrite to write of Japan in so
+enthusiastic a strain when in private letters, such as those to
+Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik, he expresses so great a detestation for
+the people and their methods. Those who say so do not know the nature of
+the man whom they are discussing; compromise with those in office was
+entirely antagonistic to his mode of thought. His life was composed of
+passing illusions and disillusions. That he, with his artistic
+perception, should have been carried off his balance by the quaintness
+and mysticism that he encountered in the outlying portions of the
+country was but natural. Go into the highlands of Japan amongst the
+simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where the ancient
+gods are still believed to haunt the ancient shrines, where the glamour
+and the grace of bygone civilisation still lingers, you will yield to
+the same charm, and, as Hearn himself says, better the sympathetic than
+the critical attitude. Perhaps the man who comes to Japan full of hate
+for all things oriental may get nearer the truth at once, but he will
+make a kindred mistake to him who views it all, as I did at first,
+almost with the eyes of a lover.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVII
+                                MARRIAGE
+
+     "'Marriage may be either a hindrance or help on the path,'
+     the old priest said, 'according to conditions. All depends
+     upon conditions. If the love of wife and child should cause a
+     man to become too much attached to the temporary advantages
+     of this unhappy world, then such love would be a hindrance.
+     But, on the contrary, if the love of wife and child should
+     enable a man to live more purely and more unselfishly than he
+     could do in a state of celibacy, then marriage would be a
+     very great help to him in the Perfect Way. Many are the
+     dangers of marriage for the wise; but for those of little
+     understanding, the dangers of celibacy are greater, and even
+     the illusion of passion may sometimes lead noble natures to
+     the higher knowledge.'"
+
+
+Hearn's marriage, as his widow told us, took place early in the year of
+1891, "23rd of Meiji." That on either side it was one of passionate
+sentiment is doubtful. Marriages in Japan are generally arranged on the
+most businesslike footing. By the young Japanese man, it is looked upon
+as a natural duty that has duly to be performed for the perpetuation of
+his family. Passion is reserved for unions unsanctioned by social
+conventions.
+
+Dominated as he was by the idea that his physical deficiencies rendered
+a union with one of his own nationality out of the question, he yet knew
+that at his time of life he had to enter into more permanent conditions
+with the other sex than hitherto, or face a future devoid of settled
+purpose or stability. His state of health also demanded domestic comfort
+and feminine care. The only alternative that presented itself to a
+celibate life was to choose a wife from amongst the people with whom his
+lines were cast.
+
+From the first moment of his arrival, Hearn had been carried away by
+enthusiasm for the gentleness, the docility, of the women of Japan. He
+compares them, much to their advantage, with their American sisters. "In
+the eternal order of things, which is the highest being, the childish,
+confiding, sweet Japanese girl, or the occidental Circe women of
+artificial society, with their enormous power of evil and their limited
+capacity for good?" In his first letter to Miss Bisland, he writes:
+"This is a domesticated nature, which loves man and makes itself
+beautiful for him in a quiet grey and blue way like the Japanese women."
+
+It seems an unromantic statement to make with regard to an artist who
+has written such exquisite passages on the sentiment that binds a man to
+a woman, but Hearn, in spite of his intellectual idealism, had from
+certain points of view a very material outlook. All considerations--even
+those connected with the deepest emotions that stir the human
+heart--were secondary to the necessities of his genius and artistic
+life.
+
+His intimacy with Althea Foley in Cincinnati was prompted and fostered
+by gratitude for her care in preparing his meals, and nursing him when
+ill, thus saving him from the catastrophe of relinquishing his position
+on the staff of the _Enquirer_, which meant not only the loss of all
+means of subsistence, but also the possibility of prosecuting the
+ambition of his life--a literary career.
+
+Now, at Matsue, after a touch of somewhat severe illness obliging him to
+pass some weeks in bed, it became really a matter of life or death that
+he should give up living from hand to mouth in country inns.
+
+With the Japanese teacher of English at the Matsue College, an
+accomplished English scholar, Hearn had formed a close intimacy from the
+moment of his arrival, an intimacy, indeed, only broken by Nishida
+Sentaro's death in 1898.
+
+"His the kind eyes that saw so much for the stranger, his the kind lips
+that gave him so much wise advice, helping him through the difficulties
+that beset him, in consequence of his ignorance of the language." At the
+beginning of his first term Hearn found the necessity of remembering or
+pronouncing the names of the boys, even with the class-roll before him,
+almost an insurmountable difficulty. Nishida helped him; gave him all
+the necessary instructions about hours and text-books, placed his desk
+close to his, the better to prompt him in school hours, and introduced
+him to the directors and to the governor of the province. "Out of the
+East," the volume written later at Kumamoto, was dedicated to Nishida
+Sentaro, "In dear remembrance of Izumo days."
+
+"Hearn's faith in this good friend was something wonderful," his wife
+tells us. "When he heard of Nishida's illness, in 1897, he exclaimed: 'I
+would not mind losing everything that belongs to me if I could make him
+well.' He believed in him with such a faith only possible to a child."
+
+Nishida Sentaro was also one of the ancient lineage and caste, and an
+intimate friend of the Koizumi family.
+
+Matsue had been at one time almost exclusively occupied by the Samurai
+feudal lords. After throwing open her doors to the world, and admitting
+western civilisation, Japan found herself obliged to accept, amongst
+other democratic innovations, the sweeping away of the great feudal and
+military past, reducing families of rank to obscurity and poverty.
+Youths and maidens of illustrious extraction, who had only mastered the
+"arts of courtesy" and the "arts of war," found themselves obliged to
+adopt the humblest occupations to provide themselves and their families
+with the means of livelihood. Daughters of men once looked upon as
+aristocrats had to become indoor servants with people of a lower caste,
+or to undertake the austere drudgery of the rice-fields or the
+lotus-ponds. Their houses and lands were confiscated--their heirlooms,
+costly robes, crested lacquer ware, passed at starvation prices to those
+whom "misery makes rich." Amongst these aristocrats the Koizumis were
+numbered. Nishida Sentaro, knowing their miserable circumstances, and
+seeing how advisable it would be, if it were Hearn's intention to remain
+in Japan, to have a settled home of his own, formed the idea of bringing
+about a union between Setsu and the English teacher at the Matsue
+College.
+
+On his own initiative he undertook the task of approaching his foreign
+friend. Finding him favourably inclined, he suggested the marriage as a
+suitable one to Setsu's parents.
+
+It is supposed that marriage in Japan must be solemnised by a priest,
+but this is not so. A Japanese marriage is simply a legal pledge, and is
+not invested with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in
+occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a Japanese woman
+can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom
+looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nishida, when
+he undertook to act as intermediary, or _Nakodo_, as they call it in
+Japan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu
+Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously,
+but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that
+the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and
+then only by his nationalising himself a Japanese citizen.
+
+One of Hearn's saving qualities was compassion for the weak and
+suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the
+deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted--as he was--behind the
+closely drawn veil of pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats
+drew between their poverty and public observation.
+
+What the Samurai maiden,--brought up in the seclusion of Matsue--may
+have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of
+forty-four (a patriarchal age in Japan), who was offered to her as a
+husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, Japanese fashion, and as
+the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding
+and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred
+ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during
+these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection,
+indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the _Gakusha_ (learned
+person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all
+the American and English tourists at Tokyo.
+
+So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the
+exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible
+fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to
+Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,--the complexion darker
+and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women--but comely, with the
+comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have
+been.
+
+Tender and true, as her _Yerbina_, or personal, name, "Setsu,"
+signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of
+patience and self-restraint--a daughter of Japan--one of a type fast
+becoming extinct--who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to
+wound other hearts.
+
+She may not have been obliged to submit to the trials of most Japanese
+wives, the whims and tyranny, for instance, of her father- and
+mother-in-law, or the drudgery to provide for, or wait upon a numerous
+Japanese household; but from many indications we know that her life
+sometimes was not by any means a bed of roses. Humorous, and at the same
+time pathetic, are her reminiscences of these first days of marriage, as
+related in later life.
+
+"He was such an intense nature," she says, "and so completely absorbed
+in his work of writing that it made him appear strange and even
+outlandish in ordinary life. He even acknowledged himself that he must
+look like a madman."
+
+During the course of his life, when undergoing any severe mental or
+physical strain, Hearn was subject to periods of hysterical trance,
+during which he lost consciousness of surrounding objects. There is a
+host of superstitions amongst the Japanese connected with trances or
+fainting fits. Each human being is supposed to possess two souls. When a
+person faints they believe that one soul is withdrawn from the body, and
+goes on all sorts of unknown and mysterious errands, while the other
+remains with the envelope to which it belongs; but when this takes place
+a man goes mad; mad people are those who have lost one of their souls.
+On first seeing her husband in this condition, the little woman was so
+terrified that she hastened to Nishida Sentaro to seek advice. "He
+always acted for us as middle-man in those Matsue days, and I confess I
+was afraid my husband might have gone crazy. However, I found soon
+afterwards that it was only the time of enthusiasm in thought and
+writing; and I began to admire him more on that account."
+
+The calm and material comforts of domestic life gave Hearn, for a time,
+a more assured equilibrium, but these trances returned again with
+considerable frequency in later days.
+
+Amenomori, his secretary at Tokyo, tells a story of waking one night and
+seeing a light in Hearn's study. He was afraid Hearn might be ill, and
+cautiously opened the door and peeped in. There he saw the little
+genius, absorbed in his work, standing at his high desk, his nose almost
+touching the paper on which he wrote. Leaf after leaf was covered with
+his small, delicate handwriting. After a while, Amenomori goes on, he
+held up his head, "and what did I see? It was not the Hearn I was
+familiar with; his face was mysteriously white; his eyes gleamed. He
+appeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence."
+
+Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much
+perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"[21] she
+says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently,
+was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so
+interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at Kumamoto he told her
+that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there,
+she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He
+said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the
+Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark
+and the eerieness.
+
+[21] It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or write a word
+of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her by the
+Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi.
+
+She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store,
+when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he
+selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or
+spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful.
+
+"I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an
+unmistakable streak of passion for gay things--however, his quiet
+conscience held him back from giving way to it."
+
+His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of
+etiquette--looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially for people
+in official positions--was a continued source of trouble to the little
+woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite
+garments," which were _de rigueur_ at any official ceremony. On one
+occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the
+Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat.
+
+The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they
+instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called
+it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The
+"race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two.
+That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between
+two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and
+Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little
+wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to
+me, though always in a lovable way--of course a man and a woman know
+each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race
+tendencies difficult to understand."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVIII
+                          THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI
+
+     "The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after
+     the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all
+     illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion
+     which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them.
+     And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all
+     emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at
+     the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire
+     anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is
+     like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like
+     violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though
+     I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a
+     man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he
+     marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable,
+     so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for
+     intellectual converse a man can't really have with women.
+     Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as
+     plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer
+     or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to
+     the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex
+     civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many
+     questions involved."
+
+
+As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the
+Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the
+rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that
+ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.
+
+On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the
+former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under
+military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its
+Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the
+straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yashiki_ were
+untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though
+he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and
+going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city
+and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in
+the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and
+care.
+
+The summer passed in this Japanese _Yashiki_ was as happy as any in
+Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing
+regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf
+shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy
+peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul
+stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free,
+clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully.
+Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were
+soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he
+could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life
+was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment
+receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said,
+twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds,
+this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of
+two.
+
+Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the
+announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.
+
+He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his
+Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household.
+After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian
+dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss
+Elizabeth Bisland.
+
+Hearn's description of the old _Yashiki_ garden is done with all the
+descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described
+Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the
+special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of
+the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to
+follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls
+it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and
+_Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature
+hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by
+flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from
+spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the
+curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these
+sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their
+effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native
+gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in perfect form.
+
+Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the
+bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns,
+and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject
+to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and
+superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light.
+
+We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can
+catch the song of the caged _Uguisu_, an inmate of the establishment,
+presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of
+the Governor of Izumo.
+
+The _Uguisu_, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and
+over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist
+confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five
+seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name.
+
+They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He
+watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was
+equally wretched when he saw them withering.
+
+One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the
+sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese,
+"Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a
+serious intention).
+
+When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in
+despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my
+flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident.
+
+He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his
+dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and
+exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable
+Japanese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five
+class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah
+overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below
+their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the
+city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling
+of _semi_, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and
+those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them
+hummed the changed Japan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-ships.
+Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the
+sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a
+faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty
+of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they
+were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams,
+creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce.
+
+The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time is an interesting
+psychological study. He had been wont to declare that his vocation was a
+monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as severe in its discipline
+as that of St. Francis of Assisi on the Umbrian hills. The code on which
+he moulded his life was formulated according to the teaching of the
+great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and effect progress,
+continual struggle against temptation is necessary. Appetites must be
+restrained. Indulgence means retrogression.
+
+It is not without a sense of amusement that we observe the complex
+personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and
+discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had
+seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the
+erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the
+starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel shirt,
+and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now
+clad in official robes, he passed out through a line of prostrate
+servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been
+handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and
+submission by the daughter of a line of feudal nobles.
+
+He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as
+to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the
+sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at
+eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the
+little lamps of the _kami_ before the shrine were left to burn until
+they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal
+for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as
+to forget the hour.
+
+Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of
+the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was
+very real indeed.
+
+The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was
+I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty,
+and honour, and Hell fire staring you in the face, you would have gone
+after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and
+quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I
+am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in
+Japan."
+
+Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain,
+alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine,"
+of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and
+she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little
+like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a
+gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their
+tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had
+everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all,
+however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and
+selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring
+off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in
+riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese--don't you think so?
+And the man was certainly a detestable fellow."
+
+Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper,
+he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese
+food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to
+interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose
+knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women."
+
+"Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one
+of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later.
+Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild,
+wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone
+by.
+
+When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the
+wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha.
+After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies,
+and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear
+the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan,
+where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man
+is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it,
+and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of
+existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over
+the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about.
+
+A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the
+old _Yashiki_, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed
+Japanese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of
+the interpreter, the superstitions and legends of the ancient Province
+of the Gods.
+
+She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring,
+"How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked
+fixedly in front of him.
+
+Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed
+to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"[22] or "Dancing Girl," the
+finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written
+during the course of the summer passed in the old _Yashiki_. Its first
+inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891.
+"There was a story some time ago in the _Asahi-shimbun_[23] about a
+'Shirabyoshi,' that brought tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully
+translated by a friend."
+
+[22] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+[23] The _Asahi-shimbun_ was one of the principal Japanese illustrated
+daily papers, printed and published at Osaka.
+
+The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign
+languages--German, Swedish, French and Italian--a writer in the _Revue
+des Deux Mondes_ declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world.
+The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in
+England.
+
+The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a
+Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible
+and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a
+vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of
+warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into
+kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is
+no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature,
+in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her
+regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the
+possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she
+cherishes is for her.
+
+Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story
+that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an
+account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how
+they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men.
+
+It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a
+woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife,
+that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to
+ideal things, her pure and simple passion, he thrills us through with
+the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength
+of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life.
+
+How different the manner in which he treats the scenes between the young
+man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the manner in which his
+French prototypes--in which Pierre Loti, for instance, whom Hearn
+declares to be one of the greatest living artists--would have treated
+it. Far ahead has he passed beyond them; the moral, the life of the
+soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line does he play on the lower
+emotions of his readers.
+
+A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to
+Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to passing
+the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a
+single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way
+towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's
+house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear
+any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He
+told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a
+woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and
+then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his
+feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier
+was set before him, and a cotton _zabuton_ for him to kneel upon. He was
+struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when
+she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no
+time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and
+paper mosquito curtain."
+
+After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly
+fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of
+the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated _Butsudan_, he
+saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but
+before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad
+when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find
+out what I was doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she
+had fallen in love with one another, and how they had gone away and
+built the cottage in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to
+please him. One cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had
+lived alone with nothing to console her but the memory of her lover,
+laying daily before his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly
+dancing to please his spirit.
+
+After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try
+again to sleep.
+
+On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had
+received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was
+not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the
+path he had to follow, she watched him until he passed from sight, his
+heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left
+behind.
+
+Many years passed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous.
+One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with
+him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but
+she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master.
+When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the
+knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments
+of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a _Shirabyoshi_.
+
+With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched
+her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred
+in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw
+the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated
+hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the
+strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night.
+"Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he
+said, as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years
+since we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up
+to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your
+story."
+
+The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years,
+she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house,
+and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before
+the _Butsudan_. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she
+desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and
+attitude of the dance that she might hang it up before the _Butsudan_.
+"I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young
+again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose
+sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!"
+
+He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to
+thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted
+her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she
+clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master?
+She had nothing to offer but her _Shirabyoshi_ garments. He took them,
+saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to
+place her beyond the reach of want.
+
+No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went
+away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day
+took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and
+outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and
+receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the
+aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired
+lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the
+lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him.
+
+Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor seemingly asleep.
+On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient _Butsudan_ with its tablet,
+and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning; in front of it stood the
+portrait he had painted.
+
+"The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as
+she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he
+gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the
+ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow
+had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier
+than he."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIX
+                                KUMAMOTO
+
+     "Of course Urashima was bewildered by the gods. But who is
+     not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a
+     bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the
+     purpose of the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without
+     any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima
+     Mio-jin....
+
+     "These are quite differently managed in the West. After
+     disobeying Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to
+     learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative
+     sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at
+     the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become
+     after death small gods in our own right. How can we pity the
+     folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with
+     visible gods?
+
+     "Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity
+     must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a
+     myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular
+     time of blue light and soft wind,--and always like an old
+     reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the
+     feeling of a season not to be also related to something real
+     in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors."
+
+
+Only for a year did Hearn's sojourn in Fairyland last. The winter
+following his arrival was a very severe one. The northern coast of Japan
+lies open to the Arctic winds blowing over the snow-covered plains of
+Siberia. Heavy falls of snow left drifts five feet high round the
+_Yashiki_ on the hill. The large rooms, so delightful in the summer with
+their verandah opening on the garden, were cold as "cattle barns" in
+winter, with nothing but charcoal braziers to heat them. He dare not
+face another such experience, and asked, if possible, to be transferred
+to warmer quarters. Aided again by his friend, Professor Chamberlain,
+the authorities at Tokyo were induced to give him the professorship of
+English at the Imperial University at Kumamoto.
+
+Kumamoto is situated in Kyushu, facing Formosa and the Chinese coast;
+the climate, therefore, is much milder than that of Matsue. Here,
+however, began Hearn's first disillusionment; like Urashima Taro, having
+dwelt within the precincts of Fairyland he felt the shock of returning
+to Earth again. The city struck him as being ugly and commonplace, a
+half-Europeanised garrison town, resounding to the sounds of bugles and
+the drilling of soldiers, instead of pilgrim songs and temple bells.
+"But Lord! I must try to make money; for nothing is sure in Japan and I
+am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a
+trip, whether the Government employs me or not."
+
+He began to look back with regret to the days passed at Matsue. "You
+must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find
+out how unutterably different it is from other places,--for instance,
+this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here
+exist."
+
+All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and
+apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has
+nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father,
+wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a
+Buddhist student.
+
+This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is
+nothing in Japan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he
+indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a
+little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all
+up--the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to
+orientals, and an oriental he had now become. His people felt like fish
+out of water, everything surrounding them was so different from their
+primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next yard, "_mezurashii
+kedamono_," filled his little wife with an amused wonder. Some geese and
+a pig also filled her with surprise, such animals did not exist in the
+highlands of Japan.
+
+The Kumamoto Government College was one of the largest in Japan,--came
+next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was
+run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still
+adhered to their Japanese dress, but most of them adopted the military
+uniform now, as a rule, worn in Japanese colleges. There were three
+classes, corresponding with three higher classes of the _Jinjo
+Chugakko_--and two higher classes. He did not now teach on Saturdays.
+There were no stoves--only _hibachi_. The library was small, and the
+English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was
+taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The
+bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the
+same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great
+dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of
+chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum.
+
+Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college,
+except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning
+and evening, and in the intervals between classes sat in a corner to
+himself smoking his pipe.
+
+"You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to
+Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF GODS! What would you do if you
+were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! Japan in Kyushu is like
+Europe--except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking,
+and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an _educated_
+Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. My scholars in
+this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me
+only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the
+college and return after class,--always alone, no mental company but
+books. But at home everything is sweet."
+
+In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence
+of matrimony, here at Kumamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to
+the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so
+many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own
+kindred," he says to his sister.
+
+His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second
+wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had
+died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his
+widow continued their journey to Ireland.
+
+At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls
+were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two
+of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr.
+Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to
+Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own
+half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called.
+
+Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to Japanese affairs.
+Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as
+standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and
+social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their
+way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's
+articles contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_, afterwards published
+under the title of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," had claimed public
+attention.
