Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 7

There is not a hint in all he did that he had read a line of the great creators of literature,--the Greek dramatists, Dante, Goethe, Shakespere, and a hundred more; he could not give time to read, much less study them. His pretension of ability to teach English literature was soon recognized even by the j.a.panese, and it is well that over-zealous friends did not secure him a lectures.h.i.+p at Cornell University. To be sure, he never had time to study even the history of his own science and art,--but he never would have done so, it is plain, if leisure and opportunity had been offered him. The ideal and the rewards of scholars.h.i.+p never entered his mind. Perhaps it was best for his peculiar office and proficiency that he allowed all erudition to go unlooked-upon. And yet if he had been possessed of sufficient virility and objectivity of mind to have learned the j.a.panese language, what would the labour not have been worth? That he could not read a j.a.panese book or newspaper after fourteen years of life among the people is most disconcerting. It is a tribute to the amazing delicacy and receptiveness of his mind that while he could not speak to his wife or children in their own tongue, he should still have so accurately caught the j.a.panese spirit and so admirably conveyed it to us.

The history of Hearn's ghoulish pleasure in the gruesome and sensualistic, runs from the tan-yard horror and Cincinnati reportorial days, through the translated stories of the New Orleans epoch, to his "St. Anthony." In "Stray Leaves" it is but little softened, and yet the atmosphere is brightening. It glitters and flashes like vengeful lightning about the clouds of his mind with the Martinique epoch, etc.; but in the j.a.panese writing even the "Mountain of Skulls" and other stories are so far removed from reality that our disgust sinks to a smile of sighing wonder that the gruesome could still be so loved by him. It is only a few of the brutal and a small brutalized public that seeks such _contes drolatiques_ (without Balzac's wit, satire, and power, of course), and so again perforce, Hearn was weaned from his morbidities. Dominated by his developing art and also by the need to sell his writings, he thus rose, partly by the command of his readers, to the choice of less and less repulsive themes and methods, and, awed by the j.a.panese spirit of gentleness and beauty, he finally endowed their national soul-life with a prismatic glory which they themselves had hardly suspected.

Hearn deserted the G.o.d of religion, and, except in one respect, he was faithless to the G.o.d of ethics. He was, therefore, without any divinity.

For a mind that had no creative ability, that _must_ have its _subjects_ furnished to it, a mind whose sole function was to colour the data chosen or given from without,--this inner emptiness could only be deceived by but could not be satisfied with the inner emptiness of Spencerism. He acknowledged that religion was the mother of all civilization, arts, and laws, and that all social systems, arts, and laws, antique or modern, were begotten and nurtured by ethics,--and yet there was no reality in, no reason for the existence of either religion or ethics in this world of mechanics and of fatalism, grim and inexorable.

Hearn speaks somewhere of his aspiration to be considered a "thinker,"

and once he praises "science" as a source of data for working into the art forms of his beloved poetic prose. But science to him was as impossible as was he to polite society; Spencer gave him leave, he thought, to consider his atheism, irreligion, and sensualisticism as scientifically authorized, and logically justified. He was always hankering after the old heathen, even savage, G.o.ds of his father and mother; and every time he went Fantee with them, he came back to a saner world weakened and still more at war with himself. He always sought an impossible world where Teutonic worth and honour could supply a decadent Latin, with half-savage languor and never failing delights of the senses and of art,--art which, in the last a.n.a.lysis, was his only G.o.d. But his tragedy was that he always hastened to turn his G.o.d into a fetich, while even his mind caught disquieting glimpses of the awful truth that all genuine wors.h.i.+p abjures fetichism. As sensualism is the superst.i.tion of love, so fetichistic art is the superst.i.tion of true aesthetics.

For the most part, minds are mechanical not chemical compoundings, or if chemic, they are in very unstable equilibrium. There are strange and wayward traits, illogic and unfused to unity with the others. There may be psychopathic and isolation wards in the psyche, "retreats," and all manner of diseases of individual organs. Most people go Fantee, often or seldom, and are able to hide their fetichisms from even their best friends. If we observe ourselves at all, most of us wonder at the curious mix of self-contradictories in ourselves. The few whose souls and bodies are fused to clear-cut unity, the component metal melted to harmony in the foundry of Fate and of Purpose,--these clang loyally in absolute and precise tone-colour. In commoner folk the failure of the flux, and the flaws in the casting, have only a social significance, but with the Hearns, with thinkers and writers, the affair has an infinite purport.

Hearn could never make his writings and his art impulses square with his beloved materialistic, deterministic philosophy. He did not believe in soul or in souls, and yet his soul was always treating of souls, and showing the invisible thread of continuity which links souls to Soul.