+
+Miss Lillah Hearn was the first member of the family to write to this
+half-brother, who was becoming so famous, but received no answer. Then
+Mrs. Brown, the other sister, approached him, silence greeted her
+efforts as well. On hearing of his marriage to a Japanese lady, Mrs.
+Atkinson, the youngest sister, wrote. Whether it was that she softened
+the exile's heart in his expatriation by that sympathy and innate tact
+which are two of her distinguished qualities, it is impossible to say,
+but her letter was answered.
+
+This strange relative of theirs who had gone to Japan, adopted Japanese
+dress and habits, and married a Japanese lady, had become somewhat of a
+legendary character to his quiet-going Irish kindred. The arrival of the
+first letter, therefore, was looked upon as quite an event and was
+passed from house to house, and hand to hand, becoming considerably
+mutilated in its journeyings to and fro. The first page is entirely
+gone, and the second page so erased and torn that it is only
+decipherable here and there. We are enabled to put an approximate date
+to it by his reference to Miss Bisland's marriage, of which he had heard
+towards the end of his stay at Matsue.
+
+"I have written other things, but am rather ashamed of them," he adds.
+"So Miss Bisland has married and become Mrs. Wetmore. She is as rich at
+least as she could wish to be, but I have not heard from her for more
+than a year. I suppose friendship ends with marriage. If my sister was
+not married, I think--I only think--I would feel more brotherly.
+
+"Well, I will say _au revoir_. Many thanks for the letter you wrote me.
+I would like                Please give me            you can. Don't
+think busy to write--much            I teach for a week--English and
+Elementary Latin:           the time I study              and write for
+pleasure, not for profit. There isn't much profit in literature unless,
+as a novelist, one happens to please a popular taste,--which isn't good
+taste. Some exceptions there are, like Rudyard Kipling; but your brother
+has not his inborn genius for knowing, seizing and painting human
+nature.           Love to you and yours--from
+
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+    "_Tetorihomnatu_ 34,
+        "_Kumamoto, Kyushu,
+           "Japan._"
+
+Mrs. Atkinson replied immediately, thus beginning a series of delightful
+letters, which alas! relate, so many of them, to intimate family affairs
+that it is impossible to publish them in their original form.
+
+"My sweet little sister," he wrote in answer, "your letter was more than
+personally grateful: it had also an unexpected curious interest for me,
+as a revelation of things I did not know. I don't know anything of my
+relations--their names, places, occupations, or even number: therefore
+your letter interested me in a peculiar way, apart from its amiable
+charm. Before I talk any more, I thank you for the photographs. They
+have made me prouder than I ought to be. I did not know that I had such
+nice kindred and such a fairy niece. My wife stole your picture from me
+almost as soon as I had received it, to caress it, and pray to Buddha
+and all the ancient gods to love the original: she has framed it in a
+funny little Japanese frame, and suspended it in that sacred part of the
+house, called the Toko, a sort of alcove, in which only beautiful things
+are displayed. Formerly the gods were placed there (many hundred years
+ago); but now the gods have a separate shrine in the household, and the
+Toko is only the second Holy place...."
+
+[Illustration: Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn's Half-sister).]
+
+The next letter is dated June 27th, '92, 25th year of Meiji.
+
+"Dear sister, I love you a little bit more on hearing that you are
+little. The smaller you are the more I will be fond of you. As for
+marriage being a damper upon affection between kindred, it is true only
+of Occidental marriages. The Japanese wife is only the shadow of her
+husband, infinitely unselfish and naive in all things....
+
+"If you want me to see you soon, you must pray to the Occidental gods to
+make me suddenly rich. However, I doubt if they have half as much
+influence as the gods of Japan,--who are helping me to make a bank
+account as fast as honest work can produce such a result. I have no
+babies; and don't expect to have, and may be able to cross the seas one
+of these days to linger in your country a while. But really I don't
+know. I drift with the current of events.
+
+"As for my book on Japan,--my first book,--there is much to do yet,--it
+ought to be out in the Fall. It will be called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar
+Japan," and will treat of strange things.
+
+"I would like to see you very much; for you are too tantalizing in your
+letters, and tell me nothing about your inner self. I want to find out
+what the angel shut up in your heart is like. No doubt very sweet, but I
+would like to pull it out, and stroke its wings, and make it chipper a
+little. As for the little ones, make them love me; for if they see me
+without previous discipline, they will be afraid of my ugly face when I
+come--I send you a photo of one-half of it, the other is not pleasant, I
+assure you: like the moon, I show only one side of myself. In Spanish
+countries they call me Leucadio--much easier for little folk to
+pronounce. By the way, you never gave me your address,--sign of
+impulsive haste, like my own.
+
+                                           "With best love,
+                                                   "LAFCADIO HEARN."
+
+Then in January, 1903, he writes again, "Your kind sweet letter reached
+me at Christmas time, where there is no Christmas. Don't you know that
+you are very happy to be able to live in England? I am afraid you do
+not. Perhaps you could not know without having lived much elsewhere....
+Your photo has come. The same eyes, the same chin, brow, nose: we are
+strangely alike--excepting that you are very comely, and I very much the
+reverse--partly by exaggeration of the traits which make your face
+beautiful, and partly because I am disfigured by the loss of an
+eye--punched out at school.... Won't you please give my kindest thanks
+to your husband for the pains he has taken to please me! I hope to meet
+him some day, and thank him in person, if I don't leave my bones in some
+quaint and curious Buddhist cemetery out here...."
+
+The wonderful series of letters to Professor Hall Chamberlain, recently
+published by Miss Bisland, are also written from Kumamoto and Kobe, and
+to a great extent run simultaneously with those to his sister. He had a
+habit of repeating himself; the same expressions, the same quotations,
+appear in both series, and sometimes are again repeated in his published
+essays. When struck by an idea or incident, it seems as if he must
+impart it as something noteworthy to every one with whom he was holding
+communion. He gives, for instance, the same account to his sister of the
+routine of his Japanese day as related to Professor Hall Chamberlain and
+Ellwood Hendrik.
+
+We can imagine his rigidly Protestant Irish relations amidst the
+conventional surroundings of an Irish country house, following minutely
+the services of the established church as preached to them by their
+local clergyman, utterly bewildered in reading the description of the
+outlandish cult to which he, their relation, subscribed in Japan. The
+awakening to the rising of the sun with the clapping of hands of
+servants in the garden, the prayers at the _Butsudan_, the putting out
+the food for the dead, all the strange, quaint customs that mark the
+passing of the day in the ancient Empire of Nippon. Not by thousands of
+miles only was he separated from his occidental relations, but by
+immemorial centuries of thought.
+
+On May 21st, 1893, there is another letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
+in which he first announces his expectation of becoming a father. It is
+so characteristic of Lafcadio to take it for granted that the child
+would be a boy, and already to make plans for his education abroad.
+
+                       "_Tsuboi, Nichihorabata_ 35, _Kumamoto,
+                                            "Kyushu, Japan.
+                                                   May_ 21_st_, '93.
+
+"MY DEAR MINNIE:
+
+"(I think 'sister' is too formal, I shall call you by your pet name
+hereafter.) First let me thank you very, very much for the photographs.
+I was extremely pleased with that of your husband;--and thought at once,
+'Ah! the lucky girl!' For your husband, my dear Sis, is no ordinary man.
+There are faces that seen for the first time leave an impression which
+gives the whole of the man, _ineffaceably_. And they are rare. I think I
+know your husband already, admire him and love him,--not simply for your
+sake, but for his own. He [is] all man,--and strong,--a good oak for
+your ivy. I don't mean physical strength, though he seems (from the
+photograph) to have an uncommon amount of it, but strength of character.
+You can feel pretty easy about the future of your little ones with such
+a father. (Don't read all this to him, though,--or he will think I am
+trying to flatter either him or you,--though, of course, you can tell
+him something of the impression his photo gives me, in a milder form.)
+And you don't know what the real impression is,--nor how it is enhanced
+by the fact that I have been for three years isolated from all English
+or European intercourse,--never see an English face, except that of some
+travelling missionary, which is apt to be ignoble. The Oriental face is
+somewhat inscrutable,--like the faces of the Buddhist gods. In youth it
+has quite a queer charm,--the charm of mysterious placidity, of smiling
+calm. (But among the modernised, college-bred Japanese this is lost.)
+What one never--or hardly ever--sees among these Orientals is a face
+showing strong character. The race is strangely impersonal. The women
+are divinely sweet in temper; the men are mysteries, and not altogether
+pleasant. I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only
+make me homesick for English life,--just one plunge into it again.
+
+"--Will I ever see you? Really I don't know. Some day I should like to
+visit England,--provided I could assure myself of sufficient literary
+work there to justify a stay of at least half-a-year, and the expense of
+the voyage. Eventually that might be possible. I would never go as a
+mere guest--not even a sister's; but I should like to be able to chat
+with the sister occasionally on leisure-evenings. I am quite a savage on
+the subject of independence, let me tell you; and would accept no
+kindnesses except those of your company at intervals. But all this is
+not of to-day. I cannot take my wife to Europe, it would be impossible
+to accustom her to Western life,--indeed it would be cruel even to try.
+But I may have to educate my child abroad,--which would be an
+all-powerful reason for the voyage. However, I would prefer an Italian,
+French, or Spanish school-life to an English one.
+
+"--Oh yes, about the book--'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan' is now in
+press. It will appear in two volumes, without illustrations. The
+publishers are Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston,--the best in America.
+Whether you like the book or no, I can't tell. I have an idea you do not
+care much about literary matters;--that you are too much wife and mother
+for that;--that your romances and poetry are in your own home. And such
+romance and poetry is the best of all. However, if you take some
+interest in trying to look at ME between the lines, you may have
+patience to read the work. Don't try to read it, if you don't like.
+
+"--But here is something you might do for me, as I am not asking for
+certain friendly offices. When the book is criticised, you might kindly
+send me a few of the best reviews. Miss Bisland, while in London, wrote
+me the reviews of some of my other books had been very kindly; but she
+never dreamed of supplementing this pleasant information by cutting out
+a few specimens for me.--By the way, she has married well, you
+know,--has become awfully rich and fashionable, and would not even
+condescend to look at me if she passed me in Broadway--I _suppose_. But
+she well deserved her good fortune; for she was certainly one of the
+most gifted girls I ever knew, and has succeeded in everything--against
+immense obstacles--with no help except that of her own will and genius.
+
+"--And now I must give you a lecture. I don't want more than one
+sister,--haven't room in my heart for more. All appear to be as charming
+as they are sweet looking. I am interested to hear how they succeed,
+etc., etc. But don't ask me to write to everybody, and don't show
+everybody my letters. I can't diffuse myself very far. You said you
+would be 'my favourite.' A nice way you go about it! Suppose I tell you
+that I am a very jealous, nasty brother; and that if I can't have one
+sister by herself I don't want any sister at all! Would that be very,
+very naughty? But it is true. And now you can be shocked just as much as
+you please.
+
+"--Yes, I have lost an eye, and look horrible. The operation in Dublin
+did not cause the disfigurement, but a blow, or rather the indirect
+results of a blow, received from a play-fellow.
+
+"--You ask me if I should like a photograph of father. I certainly
+should, if you can procure me one without trouble. I hope--much more
+than to see England,--to visit India, and try to find some tradition of
+him. I did not know positively, until last year, that father had been in
+the West Indies. When I went there, I had the queerest, ghostliest
+sensation of having seen it all before. I think I should experience even
+stranger sensations in India! The climate would be agreeable for me.
+Remember, I passed fourteen years of my life south of winter. The first
+snow I saw from 1876 to 1890 was on my way through Canada to Japan.
+Indeed, if ever I become quite independent, I want to return to the
+tropics.
+
+"Enough to tire your eyes,--isn't it?--for this time.
+
+                                            "Ever affectionately,
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+"In the names of the eight hundred myriads of Gods,--do give me your
+address. The only way I have been able to write you is by finding the
+word _Portadown_ in _Whittaker's Almanac_. You are a careless, naughty
+'Sis.'
+
+"I enclose my name and address in Japanese.
+
+        "YAKUMO KOIZUMI,
+                   "_Tsuboi,
+                      "Nichihorabata 35,
+                           "Kumamoto, Kyushu_."
+
+All the women are making funny little Japanese baby-clothes, and all the
+Buddhist Divinities, who watch over little children, are being prayed
+to.... "Letters of congratulation," he said, "were coming from all
+directions, for the expectation of a child is always a subject of great
+gladness in Japan.... Behind all this there is a universe of new
+sensations, revelations of things in Buddhist faith which are very
+beautiful and touching. About the world an atmosphere of delicious,
+sacred naivete,--difficult to describe because resembling nothing in the
+Western world...."
+
+Hearn's account of his home before the birth of his son throws most
+interesting lights on Japanese methods of thought and daily life. He
+refers to the pretty custom of a woman borrowing a baby when she is
+about to become a mother. It is thought an honour to lend it. And it is
+extraordinarily petted in its new home. The one his wife borrowed was
+only six months old, but expressed in a supreme degree all the Japanese
+virtues; docile to the degree of going to sleep when bidden, and of
+laughing when it awakened. The eerie wisdom of its face seemed to
+suggest a memory of all its former lives. The incident he relates also
+of a little Samurai boy whom he and his wife had adopted is interesting
+as showing the Spartan discipline exercised over Japanese children from
+earliest youth, enabling them in later life to display that iron
+self-control that has astonished the world; interesting, also, as
+showing how nothing escaped Hearn's quick observation and assiduous
+intellect. Hearn, at first, wanted to fondle the child, and make much of
+him, but he soon found that it was not in accordance with custom. He
+therefore ceased to take notice of him; and left him under the control
+of the women of the house. Their treatment of him Hearn thought
+peculiar; the little fellow was never praised and rarely scolded. One
+day he let a little cup fall and broke it. No notice was taken of the
+accident for fear of giving him pain. Suddenly, though the face remained
+quite smilingly placid as usual, he could not control his tears. As soon
+as they saw him cry, everybody laughed and said kind things to him, till
+he began to laugh, too. But what followed was more surprising.
+Apparently he had been distantly treated. One day he did not return from
+school until three hours after the usual time; suddenly the women began
+to cry--they were, indeed, more deeply affected than their treatment of
+the boy would have justified. The servants ran hither and thither in
+their anxiety to find him. It turned out that he had only been taken to
+a teacher's house for something relating to school matters. As soon as
+his voice was heard at the door, every one was quiet, cold, and
+distantly polite again.
+
+On September 17th he writes again to his sister, thanking her for a copy
+she had sent him of the _Saturday Review_. "You could send me nothing
+more pleasing, or more useful in a literary way. It is all the more
+welcome as I am really living in a hideous isolation, far away from
+books, and book-shops, and Europeans. When I can get--which I hope is
+the next year--into a more pleasant locality, I shall try to pick out
+some pretty Oriental tales to send to the little ones." He was not able,
+he goes on, to go far from Kumamoto, not liking to leave his little wife
+too long alone; so his vacation was rather monotonous. He travelled only
+as far as Nagasaki. It was quaint and pretty, but hotter than any West
+Indian port in the hot season. He was economising, he said, and had
+saved nearly three thousand five hundred dollars. Once he had provided
+for his wife, he hoped to be able to make a few long voyages to places
+east of Japan. "You are much to be envied," he goes on to his sister,
+"for your chances of travel. What a pity you are not able to devote
+yourself to writing and painting in a place like Algiers--full of
+romance and picturesqueness. If you go there, don't fail to see the old
+Arab part of the city--the Kasbah, I think they call it. How about the
+Continent? Have you tried Southern Italy? And don't you think that one
+gets all the benefit of travel only by keeping away from fashion-resorts
+and places consecrated by conventionalism? Nothing to me is more
+frightful than a fashionable seaside resort--such as those of the
+Atlantic Coast. My happiest sojourns of this sort have been in little
+fishing villages, and little queer old unknown towns, where there are no
+big vulgar hotels, and where one can dress and do exactly as one
+pleases.
+
+"What will you do with your little man when he grows up? Army, or Civil
+Service? Whatever you do, never let him go to America, and lose all his
+traditions. Australia would be far better. I expect he will be
+gloriously well able to take care of himself anywhere,--judging by his
+father, but I have come to the belief that one cannot too soon begin the
+cultivation of a single aim and single talent in life. This is the age
+of specialism. No man can any longer be successful in many things. Even
+the 'general practitioner' in medicine has almost become obsolete.
+
+"Nothing seems to me more important now for a little boy than the
+training of his linguistic faculties,--giving him every encouragement in
+learning languages by ear--(the only natural way); and your travelling
+sometimes with him will help you to notice how his faculties are in that
+direction. But perhaps it will be possible for him to pass all his life
+in England. (For me, England, Ireland and Scotland mean the same thing.)
+That would be pleasant indeed.... When I think of your little man with
+the black eyes, I hope that his life will always be in the circle of
+English traditions, wherever the English Flag flies, there remain.
+
+"I suppose you know that in this Orient the construction of the family
+is totally different to what it is in Europe.... We are too conceitedly
+apt to think that what is good for Englishmen is good for all
+nations,--our ethics, our religion, our costumes, etc. The plain facts
+of the case are that all Eastern races lose, instead of gaining, by
+contact with us. They imitate our vices instead of our virtues, and
+learn all our weaknesses without getting any of our strength. Already
+statistics show an enormous increase of crime in Japan as the result of
+'Christian civilisation'; and the open ports show a demoralisation
+utterly unknown in the interior of the country, and unimaginable in the
+old feudal days before 1840 or 1850...."
+
+In the next letter he gives his sister a minute account of his Japanese
+manner of life on the floor without chairs or tables. It has been
+described so often by visitors to Japan, and by Hearn himself, that it
+is unnecessary to repeat it here. He ends his letter:--
+
+"I am now so used to the Japanese way of living, that when I have to
+remain all day in Western clothes, I feel very unhappy; and I think I
+should not find European life pleasant in summer time. Some day, I will
+send you a photograph of my house.
+
+"I wish you much happiness and good health and pleasant days of travel,
+and thank you much for the paper.
+
+"This letter is rather rambling, but perhaps you will find something
+interesting in it.
+
+                                          "Ever affectionately,
+                                                         "LAFCADIO."
+
+In September comes another letter to Mrs. Atkinson:
+
+"You actually talk about writing too often,--which is strange! There is
+only this difficulty about writing,--that we both know so little of each
+other that topics interesting to both can be only guessed at. That
+should be only a temporary drawback.
+
+"The more I see your face in photos, the more I feel drawn toward you.
+Lillah and the other sister represent different moods and tenses
+pictorially. You seem most near to me,--as I felt on first reading your
+letter. You have strength, too, where I have not. You are certainly very
+sensitive, but also self-repressed. I think you are not inclined to make
+mistakes. I think you can be quickly offended, and quick to forgive--if
+you understand the offence to be only a mistake. You would not forgive
+at all should you discern behind the fault a something much worse than
+mistake,--and in this you would be right. You are inclined to reserve,
+and not to bursts of joy;--you have escaped my extremes of depression
+and extremes of exultation. You see very quickly beyond the present
+relations of a fact--I think all this. But of course you have been
+shaped in certain things by social influences I have never had,--so that
+you must have perfect poise where I would flounder and stumble.
+
+"But imagining won't do always. I should like to know more of you than a
+photograph or a rare letter can tell. I don't know, remember, anything
+_at all_ about you. I do not know where you were born, where you were
+educated,--anything of your life; or what is much more, infinitely more
+important, I don't know your emotions and thoughts and feelings and
+experiences in the past. What you are now, I can guess. But what _were_
+you,--long ago? What memories most haunt you of places and people you
+liked? If you could tell me some of these, how pleasantly we might
+compare notes. Mere facts tell little: the interest of personality lies
+most in the infinitely special way that facts affect the person. I am
+very curious about you,--but, don't take this too seriously; because
+though my wishes are strong, my disinclination to cause you pain is
+stronger; and you have told me that writing is sometimes fatiguing to
+you. It were so much better could we pass a day or two together.
+
+"You must not underrate yourself as you did in your last. Your few lines
+about the scenery,--short as they were,--convinced me that you could do
+something literary of a very nice sort had you the time and chance to
+give yourself to any such work. But I do not wish that you would--except
+to read the result; for literary labour is extremely severe work, even
+after the secret of method is reached. I am only beginning to learn; and
+to produce five pages means to write at least twenty-five. Enthusiasms
+and inspirations have least to do with the matter. The real work is
+condensing, compressing, choosing, changing, shifting words and
+phrases,--studying values of colour and sound and form in words; and
+when all is done, the result satisfies only for a time. What I wrote six
+years ago, I cannot bear the sight of to-day. If I had been a genius, I
+wonder whether I would feel the same.
+
+"Romances are not in novels, but in lives. Can you not tell me some of
+yours when you are feeling very, very well, and don't know what to do?
+What surprised me was your observation about 'sentimental' in your last
+letter,--and that upon such a worthy topic! What can you think of me?
+And here in this Orient, where the spirit of more ancient faiths enters
+into one's blood with the sense of the doctrine of filial piety, and the
+meaning of ancestor worship,--how very, very strange and cruel it seems
+to me that my little sister should be afraid of being thought
+_sentimental_ about the photograph of her father! What self-repression
+does all this mean, and what iron influences in Western life--English
+life that I have almost forgotten! However, character loses nothing:
+under the exterior ice, the Western could only gain warmth and depth if
+it be of the right sort. I hope, nevertheless, my little sister will be
+just as 'sentimental' as she possibly can when she writes to Japan,--and
+feel sure of more than sympathy and gratitude. Unless she means by
+'sentimental' only something in regard to style of writing--in which
+case I assure her that she cannot err. If she is afraid of being thought
+really sentimental, I should be much more afraid of meeting her,--for I
+should wish to say sweet things and to hear them, too, should I deserve.
+
+"At all events remember that you have given me something very
+precious,--not only in itself,--but precious because precious to you.
+And it shall never be lost,--in spite of earthquakes and possible
+fires."
+
+(The something he alludes to as "very precious" was a photograph of
+their father, Charles Hearn, that Mrs. Atkinson had sent him.)
+
+"--I wish I could talk to you more about Father and India. I wish to ask
+a hundred thousand questions. But on paper it is difficult to express
+all one wishes to say. And letters of mere questions carry no joy with
+them, and no sympathy. So I shall not ask _now_ any more. And you must
+not tire your dear little aching head to write when you do not feel
+well. I shall write again soon. For a little while good-bye, with love
+and all sweet hope to you ever,
+
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+    "_Kumamoto,
+       "Kyushu, Japan.
+          "Jan_. 30, '94."
+
+On November 17th, 1893, at one o'clock in the morning, Hearn's eldest
+son, Leopold Kazuo Koizumi, was born.
+
+He declared that the strangest and strongest sensation of his life was
+hearing for the first time the cry of his own child. There was a strange
+feeling of being double; something more, also, impossible to
+analyse--the echo in a man's heart of all the sensations felt by all the
+fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the past.
+
+A few weeks later he writes to his sister, giving her news about his
+son. "The physician says that from the character of his bones he ought
+to become very tall. He is very dark. He has my nose and promises to
+have the Hearn eyebrows; but he has the Oriental eye. Whether he will be
+handsome or ugly, I can't tell: his little face changes every day;--he
+has already looked like five different people. When first born, I
+thought him the prettiest creature I ever saw. But that did not last. I
+am so inexperienced in the matter of children that I cannot trust myself
+to make any predictions. Of course I find the whole world changed about
+me....
+
+"My wife," he goes on, "is quite well. Happily the old military caste to
+which she belongs is a strong one, but how sacred and terrible a thing
+is maternity. When it was all over I felt very humble and grateful to
+the Unknowable Power which had treated us so kindly. The possibility of
+men being cruel to the women who bear their children seemed at the
+moment to darken existence.
+
+"I have received your last beautiful photograph--or I should say
+two:--the vignette is, of course, the most lovable, but both are very,
+very nice. I gave the full-figure one to Setsu. She would like to have
+her boy grow up looking either like you or like Posey--but most like
+you. (Thanks also for the pretty photo of yourself and Posey: Posey is
+decidedly handsome.) But I fear my son can never be like either of you.
+He is altogether Oriental so far,--looks at me with the still calm
+Buddhist eyes of the Far East, and the soul of another race. Even his
+nose will never declare his Western blood; for the finest class of the
+Japanese offer many strongly aquiline faces. Setsu is a Samurai, and
+though her own features are the reverse of aquiline, there are aquiline
+faces among the kindred.
+
+"I am awfully anxious that the boy should get to be like you. I have had
+your most beautiful photograph copied by a clever photographer here and
+have sent the copies to friends, saying, 'this is my sister; and this is
+the boy. I want him to look like her.' You see I am proud of you,--not
+only as to the ghostly, but also as to the material part of you.
+Physiologically I am all Latin and Pagan,--even though my little boy's
+eyes are bright blue.
+
+"... It is really nonsense, sending such a thing as his photo at
+fifty-five days old, because the child changes so much every week. But
+you are my little sister. I have called him Leopold Kazuo Hearn--for
+European use and custom. Kazuo, in Japanese, signifies 'First of the
+Excellent.' I have not registered him under that name, however; because
+by the law, if I registered my wife or son in the Consulate, both become
+English citizens, and lose the right to hold any property, or do any
+business in Japan, or even to live in the interior without a passport. I
+have, therefore, stopped at the Japanese marriage ceremony, and a
+publication of the fact abroad. In the present order I dare not deprive
+my folks of their nationality."
+
+Then some time later he writes:--
+
+"You ask for all kinds of news about Kajiwo. Well, he is now able to
+stand well, and is tremendously strong to all appearance. He tries to
+speak. 'Aba' is the first _word_ spoken by Japanese babes: it means
+'good-bye.' Here is a curious example of the contrast between West and
+East,--the child comes into the world saying farewell. But this would be
+in accordance with Buddhist philosophy,--saying farewell to the previous
+life.
+
+"You are right about supposing that the birth of a son in Japan is an
+occasion of special rejoicing. All the baby clothes are ready long
+before birth--(except the ornamental ones)--as the _Kimono_ or little
+robe is the same shape for either sex (_of children_). But, when the
+child is born, if it be a girl, very beautiful clothes of bright
+colours, covered with wonderful pictures, are made for it. If it be a
+boy the colours are darker, and the designs different. My little
+fellow's silken Kimono is covered with pictures of tortoises, storks,
+pine, and other objects typical of long life, prosperity, steadfastness,
+etc. This subject is enormously elaborate and complicated,--so that I
+cannot tell you all about it in a letter.
+
+"After the child is born, all friends and relatives bring presents,--and
+everybody comes to see and congratulate the mother. You would think this
+were a trial. I was afraid it would tire Setsu. But she was walking
+about again on the seventh day after birth. The strength of the boy is
+hers,--not mine.
+
+"I was also worried about the physician. I wanted the chief surgeon of
+the garrison,--because I was afraid. He was a friend, and laughed at me.
+He said: 'If anything terrible should happen, call me, but otherwise
+don't worry about a doctor. The Japanese have managed these things in
+their own way for thousands of years without doctors: a woman or two
+will do.' So two women came, and all was well. I hated the old women
+first, but after their success, I became very fond of them, and hugged
+them in English style, which they could not understand."
+
+The kind dull veil that nature keeps stretched between mankind and the
+Unknown was drawn again. The world became to Hearn nearly the same as it
+had been before the birth of his child, and he could plan, he said, for
+the boy's future. He was afraid he might be near-sighted, and wondered
+if he would be intellectual. "He was so proud of him," his wife says,
+"that whenever a guest, a student, or a fellow-professor called, he
+would begin talking about him and his perfections without allowing his
+friend to get a word in. He perfectly frightened me with a hundred toys
+he brought home when he returned."
+
+After his son's birth, Hearn naturally became still more anxious to have
+Setsu registered legally as his wife, but he was always met by official
+excuses and delays. He was told that if he wished the boy to remain a
+Japanese citizen he must register him in the mother's name only. If he
+registered him in his own name his son became a foreigner. On the other
+hand, Hearn knew that if he nationalised himself his salary would be
+reduced to a Japanese level.
+
+[Illustration: Kazuo (Hearn's Son) and his Nurse.]
+
+"I don't quite see the morality of the reduction," he says, "for
+services should be paid according to the market value at least;--but
+there is no doubt it would be made. As for America, and my relatives in
+England, I am married: that has been duly announced. Perhaps I had
+better wait a few years and then become a citizen. Being a Japanese
+citizen would, of course, make no difference whatever as to my relations
+in any civilised countries abroad. It would only make some difference in
+an uncivilised country,--such as revolutionary South America, where
+English or French, or American protection is a good thing to have. But
+the long and the short of the matter is that I am anxious about Setsu's
+and the boy's interests: my own being concerned only at that point where
+their injury would be Setsu's injury."
+
+The only way out of the difficulty, he concluded, was to abandon his
+English nationality and adopt his wife's family name, Koizumi. As a
+prefix for his own personal use he selected the appellation of the
+Province of Izumo "Yakumo" ("Eight clouds," or the "Place of the Issuing
+of Clouds," the first word of the ancient, Japanese song "Ya-he-gaki").
+
+On one of his letters he shows his sister how his name is written in
+Japanese.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson's youngest child, Dorothy, was born in March, 1894. There
+is an interval of exactly four months between her and her cousin Kazuo.
+It is in reference to this event that the following letter was
+written:--
+
+"How sweet of you to get Mrs. or Miss Weatherall to write me the dear
+news! You will be well by the time this reaches you, so that I may
+venture to write more than congratulations.
+
+"I was quite anxious about you,--feeling as if you were the only real
+_fellow-soul_ in my world but one:--and birth is a thing so much more
+terrible than all else in the universe--more so than death itself--that
+the black border round the envelope made my heart cold for a moment. I
+had forgotten the why. Now I hope you will not have any more sons or
+daughters; you have three,--and I trust you will have no more pain or
+trouble. As for me, I am very resolved not to become a father again.
+
+"You will laugh at me, and perhaps think it very strange that when only
+thirty-five I began to feel a kind of envy of friends with children. I
+knew their troubles, anxieties, struggles; but I saw their sons grow up,
+beautiful and gifted men, and I used to whisper to myself,--'But I never
+shall have a child.' Then it used to seem to me that no man died so
+utterly as the man without children: for him I fancied (like some folk
+still really think in other lands) that death would be utter eternal
+blackness. When I did, however, hear the first cry of my boy--_my_ boy,
+dreamed about in forgotten years--I had for that instant the ghostly
+sensation of being _double_. Just then, and only then, I did not
+think,--but _felt_, 'I am TWO.' It was weird but gave me thoughts that
+changed all pre-existing thoughts. My boy's gaze still seems to me a
+queerly beautiful thing: I still feel I am looking at myself when he
+looks at me. Only the thought has become infinitely more complicated.
+For I think about all the dead who live in the little heart of
+him--races and memories diverse as East and West. But who made his eyes
+blue and his hair brown? And will he be like you? And will he ever see
+the little cousin who has just entered the world? The other day, for one
+moment, he looked just like your boy in the picture."
+
+Mrs. Atkinson about this time went through private trials upon which it
+is unnecessary to touch here. The following letter of consolation and
+encouragement was written to her by her half-brother:--
+
+"Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One
+must pay a terrible price to see and to know. Still, the purchase is
+worth making. You know the Emerson lines:--
+
+                    "Though thou love her as thyself,
+                     As a self of purer clay;
+                     Though her parting dims the day,
+                     Stealing grace from all alive,
+                         Heartily know
+                         When half-Gods go,
+                          The Gods arrive!...
+
+"Reverse the condition: the moral is the same,--and it is eternal. By
+light alone one cannot see; there must be shadows in multitude to help.
+What we love is good, and exists, but often exists only in _us_,--then
+we become angry at others, not knowing the illusion was the work of the
+Gods. The Gods are always right. They make us sometimes imagine that
+something we love ever so much is in others, while it is only in our own
+hearts. The reason they do this to some, like you and me, is to teach us
+what terrible long, long mistakes we might have made without their help.
+Sometimes they really cause a great deal of more serious trouble, and we
+can't tell why. We must wait and believe and be quite sure the Gods are
+good.
+
+"What is not always good is the tender teaching we get at home. We are
+told of things so beautiful that we believe everybody must believe
+them,--truth, and love, and duty, and honour of soul, etc. We are even
+taught the enormous lie that the world is entirely regulated by these
+beliefs. I wonder if it would not be much better to teach children the
+adult truth:--'The world is thus and so:--those beliefs are ideal only
+which do not influence the intellectual life, nor the industrial life,
+nor the social life. The world is a carnival-ball; and you must wear a
+mask thereat,--and never, _never_ doff it;--except to the woman or the
+man you must love always. Learn to wear your mask with grace--only keep
+your heart fresh in spite of all bitter knowledge.' Wouldn't this be the
+best advice? As a mere commonplace fact,--the whole battle of life is
+fought in disguise by those who win. No man knows the heart of another
+man. No woman knows the heart of another woman. Only the woman can learn
+the man, and the man the woman;--and this only after years! What a great
+problem it is; and how utterly it is neglected in teaching the little
+human flowers that we set out in the world's cold without a thought!
+
+"You are more and more like me in every letter; but you are better far.
+I have not learned reserve with friends yet: I supply the lack by a
+retreating disposition,--a disinclination to make acquaintances. I love
+very quickly and strongly; but just as quickly dislike what I loved--if
+deceived, and the dislike does not die. My general experience has been
+that the loveable souls are but rarely lodged in the forms which most
+attract us: there _are_ such exceptions on the woman's side as my dear
+little Sis,--and there are exceptions on the male side of a particular
+order, and rare. But the rule remains. I wonder if all these jokes are
+not played on us by the Gods, who think,--'No!--you want the infinite!
+That can be reached later only,--after innumerable births. First learn,
+for a million years or so, just to love only _souls_. You _must_! for
+you will be punished if you try to obtain all perfections in one.' I
+think the Gods talk to us about that way; and when we leave the Spring
+season of life behind, we find the Gods were right after all.
+
+"--Still, the great puzzle is in all these things there are no general
+rules solid enough to trust in. I fancy the best teaching for a heart
+would be,--'Always caution,--but--believe the tendency of the world is
+to good.' And _largeness_ seems to be necessary,--never to suffer
+oneself to see only one charm; but to train oneself to study
+combinations and understand them. Any modern human nature is too complex
+to be otherwise judged.
+
+"Music,--yes! If I were near you I would be always teasing you to
+play:--and would bring you all kinds of queer exotic melodies to make
+variations on: strange melodies from Spanish America and the Creole
+Islands, and Japan, and China, and all sorts of strange places. We
+should try to do very curious things in the way of ballads and songs,
+and you would teach me all sorts of musical things I don't know. By the
+way, you will be shocked to learn, perhaps, that I have never been able
+to appreciate the superiority of the new German music: The Italian still
+seems to me the divine: but that may be because I have never had time to
+train myself to appreciate.
+
+"--You do not know how much I sympathise with all your anxieties and
+troubles, and how much I wish for your strength and happiness. Would I
+not like to be travelling with you to countries where you would find all
+the rest and light and warmth you could enjoy! Perhaps, some day that
+may be. Pray to the Gods for my good fortune; and we shall share the
+pleasure together if They listen. If They do not, we must wait as the
+Buddhists say until the future birth. Then I want to be a very rich man,
+or woman, and you a very dear little sister or brother;--and I want to
+have a steam yacht of 30,000 horse-power.
+
+"--Your sweetest little daughter, may you live to see her happiness in
+all things! I am glad I have no daughter. A boy can fight--must fight
+his way; but a daughter is the luxury of a rich man. Had I a daughter,
+she would be too dear; and I should feel inclined to say if dying:--'My
+child, I am unable to guard you longer, and the world is difficult: you
+would do better to come to Shadowland with me.' But your Marjory will be
+well guarded and petted, and have the world made sweet for her; and you
+will have no more grief. You have had all your disappointments and
+troubles in girlhood--childhood;--the future must be kind to you. As for
+me, I really think the Gods owe me some favours; they have ignored me so
+long that I am now all expectation."
+
+Then again:--
+
+
+"MY VERY SWEET LITTLE SISTER,
+
+"Your dear letter came yesterday, and filled us all with gladness. You
+see I say US;--for my folks prayed very hard for you to the ancient Gods
+and to the Buddhas,--that I might not lose that little sister of
+mine.--And now to answer questions.
+
+"Indeed, Setsu got the photos, and wondered at them, for she had never
+seen a carriage before of that kind, or a room like your room; and very
+childishly asked me to make her a room like yours. To which I
+said:--'The cost of such a room would buy for you a whole street in your
+native city of Matsue; and besides, you would be very unhappy and
+uncomfortable in such a room.' And when I explained, she wondered still
+more. (A very large Japanese house could be bought with the grounds for
+about L30--I mean a big, big merchant's house--in Izumo.) Another wonder
+was the donkey in the other photo, for none had ever seen such an
+animal.
+
+"--As for your ever coming to Japan, my dear, if you do, you shall have
+a chair. But I fear--indeed I am almost certain--that the day is not
+very far away when I must leave Setsu and Kajiwo to the care of the
+ancient Gods, and go away and work bravely for them elsewhere, till
+Kajiwo is old enough to go abroad. The days of foreign influence and of
+foreign teaching in Japan are rapidly drawing to a close. Japan is
+learning to do well without us; and we have not been kind enough to her
+to win her love. We have persecuted her with hordes of fanatical
+missionaries, robbed her by unjust treaties, forced her to pay monstrous
+indemnities for trifling wrongs;--we have forced her to become strong,
+and she is going to do without us presently, the future is dark. Happily
+my folks will be provided for; and I expect to be able, if I must go, to
+return in a few years. It is barely possible that I might get into
+journalism in Japan,--but not at all sure. I suppose you know that is my
+living profession: I understand all kinds of newspaper work. But as I am
+no believer in conventions, I am not likely to get any of the big
+sinecures. To do that one must be a ladies' man, a member of some
+church, a social figure. I am no ladies' man: I am known to the world as
+an 'infidel,' and I hate society unutterably. Were I rich enough to live
+where I please, I should certainly (if unable to live in Japan) return
+to the tropics. Indeed, I have a faint hope of passing at least the
+winters of my old age near the Equator. Where the means are to come from
+I don't know; but I have a kind of faith in Goethe's saying, that
+whatever a man most desires in youth, he will have an excess of in his
+old age. Leisure to write books in a warm climate is all I ask. Pray to
+the Gods, if you believe in any Gods, to help the dream to be realised.
+
+"Kajiwo is my nightmare. I am tortured all day and all night by the
+problem of how to set him going in life before I become dust. Sometimes
+I think how bad it was of me to have had a child at all. Yet before
+that, I did not really know what life was; and I would not lose the
+knowledge for any terms of gifts of years. Besides, I am beginning to
+think I am really a tolerably good sort of fellow,--for if I had been
+really such a monster of depravity as the religious fanatics declared,
+how could I have got such a fine boy. There must be some good in me
+anyhow. Nobody shall make a 'Christian' of Kajiwo if I can help it--by
+'Christian' I mean a believer in absurd and cruel dogmas. The world
+talks much about Christianity, but no one teaches it.
+
+"--So glad to hear you are able to go out a little again. Perhaps a long
+period of strong solid calm health is preparing for you. After the
+trials and worries of maternity such happy conditions often come as a
+reward. I hope to chat with you by a fire when we are both old, and Kaji
+has shot up into a man,--looking like his aunt a little--with a delicate
+aquiline face. But only the Eternities know what his face will be like.
+It is changeable as water now. I won't send another photo of him till he
+looks pretty again.
+
+                                              "With best love,
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+    "_June_ 24, '94.
+
+"I must go off travelling in a couple of weeks. Perhaps there will be a
+little delay before my next letter reaches you."
+
+[Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).]
+
+In the next letter he touches upon these travels undertaken with his
+wife, mother-in-law, and Kaji (an abbreviation of Kazuo, or Kajiwo, as
+Hearn was in the habit of calling him at first).
+
+"How sweet of you," he says, "to send that charming photo of the
+children. It delighted us all. Setsu never saw a donkey--there are none
+in Japan; and all wondered at the strange animal. What I wondered at was
+to see what a perfect pretty little woman the charming Marjory is. As
+for the boy, he is certainly what every parent wants a boy to be as to
+good looks; but I also think he must have a very sweet temper. I trust
+that you won't allow the world to spoil it for him. They do spoil
+tempers at some of the great public schools. I cannot believe it is
+necessary to let young lads be subjected to the brutality of places like
+Eton and Harrow. It hardens them too much. The answer is that the great
+school turns out the conquerors of the world,--the subalterns of
+Kipling,--the Clives,--the daring admirals and great captains, etc.
+Perhaps in this militant age it is necessary. But I notice the great
+thinkers generally come from other places. However, this is the
+_practical_ age,--there is nothing for philosophers, poets, or painters
+to succeed in, unless they are independently situated. I shall try to
+make a good doctor out of Kaji, if I can. I could never afford to do
+more for him. And if possible I shall take him to Europe, and stay there
+with him for a couple of years. But that is a far-away matter."
+
+Characteristically with that apprehensive mind of his, his son's future,
+as Hearn himself confesses, became a perfect nightmare.
+
+"I must make an Englishman of him, I fear. His hair has turned bright
+brown. He is so strong that I expect him to become a very powerful man:
+he is very deep-chested and thick-built and so heavy now, that people
+think I am not telling the truth about his age.
+
+"Kajiwo's soul seems to be so English that I fancy his memory of former
+births would scarcely refer much to Japan. How about the real compound
+race-soul, though? One would have to recollect having been two at the
+same time. This seems to me a defect in the popular theory--still the
+Japanese hold, or used to hold, that the soul is itself a multiple--that
+each person has a _number of souls_. That would give an explanation.
+Scientifically it is true. We are all compounds of innumerable
+lives--each a sum in an infinite addition--the dead are not dead--they
+live in all of us and move us,--and stir faintly in every heart-beat.
+And there are ghostly interlinkings. Something of _you_ must be in _me_,
+and of both of us in Kajiwo.
+
+"--I wonder if this also be true of little Dorothy. It is a curious
+thing that you tell me about the change in colour of the eyes. I only
+saw that happen in hot climates. Creole children are not uncommonly born
+with gold hair and bright blue eyes. A few years later the skin, eyes,
+hair seem to have entirely changed,--the first to brown, the two last to
+coal-black.
+
+"--I am writing all this dreamy stuff just to amuse my sweet little
+sister,--because I can't be near to pet her and make her feel very
+happy. Well, a little Oriental theory may have some caressing charm for
+you. It is a very gentle faith--though also very deep; and you will find
+in my book how much it interests me.
+
+"Take very, very, _very_ good care of your precious little self,--and do
+not try to write till you feel immensely strong. Setsu sends sweet words
+and wishes. And I----!
+
+                                     "With love,
+                                                    "LAFCADIO HEARN.
+
+    "_Kumamoto, June_ 2, '94."
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XX
+                            OUT OF THE EAST
+
+     "So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in
+     life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole
+     business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind
+     of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced
+     shadows were the sole product of Western civilisation, and
+     bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows
+     of machinery and chimneys and telegraph poles; and at the
+     shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the
+     hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of
+     houses twenty storeys high, and of hunger begging under them;
+     and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty;
+     and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and the
+     shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and
+     the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for
+     the purpose of an auto-da-fe. Whereat Japan became rather
+     serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes.
+     Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first
+     matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her
+     own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still cling to
+     her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never
+     again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did
+     before."
+
+
+After the lapse of a certain amount of time Hearn gradually became more
+reconciled to Kumamoto. The climate agreed with him, he put on flesh,
+all his Japanese clothes, he declared, even his _kimono_, had become too
+small. "I cannot say whether this be the climate, the diet, or what.
+Setsu says it is because I have a good wife: but she might be
+prejudiced, you know."
+
+It is more likely that his well-being at this time arose from his having
+given up the experiment of living exclusively on a Japanese regimen.
+After his bout of illness at Matsue, he found that he could not
+recuperate on the fare of the country, even when reinforced with eggs.
+Having lived for ten months thus, horribly ashamed as he was to confess
+his weakness, he found himself obliged to return to the flesh-pots of
+Egypt, and devoured enormous quantities of beef and fowl, and drank
+terrific quantities of beer. "The fault is neither mine nor that of the
+Japanese: it is the fault of my ancestors, the ferocious, wolfish
+hereditary instincts and tendencies of boreal mankind. The sins of the
+fathers, etc."
+
+Meantime, his knowledge of the strange people amongst whom his lot was
+cast was deepening and expanding. "Out of the East," the collection of
+essays--essence of experiences accumulated at this time, and the book,
+next perhaps to "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," by which he is best
+known--is typical of his genius at its best and at its worst. The first
+sketch, entitled, "The Dream of a Summer's Day," is simply a bundle of
+impressions of the journey to which he alludes when writing to his
+sister, made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland
+Sea. This journey, through some of the most beautiful scenery of Japan,
+after the horrors of a foreign hotel at an open port, was one of those
+experiences that form an epoch in an artist's life, touching him with
+the magic wand of inspiration. All the delightful impressions made by
+the poetry and the elusive beauty of old Japan seem concentrated into
+six pages of poetic prose. To the world it is known as "The Dream of a
+Summer's Day."[24] To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate
+beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the
+indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful
+memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its
+picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of
+sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote
+in the warm air. Like a bubbling spring the sense of beauty broke forth
+from the caverns of ancient memory, where, according to Lafcadio, it had
+lain imprisoned for years, to ripple and murmur sweet music in his ears.
+He went back to the days of his childhood, back to dreams lying in the
+past in what had become for him an alien land; the fragrance of a most
+dear memory swept over his senses. The gnat of the soul of him flitted
+out into the gleam of blue 'twixt sea and sun, back to the cedarn
+balcony pillars of the Japanese hotel, whence he could see the opening
+of the bay and the horizon, haunted by mountain shapes, faint as old
+memories, and then again to distant and almost forgotten memories of his
+youth by Lough Corrib, in the West of Ireland, the result being as
+beautiful a prose poem as Hearn ever wrote.
+
+[24] "Out of the East," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+[Illustration: Dorothy Atkinson.]
+
+The last essay in the collection is called "Yuko," a reminiscence.
+
+There are many of Lafcadio Hearn's critics who say that, in consequence
+of his ignorance of the Japanese language, and the isolation in which he
+lived, he never could have known anything really of the innermost
+thoughts and feelings of the people to whom he professed to act as
+interpreter. Sometimes they maintain that his views are unfavourable to
+an exaggerated extent, at another too laudatory. His essay entitled
+"Yuko" might certainly be taken as an example of the manner in which he
+selected certain superficial manifestations as typical of the inner life
+of the Japanese--a people as reserved, as secretive, as difficult to
+follow in their emotional aspects as the hidden currents to which he
+compares them, quoting the words of Kipling's pilot: "And if any man
+comes to you, and says, 'I know the Javva currents,' don't you listen to
+him; for those currents is never yet known to mortal man!"
+
+Yuko was a servant-maid in a wealthy family at Kinegawa. She had read in
+the daily newspaper the account of the attempt on the life of the
+Czarevitch during his visit to Japan in 1891. Being an hysterical,
+excitable girl, she was apparently wound up to the pitch of temporary
+insanity. Leaving her employer's home, she made her way to Kyoto, and
+there, buying a razor, she cut her throat opposite the gate of the
+Mikado's palace. Hearn writes of the incident as if the girl were a Joan
+of Arc, obeying the dictates of the most fervent patriotism. He goes to
+the extent of describing the Mikado, "The Son of Heaven," hearing of the
+girl's death, and "augustly ceasing to mourn for the crime that had been
+committed because of the manifestations of the great love his people
+bore him."
+
+Afterwards, Hearn admitted that his enthusiasm was perhaps exaggerated,
+for revelations showed that Yuko, in a letter she had left, had spoken
+of "a family claim." Under the raw strong light of these commonplace
+revelations, he confessed that his little sketch seemed for the moment
+much too romantic, and yet the real poetry of the event remained
+unlessened--the pure ideal that impelled a girl to take her own life
+merely to give proof of the love and loyalty of a nation. No small,
+mean, dry facts could ever belittle that large fact.
+
+Let those, however, who say that Hearn did not understand the
+enigmatical people amongst whom his lines were cast, read his article on
+"Jiu-jitsu" in this same volume. It is headed by a quotation from the
+"Tao-Te-King." "Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm
+and strong. So is it with all things.... Firmness and strength are the
+concomitants of death; softness and weakness are the concomitants of
+life. Hence he who relies upon his own strength shall not conquer."
+Preaching from this text, Hearn writes a masterly article, showing how
+Japan, though apparently adopting western inventions, preserves her own
+genius and mode of thought in all vital questions absolutely unchanged.
+The essay ends with a significant paragraph, showing how we occidentals,
+who have exterminated feebler races by merely over-living them, may be
+at last exterminated ourselves by races capable of under-living us, more
+self-denying, more fertile, and less expensive for nature to support.
+Inheriting, doubtless, our wisdom, adopting our more useful inventions,
+continuing the best of our industries--perhaps even perpetuating what is
+most worthy to endure in our sciences and our arts; pushing us out of
+the progress of the world, as the dinotherium, or the ichthyosaurus,
+were pushed out before us.
+
+Towards the end of his stay at Kumamoto, he wrote one of his delightful,
+whimsically affectionate letters to his old friend, Mr. Watkin, in
+answer apparently to one from him, recalling their talks and expeditions
+in the old days at Cincinnati, and expressing his gratitude for the
+infinite patience and wisdom shown in his treatment of his naughty,
+superhumanly foolish, detestable little friend. "Well, I wish I were
+near you to love you, and make up for all old troubles." He then tells
+his "dad" that he has been able to save between $3,500 and $4,000, that
+he has placed in custody in his wife's name. The reaction, he said,
+against foreign influence was very strong, and the future looked more
+gloomy every day. Eventually, he supposed, he must leave Japan and work
+elsewhere, and he ends, "When I first met you I was nineteen. I am now
+forty-four--well, I suppose I must have lots more trouble before I go to
+Nirvana."
+
+Towards the end of the Chinese-Japanese War Hearn was worried with
+anxiety on the subject of the noncontinuance of his appointment at the
+Kumamoto College. "Government Service," he writes to Amenomori, "is
+uncertain to the degree of terror,--a sword of Damocles; and Government
+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
+kindness,--instead of being made to feel that he is the servant of petty
+political clerks." He approached Page Baker, his old New Orleans friend,
+asking him if he could get him anything if he started in the spring for
+America. Something good enough to save money at, not only for himself,
+but something that would enable him to send money to Japan; he was not
+desirous of seeing Boston, New York or Philadelphia, but would rather be
+in Memphis, Charleston, or glorious Florida. Page Baker had apparently
+been sending him help, for on June 2nd Hearn writes acknowledging a
+draft for one hundred and sixty-three pounds, thanking him ten thousand
+times from the bottom of his much scarified heart. "I am now
+forty-four," he adds, "and as grey as a badger. Unless I can make enough
+to educate my boy well, I don't know what I'm worth,--but I feel that I
+shall have precious little time to do it in; add twenty to forty-four,
+and how much is left of a man?"
+
+In another letter he again alludes to the manner in which the government
+are cutting down the number of employes: "My contract runs only until
+March," he ends, "and my chances are 0."
+
+At last, after many hesitations, he definitely decided to leave
+government service, and in the autumn of 1894 accepted the offer of a
+position on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_ made by Mr. Robert Young,
+proprietor and editor of the newspaper.
+
+To his sister he wrote from the _Kobe Chronicle_ office, Kobe, Japan:--
+
+
+"MY DEAR MINNIE,
+
+"I am too much in a whirl just now to write a good letter to you (whose
+was the little curl in your last?--you never told me). I am writing only
+to say that I have left the Government Service to edit a paper in one of
+the open ports. This is returning to my old profession, and is pleasant
+enough,--though not just now very lucrative.
+
+"Best love to you. Perhaps we shall meet in a few years. My boy is well,
+beginning to walk a little. My book was to be issued on the 29th Sept.
+
+                          "Ever affectionately,
+                                          "LAFCADIO."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXI
+                                  KOBE
+
+
+Last spring I journeyed to Japan with Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio Hearn's
+half-sister, and her daughter. Mrs. Atkinson was anxious to make the
+acquaintance of her Japanese half-sister-in-law to ascertain the
+circumstances surrounding the family, also if it were possible to carry
+out her half-brother's wishes with regard to educating his eldest son,
+Kazuo--his Benjamin--in England.
+
+The first place at which we landed was Kobe, situated on the eastern end
+of the Inland Sea, opposite Osaka, the Manchester of Japan.
+
+Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's
+flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number
+of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed
+to reside in the city under Japanese law.
+
+During the six weeks on board the P. & O. coming out, I had been reading
+Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden
+soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji--gateway of the Inland Sea--it had
+blown a gale, and the Japanese steamer, the _Chikugo Maru_, to which we
+had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the
+headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all
+night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea,
+made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our
+deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes,
+and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm
+of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept
+between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here
+and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by
+symbolic _Torii_ leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing
+villages that seemed to have grown on the shore, their thatched roofs
+covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "_Yane-shobu_."
+At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the
+enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked
+gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in
+_geta_ and _kimono_, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene
+of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic
+of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,--a magic
+that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions,
+telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile
+as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of
+heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and
+China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men
+who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their
+country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the
+death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields
+of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur.
+
+A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself
+from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we
+crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the
+eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then
+paled to green.
+
+There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead.
+And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy
+peculiar to Japan, we dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the
+Ghost of Waters. We saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the
+water grasses that bend in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the
+falling dew was the spray from the herdsman's oar. And the heavens
+"seemed very near, and warm, and human; and the silence about us was
+filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning
+and for ever young, and for ever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom
+of the Gods."
+
+The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream.
+It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen
+and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick
+erections, factory chimneys, and plate-glass shop-fronts; easy was it to
+understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country.
+
+Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short
+_kuruma_ journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again
+in the era of Kusimoki Marahige.
+
+Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea
+coast,--Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;--ancient Nippon keeps
+them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by
+woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual
+life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface
+of a mirror is changed by passing reflections, as says their
+interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+Next to the hotel--as if to emphasise its nationality--was an ancient
+pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood;
+while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of
+tiles, a cedar world of _engawa_ and _shoji_, indescribable
+whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and
+grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects that a
+strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you passed
+along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity--another race soul,
+charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated itself to
+your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the arrangement of
+flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns with
+marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery rhymes
+in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman with
+elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and rouged
+and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter, while
+behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were
+squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes
+writing on long strips of paper from right to left.
+
+Enigmatical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing
+displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in
+the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross,
+red-faced women; no coarse, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling.
+Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge
+a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to
+be found in European cities.
+
+The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not
+satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the
+victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season,
+about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres
+that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from
+the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the
+cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen--about half a dollar
+in American money at the present rate of exchange."
+
+From the upper balcony of his house the Japanese street, with its rows
+of little shops, was visible to the bay; from thence he watched the
+cholera patients being taken away, and the bereaved, as soon as the law
+allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered abodes, while the ordinary
+life of the street went on day and night, as if nothing particular had
+happened. The itinerant vendors with their bamboo poles, and baskets or
+buckets, passed the empty houses, and uttered their accustomed cry; the
+blind shampooer blew his melancholy whistle; the private watchman made
+his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; and the children chased one
+another as usual with screams and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished,
+but the survivors continued their play as if nothing had happened,
+according to the wisdom of the ancient East.
+
+A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the
+depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries
+and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of
+1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of
+inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been
+worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he
+or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great
+deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will
+be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which
+the said Lafcadio never deserved, and never will deserve."
+
+Death had no terrors for Lafcadio Hearn, but the premonitions of
+physical shipwreck that beset him now depressed him heart and soul
+because of the work still left undone.
+
+He would like nothing so much, he said, as to get killed, if he had no
+one but himself in the world to take care of--which is just why he
+wouldn't get killed. He couldn't afford luxuries until his work was
+done.
+
+To his sister he writes:--
+
+"I have been on my back in a dark room for a month with inflammation of
+the eyes, and cannot write much. Thanks for sweet letter. I received a
+_Daily News_ from you,--many, many thanks. Did not receive the other
+papers you spoke of--probably they were stolen in Kumamoto. I fear I
+cannot do much newspaper work for some time. The climate does not seem
+to suit my eyes,--a hot climate would be better. I may be able to make a
+trip next winter to some tropical place, if I make any money out of my
+books. My new book--"Out of the East"--will be published soon after this
+letter reaches you.
+
+"Future looks doubtful--don't feel very jolly about it. The mere
+question of living is the chief annoyance. I am offered some further
+work in Kobe, that would leave me leisure (they promise) for my own
+literary work, but I am not sure. However, the darkest hour is before
+the dawn, perhaps.
+
+"Kaji is well able to walk now, and talks a little. Every day his hair
+is growing brighter; a thorough English boy.
+
+"Excuse bad eyes.
+                                             "Love to you,
+                                                     "LAFCADIO."
+
+Although more than twelve years had elapsed between our visit and the
+period when Hearn had resided in Kobe, nearly every one remembered the
+odd little journalist, who might be seen daily making his way, in his
+shy, near-sighted fashion, from his house in Kitinagasa Dori, to the
+office of the _Kobe Chronicle_.
+
+Dr. Papellier of Kobe, who attended Hearn in a professional capacity at
+this time, was full of reminiscences. Long before meeting him at Kobe
+Dr. Papellier had been a great admirer of his genius, had, indeed, when
+surgeon on board a German vessel, translated "Chita" for a Nuremburg
+paper.
+
+Being an oculist, one of his first injunctions, as soon as he examined
+Hearn's eyes, was cessation from all work and rest in a darkened room if
+he wished to escape total blindness. The right eye was myopic to an
+extent seldom seen, and at the moment was so severely inflamed by
+neuritis that the danger of an affection to the retina seemed
+imminent,--the left was entirely blind. For the purpose of keeping up
+his spirits, under this unwonted constraint, Dr. Papellier, in spite of
+his professional engagements, went out of his way to visit the little
+man frequently, and would stop hours chatting; showed him, indeed, a
+kindness and consideration that, we were told, were quite exceptional.
+Hearn, Dr. Papellier relates, was a good and fluent talker, content to
+keep the ball rolling himself, and preferred an attentive listener
+rather than a person who stated his own opinions.
+
+Their topics of conversations circled round the characteristics of the
+civilisation in which they were living. Hearn's emotional enthusiasm for
+the Japanese, the doctor said, had cooled; he had received several
+shocks in dealing with officials at Kumamoto, and said his illusions
+were vanishing, and he wanted to leave the country; France, China, or
+the South Sea Islands seemed each in turn to attract his wayward fancy.
+
+The account of Stevenson's life in Samoa had made a great impression on
+him. He declared that if he had not his Japanese family to look after he
+would pack up his books of reference and start at once for Samoa.
+
+"His wife, who understood no English at all, seldom appeared, a servant
+girl usually attending to his wants when I was present.
+
+"It struck me at the time that his knowledge of the Japanese vernacular
+was very poor for a man of his intelligence, who, for nearly four years,
+had lived almost entirely in the interior, surrounded by those who could
+only talk the language of the country.
+
+"It was plain that what he knew about Japan must have been gained
+through the medium of interpreters. I was still more surprised when I
+discovered how extremely near-sighted he was. His impressions of scenery
+or Japanese works of art could never have been obtained as ordinary
+people obtain them. The details had to be studied piece by piece with a
+small telescope, and then described as a whole."
+
+His mode of life, Dr. Papellier said, was almost penurious, although he
+must have been receiving a good salary from the _Kobe Chronicle_, and
+was making something by his books. At home he dressed invariably in
+Japanese style; his clothes being very clean and neat. The furniture of
+his small house was scanty. His food, which was partly Japanese and
+partly so-called "foreign," was prepared in a small restaurant somewhere
+in the town. In his position as medical attendant Papellier regarded it
+as his duty to remonstrate on this point, impressing upon him that he
+ought to remember the drain on his constitution of the amount of brain
+work that he was doing, both at the _Kobe Chronicle_ office and writing
+at home.
+
+There were reasons for this that Hearn would not care to tell Papellier.
+Mrs. Koizumi was in delicate health, expecting her second child, and
+Hearn doubtless, with that consideration that invariably distinguished
+him in his treatment of his wife, had his food brought from outside so
+as to save her the trouble and exertion of cooking it at home. Only in
+one way, Papellier said, did he allow himself any indulgence, and that
+was in the amount he smoked. Although he seldom took spirits, he smoked
+incessantly--not cigars, but a small Japanese pipe--a _kiseru_--which he
+handled in a skilful way, lighting one tiny tobacco pellet in the
+glowing ashes of the one just consumed. One of his hobbies was
+collecting pipes, the other was collecting books. He had already got
+together a valuable library at New Orleans, he did the same in Japan. He
+was able to exercise these hobbies inexpensively, but they needed
+knowledge, time and patience. At his death he possessed more than two
+hundred pipes, all shapes and sizes.
+
+Every one whom we met when we arrived at Kobe advised us to call on the
+editor of the _Kobe Chronicle_ if we wanted information on the subject
+of Lafcadio Hearn. We therefore made our way to the _Kobe Chronicle_
+office as soon as we could. Mr. Young as well as Mrs. Young, whose
+acquaintance we made subsequently, were both full of reminiscences of
+the odd little genius.
+
+He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday
+for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events,
+the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding--a
+plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as
+Hearn was in Kobe. "The Japanese," he was wont to say, "are a very
+clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding."
+
+Absence of mind, and inattention to events passing around him, was very
+noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to
+find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the identity of the
+individual with whom he was conversing.
+
+Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely
+agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For
+some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in Japanese. At last
+one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not Japanese." "Oh,
+really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised the
+fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English.
+
+Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's
+editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of
+the _Kobe Chronicle_. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's
+opinions and conclusions, with regard to the Japanese and their
+religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far
+as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his
+contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary
+qualities. The flint-edged space of the newspaper column cramped and
+hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but
+writing for money an impossibility.
+
+Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment
+he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the
+special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became nobody again;
+and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a
+fool. So he had to sit and wait for the gods. His mind, however, ate
+itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His
+thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant
+things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things
+were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to
+work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional,
+romantic--and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and
+rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result
+was an essay that the editor of the _Atlantic_ declared was a veritable
+illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even
+he himself.
+
+Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated considerably
+against his being an effective newspaper correspondent, were his
+personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must, above all
+things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did not
+possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of
+life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he
+thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of
+wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of
+human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!--why not
+collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends
+and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to
+see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the
+same doom."
+
+No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary
+reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted
+the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an
+artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,--a
+wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes
+the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in
+Japan.
+
+"For myself," he says in one of the _Kobe Chronicle_ leaders, "I could
+sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause.
+Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a
+destroyer,--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they
+break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent
+the edge,--the _acies_,--to use the Roman word--of Occidental
+aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful
+and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in
+many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and
+the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the
+Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and
+this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by
+the 'noble army.'"
+
+Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at
+this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He
+summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial
+element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the
+interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The
+Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and
+homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the
+life in Old Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every
+way, with only the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury
+and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant
+was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever
+learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against
+carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churches! and white
+shirts! and "_yofuku_"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of
+civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away
+permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call
+civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have
+conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan--the only civilised
+country that existed since Antiquity."
+
+"Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly
+so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated,
+from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things,
+the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of
+divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most
+enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says
+in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of
+Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro'
+(Heart)."
+
+Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the
+emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and
+inner meaning--just as we say in English, "the heart of things."
+
+It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one
+can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of
+Japan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is
+contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist
+who told him before she came to Japan she had read Hearn's books and
+thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a
+disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his
+descriptions!"
+
+The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's principal book on
+Japan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of
+Unfamiliar Japan." The conditions and people that he describes are
+certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western
+civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps
+exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange
+people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of
+the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for
+instance, said that he once showed him a report in the _Kobe Chronicle_,
+describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway
+tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in
+"Out of the East," which Papellier declared to be an entirely distorted
+account of the facts as they really occurred. It is the old story of
+imaginative genius and ordinary commonplace folk. In discussing the
+question, Hearn insisted that every artist should carry out the theory
+of selection. A photograph would give the unessential and the essential;
+an artist picks out important aspects; the portrait-painter's work,
+though manifestly less exact, is incomparably finer because of its
+spirituality; though less technically correct, it has acquired the
+imaginative sentiment of the mind of the artist. When depicting the
+Japanese he felt justified in emphasising certain excellent qualities,
+putting these forward and ignoring the rest; choosing the grander
+qualities, as portrait-painters do, and passing over the petty
+frailties, the mean characteristics that might impress the casual
+observer. Nothing is more lovely, for instance, than a Japanese village
+amongst the hills, when seen just after sunrise--through the mists of a
+spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the
+enchantment passes with the vapours: in the raw clear light he can find
+no palace of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood
+and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks.
+
+He attained to a certainty and precision of form in these "Kokoro"
+essays that places them above any previous work. Now we can see the
+benefit of his concentration of mind, of his earnestness of purpose and
+monastic withdrawal from things of the world; no outside influences
+disturbed his communing with himself, and it is this communing that
+imparts a vague and visionary atmosphere, a ghostly thrill to every page
+of the volume.
+
+Yet here was he, in the forty-fifth year of his age, a master amongst
+masters, arguing with solemn earnestness upon the use or mis-use of the
+word "shall" and "will," begging Professor Hall Chamberlain for
+information and guidance.
+
+"You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine, but I must confess
+that your letter on 'shall' and 'will' is a sort of revelation in one
+sense--it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of
+fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the
+sight and sound of the words 'will' and 'shall.' I confess also that I
+never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been
+guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of 'will' as softer and
+gentler than 'shall.' The word 'shall' in the second person especially
+has for me a queer identification with English harshness and
+menace,--memories of school perhaps. I shall study the differences by
+your teaching and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be
+able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything--the word
+nothing."
+
+The best essays in "Kokoro" were inspired, not by Kobe, but by Kyoto,
+one of the most beautiful cities in Japan, seat of the ancient
+government and stronghold of the ancient creeds. It lies only a short
+distance from Kobe, and many were the days and hours that Hearn spent
+dreaming in the charming old-fashioned hotel and picking up impressions
+amidst the Buddhist shrines and gardens of the surrounding country.
+"Notes from a Travelling Diary," "Pre-existence," and the charming
+sketch "Kimiko," written on the text "To wish to be forgotten by the
+beloved is a soul-task harder far than trying not to forget," all
+originated in Kyoto.
+
+In a letter to his sister dated March 11th, 1895, he alludes to his book
+"Kokoro."
+
+"My sweet little beautiful sister, since my book is being so long
+delayed I may anticipate matters by telling you something of the
+so-called Ancestor-Worship of which I spoke in my last letter. The
+subject is not in any popular work on Japan, and I think should interest
+you, if for no other reason than that you are yourself such a sweet
+little mother.
+
+"When a person dies in Japan, a little tablet is made which stands upon
+a pedestal, and is about a foot high. On this narrow tablet is inscribed
+either the real name of the dead, or the Buddhist name given to the
+soul. This is the Mortuary Tablet, or as you have sometimes seen it
+called in books, the Ancestral Tablet.
+
+"If children die they also have tablets in the home, but they are not
+prayed to,--but prayed _for_. Nightly the Mother talks to her dead
+child, advising, reminding, with words of caress,--just as if the little
+one were alive, and a tiny lamp is lighted to guide the little ghostly
+feet home.
+
+"Well, I do not want to write a dry essay for you, but in view of all
+the unkind things said about Japanese beliefs, I thought you might like
+to hear this, for I think you will feel there is something beautiful in
+the rule of reverence to the dead.
+
+"I hope, though I am not at all sure, that you will receive some fairy
+tales by this same mail,--as I have trusted the sending of them to a
+Yokohama friend. Here there are no book-houses at all--only shops for
+the sale of school texts. Should you get the stories, I want you to read
+the 'Matsuyama Mirror' first. There is a ghostly beauty that I think you
+will feel deeply. After all, the simplest stories are the best.
+
+"I wanted to say many more things; but the mail is about to leave, and I
+must stop to-day.
+
+"My little fellow is trying hard to talk and to walk. He is now very
+fair and strong.
+
+"Tell me, dear little beautiful sister, how you are always,--give me
+good news of yourself,--and love me a little bit. I will write soon
+again.
+
+                                               "LAFCADIO HEARN."
+
+In November, 1895, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited him at Kobe,
+and then probably the possibility was discussed of Hearn's re-entering
+the government service as professor of English in the Imperial
+University at Tokyo. But as late as April, 1896, he still seemed
+uncertain that his engagement under government was assured.
+
+Professor Toyama wrote to him, saying that his becoming a Japanese
+citizen had raised a difficulty, which he hoped might be surmounted.
+Hearn replied, that he was not worried about the matter, and had never
+allowed himself to consider it very seriously--hinting, at the same
+time, that he would not accept a lower salary. If Matsue only had been a
+little warmer in the winter, he would rather be teaching there than in
+Tokyo, in any event he hoped some day to make a home there.
+
+About this time comes Hearn's last letter to his sister:--
+
+"MY DEAR LITTLE SIS,
+
+"What you say about writing for English papers, etc., is interesting,
+but innocent. Men do not get opportunities to dispose of any MS. to
+advantage without one of two conditions. Either they must have struck a
+popular vein--become popular as writers; or they must have _social_
+influence. I am not likely to become popular, and I have no social
+influence. No good post would be given me,--as I am not a man of
+conventions, and I am highly offensive to the Orthodoxies who have
+always tried to starve me to death--without success, happily, as yet. I
+am looking, however, for an English publisher, and hope some day to get
+a hearing in some London print. But for the time being, it is not what I
+wish that I can get, but what I can. Perhaps your eyes will open wide
+with surprise to hear that I shall get nothing, or almost nothing for my
+books. The contracts deprive me of all but a nominal percentage on the
+2nd thousand.
+
+"Well, this is only a line to thank you for your sweet little letter. I
+have Marjory's too, and shall write her soon. Love,
+
+                                                      "LAFCADIO.
+
+"Excuse eyes.
+
+"P.S.--I reopened this letter to add a few lines on second thought.
+
+"You wrote in your last about Sir F. Ball. His expression of pleasure
+about my books may have been merely politeness to a pretty lady,--my
+sweet little sister. But it may have been genuine--probably was partly
+so. He could very easily say a good word for me to the Editors of the
+great Reviews,--the _Fortnightly_, _Nineteenth Century_, etc.--though I
+am not sure whether his influence would weigh with them very greatly.
+
+"At all events what I need is 'a friend at Court,'--and need badly.
+Perhaps, perhaps only, my little sis could help me in that direction. I
+think I might ask you,--when possible, to try. The help an earnest man
+wants isn't money: it is opportunity.
+
+"We have a cozy little home in Kobe, and Kobe is pretty, but I fear I
+shall have to leave it by the time this reaches you. Therefore perhaps
+it will be better to address me: 'c/o James E. Beale, _Japan Daily
+Mail_, Yokohama, Japan.' I shall soon send Kajiwo's last photo with some
+more fairy tales written by myself for your 'bairns.'
+
+                                                   "Love to you,
+                                                             "L. H."
+
+
+As Lafcadio Hearn's biographer, I almost shrink from saying that this
+was the last letter of the series written to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson.
+It somehow was so satisfactory to think of the exile having resumed
+intercourse with his own people, and with his native land; but with
+however deep a feeling of regret, the fact must be acknowledged that he
+suddenly put an end to the intercourse for some unaccountable reason. He
+not only never wrote again, but returned her envelope, empty of its
+contents, without a line of explanation. Mrs. Atkinson has puzzled over
+the enigma many times, but has never been able to fathom the reason for
+such an action on the part of her eccentric half-brother. There was
+nothing, she declares, in her letter to wound even his irritable nerves.
+At one time she thought it might have been in consequence of the
+attempts of various other members of the family to open a correspondence
+with him; he reiterated several times to Mrs. Atkinson the statement
+that "one sister was enough." I, on the other hand, think the key may
+with more probability be found in a passage from one of his letters
+written at this time, saying he had received letters from relatives in
+England that had made his thoughts not blue, but indigo blue. A longing
+had entered his heart that each year henceforward became stronger, to
+return to his native land, to hold communion with those of his own race;
+this nostalgia was rendered acute by his sister's letters, his literary
+work was interfered with and his nerves upset; he therefore made up his
+mind suddenly to stop the correspondence.
+
+The person who behaved thus was the same erratic creature, who, having
+previously made an appointment, on going to keep it, rang the bell and
+then, seized with nervous panic--ran away; or had fits of nervous
+depression lasting for days because a printer had put a few commas in
+the wrong place or misspelt some Japanese words. Hearn possessed supreme
+intellectual courage, would stick to his artistic "pedestal of faith"
+with a determination that was heroic, but where his nerves were
+concerned he was an arrant coward. If letters, or arguments with
+friends, flurried him, or awakened uncongenial thoughts or memories, he
+was capable of putting the letters away unread, and breaking off a
+friendship that had lasted for years.
+
+Thinking his silence might be caused by ill-health, Mrs. Atkinson wrote
+several times. The only answer she received was from Mr. James Beale of
+the _Japan Mail_:--
+
+                                         "Japan Mail _Office_,
+                                              "_Yokohama_,
+                                                 "_July_ 9_th_, 1896.
+
+"Dear Madam,
+
+"I hasten to relieve your anxiety in regard to your brother's health. I
+have just returned from an expedition in the North, and previous to
+leaving about a month ago, was on the point of asking Hearn if he could
+accompany me, because it was a part of the country which he has never
+visited, but about that time I received a letter from him in which he
+stated that he was very busy (I believe he has another book on the
+stocks), and I did not mention the matter when I wrote. His letter was
+written in a very cheerful strain and indicated no illness or trouble
+with his eyes. In regard to the latter I have heard nothing since the
+spring of '95, when, through rest from study, they had recovered their
+normal condition. As Hearn once lived in a very isolated town on the
+West Coast I used to receive letters and other postal matter for him and
+do little commissions for him here, and I remember at times English
+letters passing through my hands. These were all carefully reposted to
+him as they came, and I should say that your letters had undoubtedly
+reached him.
+
+"No apology is necessary on your part, as I am pleased to afford you
+whatever consolation you may find in the knowledge of the fact that your
+brother is alive and well. I think I may venture to say that if he has
+neglected his friends it is due to being busy.
+
+"I send you his address below.
+
+                                  "Yours faithfully,
+                                                "JAS. ELLACOTT BEALE.
+
+    "_No. 16, Zashiki,
+        "Shichi-chome, Bangai,
+            "Naka Zamate-dori,
+               "Kobe, Japan._
+
+"MRS. M. C. BUCKLEY-ATKINSON.
+
+"Since writing the foregoing I have learned that your brother has been
+appointed to a post in the University. The announcement will appear in
+to-morrow's _Mail_.
+
+"This appointment will necessitate Hearn's removal to the capital, and
+as the vacation expires on September 15, the address at Kobe I have
+given will not find him. As soon as his Tokyo address reaches me I will
+send it to you.
+
+                                                          "J. E. B."
+
+
+As a set-off to this unaccountable break in his correspondence with his
+sister, I would like to end this chapter with a touching and pathetic
+letter, addressed to Mrs. Watkin at Cincinnati, and another to his "Old
+Dad," friends of over twenty years' standing, but unfortunately am not
+able to do so. Hitherto Hearn's affection had been given to Mr. Watkin;
+of his female belongings he had seen but little. Now apparently, Mrs.
+and Miss Effie Watkin ventured to address the "great man," as their
+husband's and father's eccentric Bohemian little friend had become. To
+Mrs. Watkin he touches on the mysteries of spiritualism which were
+scarcely mysteries in the Far East; some day he hoped to drop in on all
+the circle he loved and talk ghostliness. Some hints of it appeared, he
+said, in a little book of his, "Out of the East." He imagined Mr. Watkin
+to be more like Homer than ever. He himself had become grey and
+wrinkled, fat, too, and disinclined for violent exercise. In other
+words, he was getting down the shady side of the hill, the horizon
+before him was already darkening, and the winds blowing out of it cold.
+He was not in the least concerned about the enigmas, he said, except
+that he wondered what his boy would do if he were to die. To his "Old
+Dad" he writes a whimsically affectionate letter, his old and dearest
+friend, he calls him. Practical, material people predicted that he was
+to end in gaol, or at the termination of a rope, but his "Old Dad"
+always predicted he would be able to do something. He was anxious for as
+much success as he could get for his son's sake. To have the future of
+others to care for certainly changed the face of life; he worked and
+hoped, the best and only thing to do.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXII
+                                 TOKYO
+
+     "... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of
+     circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line
+     of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always
+     too much for my own peace of mind,--places, things, and
+     persons,--and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and
+     becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a
+     great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an
+     All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil
+     falls, himself in each and all."
+
+
+One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,--and he made many
+for the sake of his wife and family--was the giving up of his life in
+the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its _Yashikis_ and
+ancient shrines--to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The
+comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high
+salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing
+was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the _Kobe
+Chronicle_, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the
+ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate
+horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling
+surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have
+been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place
+pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle.
+
+His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as
+Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of
+the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind;
+she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.
+
+Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the
+beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would
+do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description
+of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived
+ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing facade, a structure that
+would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or
+London.
+
+After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the
+capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21,
+Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was
+the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house
+with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a
+"rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so
+beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.
+
+In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to
+remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at
+Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary
+work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.
+
+When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of
+the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo
+suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in
+dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the
+quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a
+_sake_-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the
+neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where
+Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great
+trees, dreaming out of space, out of time.
+
+The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university.
+One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one
+joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any
+one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must
+have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!"
+
+Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his
+celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the
+Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly
+realistic--the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here
+the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted
+American suburb--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several
+centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor;
+then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and
+bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the
+shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which
+burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and
+bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in
+them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or
+time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess,
+was difficult. But Setsu was happy--like a bird making its nest, she was
+fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly
+weather it was.
+
+In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo,
+there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively
+tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the
+Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor,
+seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable
+and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him
+by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner
+in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at
+variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers.
+
+His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and
+delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals,
+and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a
+people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if
+England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an
+impossible task.
+
+In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his
+interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while
+professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be
+forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and
+Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo
+University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students.
+Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They
+are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their
+intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the
+surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal,
+therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical
+explanation of technique and style.
+
+The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in
+which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in
+a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the
+order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where
+intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the
+adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy
+and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form,
+through every condition of society, and almost into every household.
+Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was
+influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea
+off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling
+round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with
+fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation
+about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from
+dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he
+would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part
+would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and
+confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or
+clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted
+for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."
+
+The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship
+were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.
+
+Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to
+dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a
+university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official
+banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty
+invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical
+colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.
+
+No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he
+exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first
+the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold
+at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of
+gold--luckily for themselves.
+
+He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the
+university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that
+inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on you!" All the
+professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow--no overcoats
+allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted
+to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more
+for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far
+East--'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was
+beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife
+tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you
+upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to
+you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the
+privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest.
+There is a reason for things--for anything except--a plug hat...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during
+the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn,
+representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful
+memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he
+alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who
+had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five
+years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the
+Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about
+them."
+
+With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever
+seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of
+French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic.
+Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the
+Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only
+because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original
+owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested,
+looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient
+art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the
+other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and
+ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of
+Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in
+Japan. He describes his landlord, the old _sake_-brewer, coming to
+definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught
+sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,--you ought to have been a
+girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his
+father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at
+seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that
+he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that
+really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to
+imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under
+civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think
+superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."
+
+He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion
+one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as
+a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century
+false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and
+Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies
+in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and
+recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.
+
+After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn
+retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was
+dedicated:--
+
+                                 TOKYO
+                             "to my friend
+                          Amenomori Nobushige
+                      poet, scholar and patriot."
+
+We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he
+left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that
+Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous
+correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on
+the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To
+Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial
+surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the
+place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the
+approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new
+sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead
+sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to
+feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for
+me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality?
+Alas! I don't know...."
+
+Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little
+genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and
+apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese,
+however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all
+occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm
+of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own
+world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.
+
+Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at
+Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm
+human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.
+
+In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she
+mentions McDonald of Yokohama--in brown boots and corduroys--as
+escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in
+Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction
+of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost
+immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one
+of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar
+Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.
+
+"After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most
+peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a
+certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the
+ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio."
+
+Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that
+above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in
+uniform,--a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up
+till midnight, talking about things.
+
+The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of
+Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour
+wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never
+seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for
+the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Antaeus I feel
+always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality,
+not so much of a _literary_ man however."
+
+The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the
+breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks,
+the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had
+touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him
+material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"--only real
+facts--not names or dates--real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy.
+He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there
+were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this
+world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in
+Japan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible--"especially hidden
+from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn."
+
+If he could get together a book of short stories--six would be
+enough--he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he
+could.
+
+Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his
+friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past
+life--that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the
+outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying
+that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you
+can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for
+twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the
+disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?"
+
+The communion between these two was more like that between some popular,
+athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by
+the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two
+middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official
+capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first
+letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an
+audacious proceeding that few ventured upon.
+
+Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to
+his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street--the charming
+way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his
+interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs.
+
+In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's
+visits. A rocking-chair,--rare piece of furniture in a Japanese
+establishment--a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder.
+
+McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn
+was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and
+lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was
+doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald,
+therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of
+all sorts.
+
+"With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man!
+How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have
+only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'"
+
+They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed
+and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their
+dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and
+"blue soul"--names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at
+the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was
+tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at
+Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed
+with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable
+in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years.
+
+"What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall
+ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,--with
+philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher
+(Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is
+altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the
+world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in
+these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the
+little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an
+indefinite way that some divine attribute was his.
+
+McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief
+in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti.
+Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to
+try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his
+intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he
+wished him to write fiction--he wanted him to make some profit out of
+his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really
+paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write
+more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that
+very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which
+alone can furnish the material. They can _divine_, but must have some
+chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like
+Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them
+and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who
+think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social
+existence."
+
+Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or
+even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to
+officialdom--but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take
+care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy
+to college there must remain merely a possibility.
+
+The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two
+friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental
+tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession,
+and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary
+tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get
+behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.
+
+He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen
+from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at
+his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.
+
+He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him,
+who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you
+would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her
+'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"
+
+The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind
+of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged
+calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if
+not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite
+subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories
+of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and
+their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.
+
+But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work,
+believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings
+and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly.
+Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him
+they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the
+sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be
+forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come."
+
+Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or
+cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet
+here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and
+brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I
+right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought
+never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these
+protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and
+again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink
+good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with
+characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald
+wrapped him up in his own to send him home--an incident which Hearn
+declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died.
+Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy
+doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a
+humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home
+the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest
+and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius,
+the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the
+seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination.
+
+It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to
+the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings
+seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When
+he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least
+notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper
+again--treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his
+attacks of temper at Cincinnati.
+
+So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's,
+lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally
+stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed
+duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the
+sale of the copyright of his books in the United States.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIII
+
+                                USHIGOME
+
+     "Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye
+     can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed,
+     although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we
+     betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door
+     opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all
+     Dopplegangers?--and is not the invisible the only life we
+     really enjoy?"
+
+
+In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at
+Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other
+sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue.
+
+To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things,
+sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that
+rustled through the bamboo-grove.
+
+Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could
+indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's
+Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else.
+
+This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and
+humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time
+he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's
+"Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised,
+also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but
+in England.
+
+The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his
+pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that
+"he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada
+that could not sing."
+
+No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of
+hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking
+that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit
+of the public.
+
+Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors,
+and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University,
+at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a
+Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything
+was favourable to absorption in his work.
+
+He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one
+hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling
+well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write."
+Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a
+new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes
+he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a
+month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his
+drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many
+stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the
+drawer of his mind when he passed away.
+
+Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of
+excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and
+though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was
+slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign
+husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss
+might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's
+common-sense.
+
+"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years
+after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely
+Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light,
+things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so
+impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I
+have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned
+to prize some of them at their weight in gold."
+
+Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese
+union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various
+letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching
+home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not
+bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the
+valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't
+you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"
+
+On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his
+face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got
+possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next
+day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He
+acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."
+
+She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one
+day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy
+sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the
+murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden
+and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the
+Japanese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals.
+"He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish
+sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a
+catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he
+laughed the whole household laughed, too."
+
+His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was
+kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with
+them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his
+merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's
+nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude
+towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the
+cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would
+play "_onigokko_," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in
+the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in
+learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song,
+for instance--
+
+                              "Yu-yake!
+                               Ko-yake!
+                         Ashita wa tenki ni nare."
+
+                              "Evening-burning!
+                               Little-burning!
+                         Weather, be fair to-morrow!"
+
+or the Song of "Urashima Taro."
+
+He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating
+quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these
+which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming,
+distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In
+one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse
+has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of
+storm and impending disaster which is wonderful.
+
+He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling,
+crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle
+severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see.
+But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the
+district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he
+walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb
+his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya,
+Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little
+note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as
+they passed along.
+
+An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite
+resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this
+piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so
+miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for
+some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the
+university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly
+stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and
+contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore,
+smoking his Japanese pipe.
+
+Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his
+professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half
+of his stay at Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the
+indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the
+club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one
+at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make
+jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond:
+"Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."
+
+Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and
+smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the
+twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with
+fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse,
+though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I
+think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided
+the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and
+in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine,
+the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to
+recall."
+
+Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough
+to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese
+books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept
+them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and
+more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He
+imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim
+of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas
+were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal
+mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden
+fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers,
+ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.
+
+We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune,
+which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were
+fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony
+blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese
+hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination
+with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found
+frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows
+not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection
+with the incident.
+
+But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast,
+where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for
+sea-bathing, that he was in his element.
+
+The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and
+during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as
+they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred
+the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than
+that of college professors.
+
+As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi,
+who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every
+description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's
+description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting
+boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw
+sandals, gourds for holding _sake_, and bottles of lemonade, while
+surmounting all was the _kamidana_--the shelf of the gods--with its
+_Daruma_, or household divinity.
+
+Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at
+Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim
+relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the
+gale--floating in the mists--shuddering in the leaf--flickering in the
+light of waters--or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf,
+to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a
+boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and
+imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating
+round him.
+
+It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at
+Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published
+after his appointment as professor of English at the university was
+"Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East."
+Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said
+to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work
+was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at
+Matsue, Kobe, Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of
+reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary
+mill.
+
+Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha
+Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on
+"Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous
+statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for
+substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: _and the outer-man
+is the ghost_."
+
+In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions
+and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and
+substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and
+over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy.
+
+In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that
+the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West.
+Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of
+words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he
+fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of
+occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is
+far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much
+of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much
+prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound
+by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first
+moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous,
+and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on
+the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove
+that he is incapable of feeling them.
+
+All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and
+suggestive instead of detailed. "_Ittakkiri_" (entirely vanished, in the
+sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who,
+instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words.
+
+The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom
+consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs,
+panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies,
+curtains and women's crepe silk underwear, they are written by every one
+and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes
+poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his
+thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple
+poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you
+can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The
+translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street,"
+contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep
+feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island
+Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them
+are charming.
+
+     "To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going;
+      Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.
+
+     "Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:
+      The flowing of water, the Way of Love."
+
+His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating
+this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to
+Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so,
+as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character.
+Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant
+Friendship."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this
+time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific
+imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of
+Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life
+is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and
+thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my
+cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of
+a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define."
+
+The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful
+a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry
+of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a
+hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with
+faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the
+mighty day.
+
+The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory
+of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad
+millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme
+of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour
+when thought itself must fade.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated
+
+                                   to
+                       Mrs. Alice von Behrens
+                         for auld lang syne.
+
+We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was
+one of his New York acquaintances.
+
+"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of
+this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the
+Japanese poem on the first page.
+
+To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to
+do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he says, he has been and
+gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly
+packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to
+Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods. To save himself further
+trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased
+about terms--and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a
+man liberated from prison--smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring
+day.
+
+In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the
+fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement
+of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The
+splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness
+to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the
+Now,--a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that
+maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of
+Heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.... Thus and only
+thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes--the spectral
+past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and
+the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one
+soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory."
+
+"Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs.
+Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang
+Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book
+is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written,
+and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches,
+inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a paean, as it
+were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because
+of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems.
+
+     "Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf.
+        ... Ah! the autumn rains!"
+
+And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing
+butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:--
+
+     "Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone
+         to-day."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXIV
+                              NISHI OKUBO
+
+     "From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending
+     in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold
+     the selfsame Moon."--_Buddhist poem translated by_ Lafcadio
+     Hearn.
+
+
+It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from
+21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo.
+
+Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his
+wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan.
+It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain
+Fujisaki--one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate
+friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners'
+Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show
+of azaleas is held once a year.
+
+After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as
+it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi
+for her occupation.
+
+Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike
+acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow
+now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most
+of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a
+considerable circulation in England.
+
+There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary
+knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for
+the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given
+up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content
+to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my
+notions of things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald.
+
+On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,--assisted by his
+wife,--he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he
+suddenly heard an _uguisu_ (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove
+outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his
+wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made
+enough for you and the children."
+
+During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his
+eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was
+obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the
+paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as
+copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of
+setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers
+of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any
+necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in
+conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully.
+
+The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would
+have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float
+round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding.
+Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the
+practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical
+life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity
+flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most
+probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his
+Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought,"
+he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove
+of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and
+regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a
+year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging,
+kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then
+pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and
+pleased."
+
+"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no
+two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of
+each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can,
+without reference to nationalities or schools."
+
+Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the
+highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his
+strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole
+song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and
+religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people.
+
+At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had
+suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anaemia
+common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things,"
+as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not."
+Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance.
+Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it
+already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he
+did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead
+of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain
+thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency
+was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly
+apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude
+of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into
+the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library,
+weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his
+work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the
+rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent
+scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down,
+while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with
+uplifted hand and enigmatic smile.
+
+Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from
+memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and
+realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his
+curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his
+house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath
+his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his
+wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of
+Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky
+and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac
+spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natale_, the
+flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the
+growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey
+sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir
+under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs,
+that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and
+the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.
+
+Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the
+social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have
+Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers'
+ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's
+incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by
+any of our English essayists.
+
+Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems
+suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After
+some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies
+when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on
+the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained
+after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent
+inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small
+things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his
+window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising
+above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.
+
+In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully,
+almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject
+of human desire and attainment.
+
+"He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual
+recurrence--he asked me for the Moon.
+
+"Unwisely I protested:--
+
+"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach
+it.'
+
+"He answered:--
+
+"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock
+it down.'
+
+"... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately
+truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.
+
+"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that
+brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and
+fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some
+inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to
+freedom....
+
+"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish
+could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children
+of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings
+that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the
+continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which
+once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often
+subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?
+
+"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the
+child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us
+to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun,
+and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."
+
+He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife
+tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became
+more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings,
+supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He
+had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now
+the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and
+become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with
+the rapture of wind and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was
+so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of
+life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.
+
+"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch
+myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three!
+I shall see the sun again!
+
+"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will
+come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of
+the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,--doubt right and wrong,
+friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of
+horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one
+infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to
+remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void,
+has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and
+destruction hath no covering.
+
+"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that
+I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But--
+
+"_Must I believe that I really exist?..._"
+
+Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and
+ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have
+been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost
+circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but
+seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without
+shore I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face
+of my depth....
+
+"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of
+things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly
+lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and
+multiplied. And the dimness flushed.
+
+"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty
+Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also
+mine!..."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn
+describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he
+moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal
+intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of
+pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination
+almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night,
+the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere.
+
+"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the
+policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be
+painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her
+back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that
+she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of
+Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful
+Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side;
+and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight
+hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_
+(vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or
+more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog;
+but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.
+
+His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of
+newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the
+garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the
+little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on
+"Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?
+
+"The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from
+the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the
+neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises
+the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the
+South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies
+of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing;
+wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy
+repairing their damaged habitations....
+
+"... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy.
+They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great
+trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads
+washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other
+visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean
+town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to
+attempt an essay on Ants."
+
+After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful
+woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants,
+and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his
+ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants'
+talk, he would hear of something to his advantage--
+
+"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes
+with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things
+inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."
+
+After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a
+still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic
+law, he thus ends his essay:--
+
+"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures
+capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.
+
+"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power
+supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no
+gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would
+seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency'
+in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems
+nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics
+fundamentally opposed to human egoism."
+
+In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect
+Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of
+"things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of
+keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records
+to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time
+of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and
+improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every
+detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels
+half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh
+food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the
+insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal
+comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest
+poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the
+voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of
+forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in
+whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms
+of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in
+the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties
+of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of
+the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet
+perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has
+wasted and sterilised their paradise,--substituting everywhere for
+beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly
+hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend
+the charm of that which we destroyed."
+
+During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect
+musicians," a grass-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was
+exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so
+small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides
+of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about
+the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antennae much longer
+than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished
+against the light.
+
+"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than
+his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...
+
+"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber
+... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the
+room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness,
+a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric
+bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes
+swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish
+resonance....
+
+"Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and
+unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known
+in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many
+generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the
+fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in
+a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt
+thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was
+sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the
+exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
+It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions
+of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses
+of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has
+forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he
+sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust
+of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of
+time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it.
+They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere
+shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he
+goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the
+unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant,
+never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy
+music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold
+in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I
+have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a
+barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm
+of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon
+my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,--telling me
+also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost
+within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the
+vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and
+thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of
+his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely,
+nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had
+eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,--especially Hana the
+housemaid!
+
+"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst
+that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human
+crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."
+
+During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight,
+every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the
+polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title
+"Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the
+crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the
+country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which
+is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long
+years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."
+
+Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these
+Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product
+of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the
+work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk
+again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion
+he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so
+big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or
+lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing
+at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off
+him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a
+little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the
+sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The
+privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be
+his.
+
+In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and
+comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation."
+It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were
+fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving
+descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXV
+                               HIS DEATH
+
+     "... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper
+     and a dimmer sea, and ever separating farther and farther one
+     from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon
+     the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor
+     frames, and all that is left of their once fair colours, must
+     melt forever into the colourless Void...."
+
+
+Ten years after his arrival in Japan the lode-star of Lafcadio Hearn's
+life and genius rose above the far eastern horizon, to cast her clear
+and serene radiance on the shadowed path that henceforth was but a
+descent towards the end. We conclude that "The Lady of a Myriad Souls"
+had written an appreciative letter on the subject of his work, and his,
+dated January, 1900, was in answer to hers.
+
+The thread was taken up where it had been dropped, the old affection and
+friendship reopened, unchanged, unimpaired.
+
+Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion
+of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people,
+his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy--his
+Benjamin--in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is
+only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly
+he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of
+the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight."
+"I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as
+the Japanese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of
+strong men, there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins."
+With intense longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western
+lands from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so
+isolated that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst
+Englishmen again ... with all their prejudices and conventions."
+
+The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he
+has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited
+civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but--such a
+stubborn thing is human nature--sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of
+the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that
+Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born,
+let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love,
+worship as they worship."
+
+At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might
+wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was
+during the period of his enthusiasm for "things Japanese." When he came
+to issue with the officials at Kumamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change
+was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an
+occidental--one of his own people.
+
+All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life
+he had passed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different
+standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad,
+to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in
+the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had
+forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action
+in nationalising himself a Japanese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his
+son is a Japanese, born in Japan under Japanese conditions, and unless
+he throws off all family ties and responsibilities, which, being the
+eldest son, are--according to communal law in Japan--considerable, he
+must submit to this inexorable destiny. In his father's adopted country
+the military or naval profession is closed to him, however, in
+consequence of his defective eyesight, and both would have been closed
+to him also in England.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had
+expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son,
+made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same
+answer was given on every side. He is a Japanese, and must conform to
+the dictates of the Japanese authorities. They might permit him to go
+away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his
+father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality.
+Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-class education at the Waseda
+University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to
+separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart
+if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested.
+
+In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had anticipated, he was forced out of the
+Imperial University, on the pretext that as a Japanese citizen he was
+not entitled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone
+Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was
+offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible
+for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to
+professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet
+he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The
+long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during
+thirteen years for Japan, and sacrificed everything for Japan, I have
+been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the
+country. For while the politico-religious combination that has
+engineered this matter remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any
+position in any educational establishment here for even six months."
+
+In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this
+juncture, it is well to remember that Japan was struggling for
+existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied
+powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be
+soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one
+official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind
+to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the
+possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the
+means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking
+into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard,
+perhaps, but the Japanese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or
+they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been
+set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia
+was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to
+the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible
+privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost
+impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been
+accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation
+rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must
+also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the
+Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign
+teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier
+for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed
+at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the
+ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his
+disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and
+guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls?
+and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the
+uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of
+years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him
+to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far
+from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,--sturdy and not likely
+to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I
+must devote the rest of my life to looking after him."
+
+And she--his wise friend--knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's
+isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that
+awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action
+and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself."
+
+"Very true," was Hearn's answer--and well did he know, for had not he,
+the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the
+position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day?
+"No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid:
+the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,--and I flee, and
+bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might
+be, that a man should not be,--except as to bodily strength.... I taught
+him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit
+of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil--what
+chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly
+pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?"
+
+The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:--
+
+               "Sense with keenest edge unused,
+                  Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire;
+                Lovely feet as yet unbruised,
+                  On the ways of dark desire;
+                Sweetest hope that lookest smiling
+                O'er the wilderness defiling!
+
+               "Why such beauty, to be blighted,
+                  By the swarm of foul destruction?
+                Why such innocence delighted,
+                  When sin stalks to thy seduction?
+                All the litanies e'er chanted,
+                Shall not keep thy faith undaunted.
+
+               "I have pray'd the Sainted Morning
+                  To unclasp her hands to hold thee;
+                From resignful Eve's adorning
+                  Stol'n a robe of peace to enfold thee;
+                With all charms of man's contriving
+                Arm'd thee for thy lonely striving.
+
+               "Me too once unthinking Nature,
+                  --Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,--
+                Fashion'd so divine a creature,
+                  Yes, and like a beast forsook me.
+                I forgave, but tell the measure,
+                Of her crime in thee, my treasure."
+
+It seems as if he were haunted by memories of his own thwarted childhood
+and shipwrecked youth. If possible he wished to guard and protect his
+Benjamin from the pitfalls that had beset his path, knowing that the
+same dangers might prevail in Kazuo's case as in his own, and that there
+might be no one to protect and guard him.
+
+A charming piece of prose, from which I give a few extracts, was found
+amongst Hearn's papers after his death. The manuscript, lent to me by
+Mrs. Atkinson, lies by my hand as I write; it is entitled "Fear."
+
+"An old, old sea-wall, stretching between two boundless levels, green
+and blue. Everything is steeped in white sun; and I am standing on the
+wall. Along its broad and grass-grown top a boy is running towards
+me,--running in sandals of wood,--the sea-breeze blowing aside the long
+sleeves of his robe as he runs.... With what sudden incommunicable pang
+do I watch the gracious little figure leaping in the light.... A
+delicate boy, with the blended charm of two races.... And how softly
+vivid all things under this milky radiance,--the smiling child-face with
+lips apart,--the twinkle of the light quick feet,--the shadows of
+grasses and of little stones!...
+
+"But quickly as he runs, the child will come no nearer to me,--the slim
+brown hand will never cling to mine. For this light is the light of a
+Japanese sun that set long years ago.... Never, dearest!--never shall we
+meet,--not even when the stars are dead!"
+
+By the exercise of a considerable amount of diplomacy Mrs. Wetmore
+succeeded at this time in inducing Jacob Gould Schurmann, president of
+Cornell University, to enter into an arrangement with Hearn for a series
+of lectures on Japan.
+
+As of old, she believed him capable of conquering Fate, in spite of the
+despotism of fact as exemplified in the loss of eyesight and broken
+health; she felt sure he could interest an American audience by the
+material he had to offer, and the scholarly way in which he knew how to
+utilise it.
+
+His answer to the suggestion of the lectures is characteristic:--
+
+"O fairy! what have you dared to say? I am quite sure that I do _not_
+know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or
+politics, or history. (You did not say 'politics' or 'history,' however,
+and that seems to be what is wanted.) But perhaps you know _what_ I know
+better than I myself know,--or perhaps you can give me to eat a Fairy
+Apple of Knowledge. At present I have no acquaintance even with the
+Japanese language: I cannot read a Japanese newspaper: and I have
+learned only enough, even of the _kana_, to write a letter home. I
+cannot lie--to my Fairy; therefore it is essential that I make the
+following declaration:--"
+
+Then he repeats the statement made in the preface of "Japan, an
+Interpretation." For these lectures prepared with so much industry and
+care were destined ultimately to go to the making of that beautiful and
+lucid exposition of the history and thought of a great people.
+
+The world has to be grateful to President Schurmann for withdrawing from
+his contract, and cancelling the offer made to Hearn for the delivery of
+lectures at the university.
+
+The excuse that illness had broken out at Cornell was hardly a
+sufficient one. There is little doubt that unfavourable reports of
+Hearn's state of health, and doubts as to the possibility of his being
+able to lecture in public, had drifted to Cornell, and the president,
+acting for the best interests of his university, did not feel justified
+in abiding by his proposals.
+
+With that extraordinary mental elasticity that characterised him all his
+life, Hearn made the best of the situation, and set to work, polishing
+and repolishing his twenty-two lectures until they reached the high
+level of style that distinguishes "Japan, an Interpretation." His
+courage was the more extraordinary as, filled with the idea that he was
+at last going to America, he had gone into every detail of meeting his
+friend. "I would go straight to your Palace of Fairy before going
+elsewhere," he writes to Mrs. Wetmore, "only to see you again--even for
+a moment--and to hear you speak in some one of the myriad voices would
+be such a memory for me, and you would let me 'walk about gently
+touching things.'..." Then in another letter comes a sigh of regret,
+and as it were farewell. "But your gifts, O Faery Queen have faded away,
+even as in the Song ... and I am also fading away."
+
+After the failure of his projected visit to America, a suggestion was
+made by the University of London that he should give a series of
+lectures there. But here was the "Ah-ness" of things. Had Hearn's health
+permitted he would probably have been in England in 1905, where he would
+have been received with honour. The Japanese had fought Russia and
+beaten her. People became wildly enthusiastic about Japan: the libraries
+were besieged with inquiries for Hearn's books,--just at the eleventh
+hour, when he had become a name, he died!
+
+All his life his dream had been to be independent, to be able to travel.
+Referring to a gentleman who was in Japan, he once said, "I envy him his
+independence. Think of being able to live where one pleases, nobody's
+servant,--able to choose one's own studies and friends and books."
+
+The offer of an easy post was made to Hearn about this time as professor
+of English in the Waseda University founded by Count Okuma. He closed
+with it at once, thus putting an end to all negotiations with the
+University of London.
+
+His youngest child, Setsu-ko, was born this year, and all idea of
+leaving Japan was henceforth abandoned.
+
+In his last letter to Mrs. Wetmore, dated September, 1904--the month in
+which he died--he touches on the dedication he had made to her in his
+book, "A Japanese Miscellany." To the last the same sympathy and
+understanding reigned between them. Patiently she exhorted, comforted.
+Her wise counsel and advice soothed his torn nerves and aching heart to
+the end. So this affection, untouched by the moth and rust of worldly
+intercourse, went down with him "into the dust of death."
+
+Slowly but surely the years with their chequered story were drawing to
+an end. The sum of endeavour was complete, the secrets Death had in its
+keeping were there for the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit.
+
+Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some
+of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same
+impression--a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine
+consideration for others, the thought of the future of his wife and
+children, triumphing over suffering and death.
+
+He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he
+was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say
+my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep
+thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was
+strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I
+made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our
+house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.'
+
+"'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither
+in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said."
+
+While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up
+and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he
+died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her
+_tokonoma_ she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a
+moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I
+could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had
+passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve
+hours were over!
+
+Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the
+daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree
+in the garden,--not much to look at--but it was a blossom blooming out
+of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant
+Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi.
+
+"I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at
+it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is
+here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful,
+but will soon die under the approaching cold.'
+
+"You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking
+that the _Kaerizaki_, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid
+farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...."
+
+In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's
+death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of
+September 26th, after supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he
+was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The
+pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he
+wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in
+bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a
+little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the
+world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXVI
+                              HIS FUNERAL
+
+     "If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong,
+     as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange
+     possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal
+     records in the Universal life,--every thought of good or ill
+     or aspiration,--and the Buddhistic Karma would be a
+     scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the
+     thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds
+     would be forever acting invisibly on us."
+
+
+Perhaps of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with
+Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than
+his funeral.
+
+It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a
+Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no
+religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the
+last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions"
+in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any
+boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all
+fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were
+swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious
+palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space.
+
+Yet--Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien
+to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his
+latter years--at his death his body was taken possession of by priests,
+who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over,
+and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of
+Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple!
+
+A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss
+Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration
+for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him
+lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama
+paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession
+would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on
+September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in
+Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held.
+
+It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired
+the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the
+pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a
+"ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and
+hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little
+children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of
+shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under
+the relentless light of the afternoon sun.
+
+He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and
+unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest
+ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper
+_gohei_; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge
+bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas
+carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the
+grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne,
+palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office
+it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing
+what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination of
+good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn.
+
+While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed
+into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two
+groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little
+daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while
+the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son,
+Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university
+professors, went to the right.
+
+Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial
+service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments
+chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo.
+
+After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and
+led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse,
+touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of
+incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife,
+when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven,
+in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped
+some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the
+brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the
+ceremony ended and the congregation left the church.
+
+Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body
+would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of
+cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students
+were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of
+the day was at an end.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+                             VISIT TO JAPAN
+
+     "Every dwelling in which a thinker lives certainly acquires a
+     sort of soul. There are Lares and Penates more subtle than
+     those of the antique world; these make the peace and rest of
+     a home."
+
+
+On the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss
+Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening.
+Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law,
+announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi
+Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the
+red tape--the bales of red tape--that surround social as well as
+official transactions in Japan.
+
+Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of
+introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's
+coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the
+Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club
+library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had
+recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for
+delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter.
+
+To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and,
+though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system
+leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters;
+in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do
+with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason also reminded us that Mrs.
+Koizumi did not understand a word of English; she must have recourse to
+an interpreter before communicating with her Irish sister-in-law, but,
+above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs. Atkinson had addressed her
+letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by which no properly constituted
+Japanese postman would find himself justified in recognising Hearn's
+widow. By nationalising himself a Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as
+his occidental inheritance went, had vanished forever. He and his wife
+were only known at Tokyo as Mr. and Mrs. Koizumi.
+
+Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about
+Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been
+extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the
+friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in
+consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on
+sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on
+Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses
+from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that
+his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to
+Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami
+was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her,
+and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs,
+and insisted on his visitors doing the same.
+
+The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is
+"another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese;
+it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything
+unexpected--all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised
+country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a
+Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately
+in a jinrikisha to see her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have
+fallen into one another's arms, and a close intimacy would have been
+begun. Not so in Japan.
+
+[Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).]
+
+"Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr.
+Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful
+sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a
+letter will turn up."
+
+Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in
+consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's
+advice.
+
+I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first
+pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's
+interview with the old Buddhist priest.
+
+Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where,
+embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of
+pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine.
+
+From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a
+pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I
+experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression,
+common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a
+dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a
+special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic
+light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering
+eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to
+the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range
+of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through
+the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its
+familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese
+picture-books--the sacred, the matchless mountain--Fuji-no-yama.
+
+There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned from out
+the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision of the
+old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three hundred
+volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the interpreter
+Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise between them,
+while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat, and the song of
+the _uguisu_ from the plum-tree grove, we heard the murmur of their
+voices.
+
+"That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been....
+Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best
+painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any
+action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits
+outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such
+progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach
+such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force
+also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves
+increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last
+that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation
+have no existence."
+
+Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while
+seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures
+pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady,
+dressed in the national Japanese costume--a kimono of dark iron-grey
+silk--the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed
+also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his
+feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of
+the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese
+half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but
+the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles.
+
+Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas,
+good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced,
+Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik,
+of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished
+dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her
+person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible
+honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and
+elaborate coiffure--the usual erection worn by her country-women--she
+might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large
+English establishment.
+
+The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a
+shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried,
+instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally
+used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and
+indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of
+memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it
+had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and
+from the Imperial University.
+
+After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision,
+leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He
+was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the
+background.
+
+At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he
+laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another
+race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic
+changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he
+was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton
+Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and
+near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered
+his father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown
+hair and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a
+queer little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to
+learn by heart."
+
+Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary
+likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese
+expression--a mask of reserve as it were--fell like a curtain over his
+face,--he was Japanese again.
+
+He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible;
+his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a
+sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic
+in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative
+understand what he wished to say.
+
+It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have
+been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the
+Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely
+forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason,
+who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves
+considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly
+possessed--that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had
+been so sensitive--a soft and musical voice.
+
+Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England,
+and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's
+father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain
+round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her
+bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then
+told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese
+woman to wear any article of jewellery.
+
+[Illustration: CARLETON ATKINSON.]
+
+Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable
+time--Japanese visits usually do--Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for
+the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised
+that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this
+invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save
+Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next
+day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo.
+
+The Metropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the
+hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where
+Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn,"
+describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making
+for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of
+Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room.
+
+Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi
+Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the
+Spring Equinox (_Shunki Korei-sai_). There is an autumn and a spring
+equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating
+population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren,
+into the streets. The ladies were in their best _kimonos_, their hair
+elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them
+bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler
+hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying
+American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features
+that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and
+woman. A pretty _musume's_ ivory-coloured oval face against the
+cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a
+delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically
+picturesque than a Tokyo street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry
+of rain when hundreds of these ineffective shelters with their quaint
+designs of chrysanthemums, cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly
+opened. Alas! in ten years' time, like many other quaint and beautiful
+Japanese productions, these oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away
+into the region of faintly-remembered things.
+
+The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of
+the men had a little too much _sake_ on board, their tipsiness was only
+betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes,
+indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple
+walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling
+of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of _sake_, smells of seaweed soup,
+smells of _daikon_ (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a
+sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows
+behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky
+arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of
+sunshine.
+
+Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams,
+and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an
+interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges,
+down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams,
+we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with
+babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their
+mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of
+Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male
+children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was
+there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen.
+
+Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas,
+and still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed _kuruma_ men,
+did our journey last, through the quarter of the foreign legations,
+past government offices and military stations, beside the moat
+surrounding the mikado's palace, with its grass slopes and pine-clad
+fosse, down declivities and up others, through endless lanes, bordered
+by one-storeyed houses standing in shrubberies behind bamboo fences.
+At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose _kuruma_ led the way, halted before a
+small gateway, surmounted by a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we
+understood afterwards, with Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs.
+Passing through, we found ourselves opposite the entrance of a
+lightly-built two-story house, rather resembling a suburban bungalow
+in England. Directly we entered we were transported into a different
+era. Here no modern Japan was visible. On the threshold, waiting to
+receive us, was an "august residence maid," kneeling, palms extended
+on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head touching the matting, and
+wondered if it belonged to Hana, the unsympathetic Hana who had let
+the grass-lark die. Beside her was Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child,
+in a brilliantly-coloured _kimono_, while on the step above stood
+Professor Tanabe, who had been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an
+intimate friend of the Koizumi family, living near by, and acting
+occasionally as interpreter for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture--as an
+eastern philosopher, for instance--he would have made for Moroni or
+Velasquez, with the delicate grey and cream background of the Japanese
+_tatami_ and paper _shoji_. He had the clear olive complexion and
+intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and
+thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood
+above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to
+his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he
+receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us
+welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of
+his own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a
+presence, and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was
+trying; for the little girl had raised her forehead from the matting,
+and, with hands on knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us
+sideways like a bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential
+liftings of the eyes and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals
+from a row that stood close by, helped us to take off our boots and put
+on the sandals. We then remarked that she was not at all
+unsympathetic-looking, but a nice, chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We
+hoped devoutly we had no holes in our stockings, and after a
+considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got through the ordeal in time
+to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who appeared beside Professor Tanabe
+on the step above us, softly inviting us to "honourably deign to enter
+her unworthy abode."
+
+The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so
+arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the
+_engawa_ (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been
+Hearn's study. The _fusima_ or paper screens separating the two rooms
+were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and
+stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it
+was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus
+flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase,
+but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the _Butsudan_, or
+family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner.
+
+Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the
+spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped.
+
+At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and
+sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an
+Interpretation," and so many other wonderful books, and I felt as I
+looked at that room of Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive
+than the quick. The walls--or rather the paper panels and wood laths
+that did duty for walls--were haunted with memories.
+
+I pictured the odd little figure--dressed in the _kimono_ given him by
+Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems--"Surely just the
+kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"--with the
+prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in
+the ancient, patient manner" on his _zabuton_--smoking his _kiseru_, or
+standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets
+and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning
+over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's
+Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk.
+
+There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a
+sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie
+stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and
+clamour of the city outside--it gave an impression of restfulness, of
+calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless
+matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the
+Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels
+that, like the _fusima_, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room.
+I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study
+and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for
+paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before
+that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese
+houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had
+occupied the corner where now stands the _Butsudan_, contaminating that
+wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent,
+crystalline atmosphere" unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke.
+These hardy folk told us that they were always catching coughs and colds
+when they had the stove and glass windows, so they took both out, and
+put back the paper _shoji_ and the charcoal brazier.
+
+It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which
+Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his
+study. The _andon_--tallow-candle--stuck in a paper shade--national
+means of lighting a room--had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's
+reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little
+table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber
+tube.
+
+Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single _kakemono_, or
+piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making
+room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought
+and life--that Hearn blended so deftly in his work--joined hands. Round
+the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were
+placed, filled with books, English most of them--De Quincey, Herbert
+Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against
+the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the
+_Butsudan_ rested volumes of Browning and Kipling.
+
+I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old
+prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had
+been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a
+Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as
+hanging on the ceiling?
+
+It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a
+depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay _godong_ given to
+the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all
+valuable and artistic objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing
+of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from
+fire, earthquakes and floods.
+
+Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the
+ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate
+grey ground.
+
+On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a _kakemono_ or scroll-picture
+representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs
+clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese
+ideographs in the corner--by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present
+from Kazuo to his father.
+
+Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard,
+was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were
+Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl.
+
+Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour
+had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one.
+Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the
+hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance
+of some sort.
+
+Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to
+go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo
+that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's
+study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond
+measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They
+own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like
+our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a
+climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as
+crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful
+circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves
+uncomfortable in what seemed to me such an irritating and futile way.
+That any sane people should eat a succession of horrible concoctions
+made up of raw fish, lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted
+of Pears' soap, whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an
+afterthought, eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed
+on Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at
+least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a
+courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy.
+
+The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain
+dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage
+stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of
+the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our
+trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins
+it was an omen of death.
+
+I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when
+I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use
+knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a
+story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the
+professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet
+under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him,
+could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position
+intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing
+into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch
+your legs and be comfortable."
+
+After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell
+athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a
+bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the
+right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was
+a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the
+bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a
+mass of snowy white bloom.
+
+But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the
+cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and
+within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs.
+Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that
+Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them.
+Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to
+his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's
+life.
+
+Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies,"
+daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to
+smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the
+daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough
+Corrib.
+
+          "Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas,
+           Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these,
+           Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land--
+           Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVIII
+                       SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO
+
+     "Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the
+     magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It
+     lingers now in patches only, and bands,--like those long
+     bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of
+     Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour
+     you still can find Horai--but not elsewhere.... Remember that
+     Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,--the
+     Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,--never
+     again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...."
+
+
+Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi--through the medium of
+Professor Tanabe--asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on
+Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had
+died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks
+and the lamp were lighted before the _Butsudan_ and a repast laid out in
+honour of the dead.
+
+That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya
+Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the
+flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted,
+and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to
+spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to
+the Metropole Hotel.
+
+The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they
+went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility
+was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit
+one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a
+europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any
+other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of
+a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No
+sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was
+connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked
+upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.
+
+The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us
+in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as
+encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally
+different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions
+of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their
+charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an
+expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me,
+reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts
+of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by
+European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic
+meaning. A _Shirabyoshi_ lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara
+quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district
+of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of
+their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead
+kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the
+streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered
+in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese
+maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread,
+instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there,
+seated on _zabutons_ in a little shop, as large--or rather as small--as
+life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little
+_musumes_, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I
+passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising
+_otherness_ of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary
+land of Nippon.
+
+I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese
+houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who
+had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.
+
+Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her
+"Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn
+had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I
+thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and
+any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow
+and children.
+
+A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and
+cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens,
+and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a
+_zabuton_ (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense
+silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at
+intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance
+of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys
+and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a
+manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of
+irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the
+tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The
+moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was
+as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too
+courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a
+dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what
+communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and
+left a will--Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his
+contemptible abode to smoke a pipe--further than that he knew nothing.
+The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku),
+where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the
+heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received
+also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was
+distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct
+me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's
+favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste
+exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about
+the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any
+sort of favour by his colleagues.
+
+In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent
+their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided
+between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the
+temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were
+provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an
+extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the
+northern coast.
+
+A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with
+these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering
+up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the
+dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible
+lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures
+of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the
+heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into
+insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai
+Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by
+the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image
+that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian
+had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister
+legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both.
+Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and
+people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this
+Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire
+destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus,
+contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable
+smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of
+this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but
+here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of
+time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a
+master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the
+great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image
+of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to
+incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and
+vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of
+centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite
+base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea
+round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still
+as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal
+truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will
+pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the
+only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human
+life--infinite calm, infinite rest.
+
+"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on
+Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound
+and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he
+attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented,
+with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he
+had hitherto subscribed?
+
+It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the
+shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its _shoji_ was comforting
+after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come
+prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning
+among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August
+One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows,
+genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit,
+while on the upper step of the _genkan_ (entrance-room) with extended
+hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first,
+when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove
+occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was
+moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom
+she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels
+in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present
+always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even
+though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely."
+Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to
+hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us,
+when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and
+pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental
+widows when referring to the departed.
+
+The doors of the _Butsudan_ were set wide open, and on the _kamidan_, or
+shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and
+burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast
+of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were
+placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a
+bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that
+had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was
+Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to
+Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third
+had been buried with the writer of _Japan_, beneath his tombstone in the
+Zoshigaya Cemetery.
+
+As we stood in the study opposite the _Butsudan_ the ghostly charm, the
+emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded
+the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of
+children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection,
+crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.
+
+Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo,
+describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as
+though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without
+saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that
+hangs in the study.
+
+Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste,
+subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit.
+Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that
+gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy
+the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling
+down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out
+a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had
+belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter
+Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and
+curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one
+representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the
+donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment--a donkey
+being an unknown animal in Japan--when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another
+represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and
+groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple
+people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.
+
+It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for
+a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the
+brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not
+perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur
+attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon
+the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of
+difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some
+sort--everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good
+or bad omen.
+
+Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because
+her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson
+was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same
+respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys,
+were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance
+recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the
+subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he
+had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to
+the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of
+the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese,
+declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in
+mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many
+others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted
+by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine
+race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially,
+indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and
+intelligent.
+
+What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_
+and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish
+smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of
+their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English
+books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese _kakemonos_ and ideographs.
+
+Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely
+have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up.
+The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days
+"freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone
+down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."
+
+I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of
+unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a
+household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her
+knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for
+Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient,
+indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the
+_Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern
+education as a material weakness?
+
+"The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says
+Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and
+naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the
+further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As
+the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right,
+the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the
+opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."
+
+After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of
+"tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)--his Papa San's
+favourite cake, Kazuo told us--had been handed round and partaken of,
+jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery.
+As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight
+fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove,
+stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was
+the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo
+parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were
+going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh
+ponies--along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by
+evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean
+inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an
+unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind
+whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the
+horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but
+little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of
+exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather
+distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots,
+enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the
+impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by
+government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was
+volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking
+along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last
+reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same
+shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the
+top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo
+garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the
+stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two
+smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On
+either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab
+was the inscription--
+
+"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"--"Believing Man Similar to
+Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in
+Mansion of Right Enlightenment."
+
+The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside
+the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the
+background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the
+thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the
+cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness
+characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin
+coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the
+plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in
+front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn
+wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand,
+as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman,
+Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the
+moment, buried--an alien amongst aliens--in a Buddhist grave, under a
+Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own
+people.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONCLUSION
+
+
+LAFCADIO HEARN'S was a personality and genius which people will always
+judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary
+common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an
+odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and
+rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised
+the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human
+morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi,
+or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of
+his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who
+consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow
+his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst
+the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme
+prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages";
+while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in
+locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament.
+
+If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the
+worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities
+behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature,
+would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology"
+that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may
+have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of
+a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the
+whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that
+he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically
+proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could
+recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to
+cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap
+wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we
+patch up things."
+
+Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal,
+will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on
+which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary
+interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's
+work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute.
+
+He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of
+absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it.
+Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more,
+discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the
+ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries:
+oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more
+elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and
+self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in
+exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many
+a day by cultured readers and thinkers.
+
+Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique
+place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and
+because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the
+eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of
+enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does
+in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques
+Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of
+the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social
+and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own
+day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never
+entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental
+horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and
+pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his
+deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of
+occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so
+because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so,
+and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared
+to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it
+out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was
+quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own,
+and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the
+spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another,
+he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform
+himself of details before discussing them.
+
+As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely
+conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the
+modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in
+the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of
+Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature
+in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan
+was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan
+rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive
+sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of
+all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that
+"he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents
+inventions shall be killed!"
+
+Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his
+political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever
+camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again
+whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival
+Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a
+season.
+
+It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in
+his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the
+banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He
+dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the
+Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than
+Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous
+interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison
+between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque
+whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the
+dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when
+he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty,
+the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes
+hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones
+bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for
+a shadow and lost it."
+
+Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to
+the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower
+stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness
+found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of
+such experience--from a literary point of view--is proved by the force
+of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are
+remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with
+its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness,
+breathes the very essence of Romanticism.
+
+Literary brother to Loti and Renan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their
+sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic
+longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with
+longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on
+the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to
+return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the
+slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had
+quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to
+long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he
+regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and
+towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the
+sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his
+acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the
+appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the
+memory of his Japanese home--the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan
+and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might
+catch a butterfly.
+
+Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited,
+without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes,
+he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the
+borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for
+the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this
+strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that
+is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very
+strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it
+made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting
+dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories.
+
+His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a
+literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that
+awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"...
+The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in
+the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought
+nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking
+exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work
+is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of
+his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental
+hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical
+narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that
+flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art
+was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental
+wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain
+healthy habit of thought and life.
+
+It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his
+capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true,
+he had forfeited his birthright to produce a _Pecheur d'Islande_; but on
+most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed.
+He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain
+he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were
+apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a
+certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he
+found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and
+tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and
+epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The
+Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The
+subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken
+from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue,"
+probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of
+small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own
+characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul
+of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he
+went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses
+of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet
+Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on Japan, afterwards published
+in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by
+Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling.
+
+As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously
+exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to
+admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori,
+all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession
+of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper
+significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He
+endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the
+emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his
+genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations
+and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at
+times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk
+surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain
+coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms,
+and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the
+wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the
+talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent
+circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the
+cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism.
+
+Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that
+they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of
+the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his
+outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too pronounced to please the
+matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in
+the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes
+impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without
+finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic
+phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his
+picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic
+episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a
+country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing
+the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and
+visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality
+and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie
+in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the
+enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal
+mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure
+of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands
+would be needed to mould the figure--an unpractical and extravagant
+sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than
+merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul
+of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it
+feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion;
+then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about
+the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on
+their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into
+their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these
+memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display
+in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We
+human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and
+the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the
+faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with
+that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he
+interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a
+susceptible people.
+
+As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by
+some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was
+drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to
+Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing
+his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to
+those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the
+primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint
+villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open
+ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American
+clothes--then and then only will they be able to understand what an
+artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation
+being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his
+opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view,
+over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to
+accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have
+stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially
+subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward
+vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed,
+if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and
+appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and
+dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in
+his expressions of literary and political opinion.
+
+In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to
+the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the
+tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances
+were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most
+salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved
+him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable
+nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his
+mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New
+Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good
+fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen
+years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been
+swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in
+the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless
+cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his
+means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for
+him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was
+his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last
+years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst
+the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness
+of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with
+his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending
+his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest
+surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him.
+
+An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His
+work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed
+by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is,
+indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and
+persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses
+it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach, by the Divine
+Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that the more
+appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct for art,
+the smaller will be his success with the general public. But never was
+his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of pecuniary gain.
+From the earliest years of his literary career, his delight in
+composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity, rather than
+delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in the working.
+According to him, nothing was less important than worldly prosperity, to
+write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most damnable,
+infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug.
+
+To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this
+short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that
+matters, and "the only success in life."
+
+Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life.
+To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted.
+
+                    "One minute's work to thee denied
+                       Stands all Eternity's offence"--
+
+he quotes from Kipling.
+
+This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite
+the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange
+contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never
+was at issue either with himself or destiny.
+
+Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent
+of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through
+hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning
+neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease,
+Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one
+object, his thoughts fixed on one aim.
+
+In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a
+spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of
+the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy,
+when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable
+is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ...
+her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life
+and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad
+generations that have arisen and passed away.
+
+What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap
+publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and
+invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on
+the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing
+of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work
+aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the
+exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that
+the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out.
+
+As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the
+beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things,
+emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and
+passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life,
+making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were
+beautiful to die for."
+
+
+
+
+                                 INDEX
+
+
+    AKIRA, 168, 170, 316.
+
+    Alma Tadema, 57.
+
+    Amenomori Nobushige, 168, 184, 235, 267.
+
+    American criticism, an, 145.
+
+    Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, 143, 144, 149.
+
+    Ancestral tablet, the, 253.
+
+    "Ants," essay on, 293.
+
+    Arnold, Matthew, 59.
+
+    Arnoux, Leopold, 154.
+
+    Asama-Yama, 144.
+
+    Atkinson, Mrs., 4, 13, 217, 301, 304, 313;
+      letters to, 31-48, 56, 67, 68, 86, 100, 112, 204, 221, 252;
+      visits Japan, 313 _et seq._
+
+    Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, 202.
+
+    Atkinson, Carleton, 4, 49.
+
+    Atkinson, Dorothy, 313, 317.
+
+    Avatars, 4.
+
+
+    BAKER, CONSTANCE, 334.
+
+    Baker, Page M., 106, 109, 236, 242.
+
+    Ball, Sir F., 255.
+
+    Bangor, 26.
+
+    Baudelaire, 63.
+
+    Beale, Mr. James, 256, 257.
+
+    Behrens, Mrs., 284.
+
+    Berry, Rev. H. F., 43.
+
+    Bisland, Miss Elizabeth, 110, 111, 125, 133, 151, 267;
+      marriage of, 188, 203;
+      letters to, 158, 180;
+      joint-editor of _Cosmopolitan_, 130.
+
+    Borrow, George, 274.
+
+    Boston, 261.
+
+    Brenane, Mrs. Justin, 2, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 30.
+
+    Bridges, Robert, quoted, 303.
+
+    British Museum, image of Buddha in, 57.
+
+    Bronner, Milton, 61.
+
+    Brown, Mr., 202.
+
+    Brownings, the, 59, 324.
+
+    Buddha of Enoshima, 331, 332.
+
+    Buddhism, 42, 141, 144.
+
+    Butcher, Miss, 16.
+
+
+    CALIDAS, 146.
+
+    Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 112, 165, 206;
+      letters to, 116, 169, 177, 191.
+
+    "Chinese Ghosts," 109.
+
+    "Chita," 35, 36.
+
+    Cholera at Kobe, 241.
+
+    Cincinnati, 53, 65 _et seq._
+
+    Cincinnati Brotherhood, 114.
+
+    Civilisation, attack on, 249.
+
+    Cockerill, Colonel John, 74.
+
+    Collins, Wilkie, 60.
+
+    _Commercial, The_, Hearn joins, 86.
+
+    "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn" (G. M. Gould), 69.
+
+    Conventual Orders, 2.
+
+    Corbishly, Monsignor, 41, 42, 44.
+
+    Corfu, 6-9.
+
+    Correagh, 2, 8.
+
+    Crawford, Mrs., 18, 21.
+
+    Crescent City, 94.
+
+    Crosby, Lieutenant, 133.
+
+    Cullinane, Mr. and Mrs., 53, 64.
+
+
+    "DAD." _See_ Watkin.
+
+    Dai Batsu of Enoshima, 331.
+
+    Dai Batsu of Kamakura, 142.
+
+    "Dancing Girl, The," 194.
+
+    Darwin, Charles, 59, 60, 140.
+
+    Daunt, Mr. Achilles, 46, 48, 52.
+
+    Delaney, Catherine, 53, 58.
+
+    Dengue fever, 100.
+
+    De Quincey, 289.
+
+    "Dragon Flies," 285.
+
+    "Dream of a Summer's Day," 24.
+
+    Dublin, 5, 10, _et seq._
+
+    Du Maurier, 63.
+
+    "Dust," Hearn's essay on, 49.
+
+
+    ELWOOD, FRANK, 25.
+
+    Elwood, Mrs., 24.
+
+    Elwood, Robert, 24, 25.
+
+    Emerson, Miss Margaret, 311.
+
+    _Enquirer, The_, Hearn on staff of, 74-79.
+
+    "Eternal Feminine," article on, 281.
+
+    "Exotics and Retrospectives," 282, 283, 294.
+
+
+    "FANTASTICS," 126.
+
+    "First Principles," Spencer's, 141.
+
+    Flaubert, Gustave, 43.
+
+    Foley, Althea, 81, 83, 180.
+
+    Ford Castle, 3.
+
+    Formosa, 200.
+
+    Forrest, General, funeral of, 90.
+
+    Foxwell, Professor, 120, 278.
+
+    Franco-Prussian War, 62.
+
+    Froude, James, 153.
+
+    Fuji, first sight of, 162.
+
+    Fuji-no-Yama, 144, 311.
+
+    Fujisaki, Captain, 286.
+
+
+    "GARDEN FOLK LORE," 189.
+
+    Gautier, Theophile, 62.
+
+    "Ghostly Japan," 283, 284.
+
+    "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," 273, 280.
+
+    "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 163, 172, 268, 329.
+
+    Gould, Dr. George Milbury, 69, 149, 158.
+
+    Greek culture, 342.
+
+    Gulf winds, 35.
+
+
+    HALL, H. H., 282.
+
+    Halstead, Mr., 88.
+
+    Hamamura, cemetery of, 9.
+
+    Hana, 297.
+
+    _Harper's Weekly_, 137.
+
+    Harrison, Frederic, 143.
+
+    Hawkins, Armand, 104.
+
+    Hearn, Lafcadio, birth, 1, 9;
+      Hibernian ancestors, 2;
+      English origin, 2;
+      the interpreter of Buddhism, 4;
+      maternal lineage, 4, 5;
+      Hellenic associations of birthplace, 9;
+      memories of Malta, 10;
+      reminiscences of childhood, 17;
+      separation of his parents, 20;
+      adopted by Mrs. Brenane, 21;
+      his defective eyesight, 29, 45, 48;
+      relations with Mr. Molyneux, 30;
+      views of ideal beauty, 36;
+      at Tramore, 37;
+      at school at Ushaw, 40;
+      literary tastes at school, 43;
+      unattractive appearance, 49;
+      in London, 52 _et seq._;
+      literary vocation, 55;
+      Paris, 62;
+      Cincinnati, 65;
+      his shyness, 66;
+      reaches the depths, 68;
+      servant in boarding-house, 69;
+      secretaryship, 74;
+      on staff of _Enquirer_, 74;
+      ascends Cincinnati church spire, 76;
+      his translations, 76;
+      and Althea Foley, 81;
+      and Marie Levaux, 85;
+      joins staff of _The Commercial_, 85;
+      at Memphis, 88;
+      destitution, 94;
+      fever, 100;
+      _Times Democrat_, 105;
+      method of argument, 112;
+      intellectual isolation, 112;
+      intolerance of amateur art, 114;
+      characteristics, 120;
+      visits West Indies, 131;
+      letters, 135;
+      marriage, 134, 179-186;
+      arrangement with Harpers, 137;
+      political opinions, 142;
+      visits Mr. Watkin, 148;
+      the Krehbiels, 148, 149;
+      musical sense, 151;
+      arrives in Yokohama, 160;
+      terminates contract with Harpers, 164;
+      Professor Chamberlain, 165;
+      philosophical opinions and character, 167;
+      appointment in Matsue, 168;
+      Japanese estimate of, 176;
+      passion for work, 184;
+      family, 200;
+      naturalisation, 220;
+      symptoms of physical failure, 242;
+      devotion to family, 260;
+      emotional trances, 288;
+      love of animals, 292;
+      death, 299, _et seq._;
+      his religion, 310;
+      funeral, 310;
+      children, 336;
+      personality, 339;
+      biassed deductions, 341;
+      literary judgments, 342;
+      his romanticism, 343;
+      quotations from, 346;
+      his opinion of Japanese, 347;
+      estimate of his work, 348, 349.
+
+    Hearn, Charles Bush, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 22, 202.
+
+    Hearn, Mrs. Charles, 4, 10, 12, 14, 21.
+
+    Hearn, Mrs., 150;
+      "Reminiscences" of, 276.
+
+    Hearn, Rev. Daniel, 2, 16, 61, 202.
+
+    Hearn, Leopold Kazuo, 219.
+
+    Hearn, Rev. Thomas, 2.
+
+    Hearn, Miss, 3.
+
+    Hearn, Miss Lillah, 202, 203.
+
+    Hearn, Richard, 10 _et seq._, 150.
+
+    Hearn, Susan, 10 _et seq._
+
+    Hearn family in Waterford, 2.
+
+    Henderson, Mr. Edmund, 74, 76.
+
+    Hendrik, Ellwood, 125, 263;
+      letters to, 154, 177, 261.
+
+    Heron, Francis, 3.
+
+    Heron, Sir Hugh de, 3.
+
+    Hijo, 189.
+
+    Hirn, Professor, letter to, 67.
+
+    Holmes, Elizabeth, 5.
+
+    Hugo, Victor, 62.
+
+    Huxley, Professor, 60, 141.
+
+
+    ICHIGAYA, 311.
+
+    "Idolatry," 37.
+
+    Imperial University, Japanese, 330.
+
+    "In Ghostly Japan," 145.
+
+    "Insect Studies," 293.
+
+    "Intuition," 71.
+
+    Ionian Islands, 5.
+
+    Izumo, 262.
+
+
+    JAPAN,
+      discipline of official life in, 54;
+      spirit of, 229;
+      old Japan, 347.
+
+    "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation," 297.
+
+    Japanese character, analysis of, 176.
+
+    Japanese constitution promulgated, 158.
+
+    Japanese day, a, 206.
+
+    Japanese funeral, a, 312.
+
+    "Japanese Miscellany, A," 284.
+
+    Japanese regimen, 231.
+
+    Japanese school classes, 201.
+
+    Japanese training of children, 211.
+
+    Jefferies, Richard, 289.
+
+    Jitom Kobduera Temple, 311.
+
+    Jiu-jitsu, 201.
+
+    Jizo-Do Temple, 315.
+
+
+    KENTUCKY, 72.
+
+    Keogh, Miss Agnes, 50.
+
+    Kinegawa, 233.
+
+    Kingsley, Charles, 277.
+
+    Kinjuro, 189, 191.
+
+    Kipling, Rudyard, 233, 271, 324, 345.
+
+    Kitinagasa, Dori, 243.
+
+    Kobduera, Temple of, 261.
+
+    Kobe, 168, 193.
+
+    _Kobe Chronicle_, 168, 248.
+
+    Koizumi, Mrs. Setsu, 3, 27, 60, 286, 300, 308, 314 _et seq._, 334;
+      "Reminiscences" of, 122;
+      letter of, 309.
+
+    Koizumi, Idaho, 325.
+
+    Koizumi, Iwayo, 325.
+
+    Koizumi, Kazuo, 4, 217, 277, 300, 312, 317 _et seq._, 337.
+
+    Koizumi, Setsu-ko, 307, 321, 325, 335.
+
+    "Kokoro," 65, 109, 249, 251, 266.
+
+    Krehbiel, Henry, 5, 26, 74, 78, 79, 104, 112, 114, 152.
+
+    Kumamoto, 13, 65, 193, 199.
+
+    Kusa-Hibari (grass-lark), 295.
+
+    Kusimoki marahige, 240.
+
+    "Kwaidan," 24.
+
+    Kyoto, 252.
+
+    Kyushu, 200.
+
+
+    "LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS" (Miss Bisland), 113, 124-136.
+
+    Lamb, Charles, 289.
+
+    Levaux, Marie, 85.
+
+    "Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn" (Wetmore), 263.
+
+    Literary College, Tokyo, 3.
+
+    Loti, Pierre, 29, 84.
+
+    Lough Corrib, 25, 233.
+
+    Louisiana, 92.
+
+    Lowell, Percival, 345.
+
+    "Luck of Roaring Camp" (Bret Harte), 77.
+
+
+    MALTA, 5, 10.
+
+    Martinique, 155.
+
+    Mason, Mr. W. B., 122, 143, 287, 313, 315.
+
+    Matas, Dr. Rudolf, 102, 152.
+
+    Matsue, 142, 168, 172-178.
+
+    McDermott, Mr., 73.
+
+    McDonald, Capt. Mitchell, 108, 126, 168, 267, 271, 276, 284, 287,
+      299, 324, 333.
+
+    Memphis, 88-92.
+
+    "Midwinter, Ozias," 60, 89, 98.
+
+    Mifflin, Houghton & Co., 208.
+
+    Millet, Francois, 62.
+
+    Mionoseki, ironclads at, 341.
+
+    Moje, 238.
+
+    Molyneux, Henry, and Mrs., 2, 23, 28, 30, 50, 69.
+
+    Montreal, 160.
+
+    "Moon Desire," 290.
+
+    Morris, William, 59.
+
+    "Mountain of Skulls," 145.
+
+    "My First Romance," 67.
+
+    "My Guardian Angel," 29.
+
+    Mythen, Kate, 28, 36.
+
+
+    NAGASAKI, 212, 232.
+
+    New Orleans, 60, 85, 93-101;
+      yellow fever at, 100;
+      Exposition at, 137.
+
+    New York, 131.
+
+    "Nightmare Touch," 28.
+
+    Nishi Okubo, 261, 269, 286 _et seq._
+
+    Nishida Sentaro, 168, 181, 184, 265, 345.
+
+
+    OKUMA, COUNT, 307.
+
+    Osaka, 238.
+
+    O Saki, 308.
+
+    Otani, 323.
+
+    Otokichi, 280, 308.
+
+    "Out of the East," 232, 243, 315.
+
+
+    PAPELLIER, DR., 243, 250, 270.
+
+    Pater, Walter, 59, 349.
+
+    Philadelphia, 131, 261.
+
+    Pre-Raphaelites, aims of, 59.
+
+    "Principles of Ethics" (Spencer), cited, 140.
+
+
+    RACHEL, picture of, 71, 72.
+
+    "Raven, The," 73.
+
+    Redhill, 30, 45.
+
+    "Romance of the Milky Way, A," 298.
+
+    Rossetti, D. G., 59.
+
+    Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 340.
+
+    Ruskin, 59, 288.
+
+
+    SACKVILLE, LIONEL, DUKE OF DORSET, 2.
+
+    "St. Ronite," 44.
+
+    Santa Maura, 1, 9.
+
+    Schurmann, J. G., 305, 306.
+
+    Seaton, Viscount, 7.
+
+    "Serenade, A," 146.
+
+    Setsu-ko (Koizumi), 307, 321.
+
+    "Shadowings," 284.
+
+    Shinto worship, 41, 144, 168.
+
+    "Shirabzoshi" or "Dancing Girl," 193.
+
+    Shunki Korei-sai, 319.
+
+    Spencer, Herbert, cited, 60, 139-143, 168, 324, 335.
+
+    Steinmetz, General, 118.
+
+    Stevenson, R. L., 28, 63, 289.
+
+    "Stray Leaves," 109, 126.
+
+    Suruga, 34.
+
+    "Sylvestre Bonnard," 43.
+
+
+    TAKATA, 25.
+
+    Tanabe, Professor, 312, 321 _et seq._, 328.
+
+    Tennyson, 59.
+
+    Thomson, Francis, 40.
+
+    "Toko, The," 204.
+
+    Tokyo, 67, 260 _et seq._, 313.
+
+    "Torn Letters," 129.
+
+    Toyama, Professor, 254.
+
+    Tramore, 2, 20, 28, 31, 33-39.
+
+    Treves, Sir Frederick, 153.
+
+    "Trilby," 63.
+
+    Tunison, Mr. Joseph, 22, 45, 61, 79, 152.
+
+    "Two Years in the French West Indies," 108, 152.
+
+    Tyndall, 60.
+
+
+    "UJO," 189.
+
+    Ume, Professor, 330.
+
+    Ushaw, 28, 29, 36, 40-51.
+
+    Ushigome, 274-285.
+
+
+    VICKERS, THOMAS, 74.
+
+    "Voodoo Queen," 85.
+
+
+    WASEDA UNIVERSITY, 301, 307.
+
+    Waterford, 34.
+
+    Watkin, Henry ("Dad"), 44, 65, 66, 70, 73, 90, 100, 112, 147, 162,
+      235, 258.
+
+    Watkin, Miss Effie, 258.
+
+    Weatherall, Mrs., quoted, 18, 19, 221.
+
+    Weldon, Charles, 159.
+
+    West Indies, Hearn in, 148 _et seq._
+
+    Westmeath, 2, 8.
+
+    Wetmore, Mrs. (Miss Bisland q. v.), 273, 282, 299, 305, 307.
+
+    Wexford, 36.
+
+    Whistler, James, 59, 63.
+
+    Wiseman, Cardinal, at Ushaw, 40.
+
+    Worthington, Mr., 106.
+
+    Wrennal, Father William, 46.
+
+
+    YAIDZU, 34, 279, 290.
+
+    "Yakumo," 221.
+
+    Yashiki garden, 260.
+
+    Yokohama, 270, 313.
+
+    Yone Noguchi, 185, 263, 301, 318, 334.
+
+    Young, Mr. Robert, 143, 247, 313.
+
+    Young, Mrs., 246.
+
+    "Yuko," 233.
+
+    Yvetot, 61.
+
+
+    ZOSHIGAYA, 278.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes.
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_.
+
+Passages in small caps are replaced by either Title case or ALL CAPS,
+depending on how the words were used.
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation preserved as in the original.
+
+The List of Illustrations was changed to match the captions of the
+illustrations.
+
+On page 51, the comma after "indirectly does me a right" was replaced
+with a period.
+
+On page 52, in the footnote "Lafacadio" was changed to "Lafcadio".
+
+On page 65, the [OE] ligature was replaced with "OE".
+
+On page 71, "acquiline" was changed to "aquiline".
+
+On page 82, "Marysville" was changed to "Maysville".
+
+On page 83, "indigant" was changed to "indignant".
+
+On page 118, the period inside the quote was changed to a comma.
+
+On page 120, "important person that" was changed to "important person
+than".
+
+On page 138, "Houkousai" was changed to "Hokusai".
+
+On page 145, "pyschological" was changed to "psychological".
+
+On page 163, "Hokousai" was changed to "Hokusai".
+
+On page 177, "adoped" was changed to "adopted".
+
+On page 202, "Lillian" was changed to "Lilliah".
+
+On page 203, the added spaces were in the original, to indicate missing
+words. Those missing spaces have been retained here.
+
+On page 210, "KOIZUME" was changed to "KOIZUMI".
+
+On page 245, "kizeru" was changed to "kiseru".
+
+On page 260, "bad" was changed to "had".
+
+On page 264, "spead" was changed to "spread".
+
+On page 275, "library,." was changed to "library,".
+
+On page 282, "Ultitimately" was changed to "Ultimately".
+
+On page 291, "condi tions" was changed to "conditions".
+
+On page 315, "out" was changed to "our".
+
+On page 334, "portaits" was changed to "portraits".
+
+On page 336, a closing quotation mark was places after "Finis:
+sweetness and sympathy."
+
+On page 353, "Theophile" was changed to "Theophile".
+
+On page 355, in the Index, the "Sackville" entry was moved to the "S"
+section and was identified with small caps as the first "S" word,
+instead of "St. Ronite", and "Shirabzoshi" was replaced with
+"Shirabyoshi".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lafcadio Hearn, by Nina H. Kennard
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAFCADIO HEARN ***
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