Therefore he is always happiest when his _daimon_ breaks from the restraint of theory and fate and pictures the play of free spirit, of soul unconquered by fate, of life victorious over death in some sad way or bright.

Concerning Hearn's treatment of friends, editors, and publishers, as it bears sharply upon his literary character and productivity, as little as may or must be said: He was under bonds to Fate to abuse worst the majority of his friends who were most magnanimous, helpful, and kind to him personally, or who were most discriminating and encouraging toward his art and artistic ideals. To his former Cincinnati comrades, except the old printer-friend, he scarcely ever wrote after he left them, and the most faithful of these recently writes me: "I never pretended to be a friend to him; I was merely one to whom he resorted when all the rest cast him out. He never found me wanting, but he got few letters from me, and none that were flattering." "I used to love Matas" are Hearn's pitiful words. It is with sorrow and pain that we note the sudden cessation in 1887 of the letters to Krehbiel. This n.o.ble friend had drawn from Hearn a beautiful world of play and enduring memories, and one may be more than sure that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed.

Baker had been his most helpful and best friend, and yet for a fancied wrong Hearn wrote him a letter filled with insult and ruffianism which a gentleman could not answer, hardly forgive, and never forget. Did Hearn know anybody of character in the West Indies? To the greatest of American editors, the one who "discovered" him and introduced him to a national and international audience, who treated him with a sweet and gracious benignity, even after a shamelessness that is indescribable--to this good man there is not a published letter, although many, and many more, must exist. One day while at my house, Hearn rushed to his room, seized the man's picture on the wall, tore it in a hundred pieces, and danced and spat upon it in a furious rage. In subsequent letters to me he explained his hatred--how he broke his engagements, how he borrowed money from his loathed and insulted friend, how he got credit through him from his tailor, etc. Gently the abused one bore it all and without the least remonstrance, writing me, "Hearn has utterly cast me off; I was loath to part with him." Professor Chamberlain and others kindly explain the curious morbid psychology which Hearn had exhibited towards them. To the last, love and trust breathed from Hearn's letters to me, and yet I learn that to others long afterward he wrote of me with bitterness and malevolent injustice. And yet he had written me after I saw him for the last time, in this way: "Please don't write me at all, or expect me to write, for some months. I do not need any money. I have a good deal on my mind, and am apt, in consequence, to do very stupid or very unkind things in an unlucky moment." And then he wrote: "No, dear Gooley, I will never be indifferent to you! Never think that; I understand better than you suppose. If I am silent at intervals, never doubt me, dear teacher and brother; and you will find everything come right." How often is the pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving way to foolish, needless, and degrading inherited instincts at the expense of the higher life and usefulness! As to some who ludicrously boast of the long continuance of an intimate friends.h.i.+p, there are many letters of Hearn extant and unpublished which blow out that vanity with an amusing smile. The matter, generally, might not have so real an importance were it not that the publis.h.i.+ng of literature has a vast deal to do with literature, and, closely examined, Hearn's quarrels with editors, publishers, and the public, is a matter that reaches out astonis.h.i.+ngly both as regards himself, his books, and the interest in him, as well as beyond the question of Hearn or of any or all of his friends. Until one silent man consents to speak--which may never be--the discussion of the essence of the affair cannot be set forth in any detail. Pa.s.sages in Hearn's letters relating thereto should never have been published, or a hundred other things should have been as frankly published. When such publicity shall exist the reasons will be manifest why one publisher destroyed an entire fresh edition of one book of Hearn, why another acted differently, why one is praised or praises himself, why others are blamed, why some are silent although a word would end the injustice, etc. One phase may be noted in pa.s.sing:--Whatever Hearn's rights or wrongs as to the author's relations with publishers and editors, it was beyond the ken of his mind that one who may gloriously sacrifice all his own temporal blessings in striving after artistic excellence, has no right to ask the same altruism of those engaged in the publis.h.i.+ng business. Hearn blamed the crude world, and, for him, its representatives in the persons of editors and their masters, the publishers, for wis.h.i.+ng a certain kind of literature. As well blame the bookseller for not sending the book you had not ordered.

He who deliberately chooses to give the world a literature he knows it does not want, must accept the rejection and editing of his ma.n.u.scripts, and the absence of the world's cheques. He chose poverty and may not abuse them who allowed his choice to be realized. It is sad enough, but it is more than childish to grumble, more than ign.o.ble to rail.

The search for "inspiration," as he called it, was with Hearn constant and lifelong. Thus, early in his career, he wrote to his friend, Dr.

Matas:

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 wors.h.i.+ppers--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....

And again he wrote:

I think I _must_ get inspiration. The real secret of art is feeling. The highest form of that feeling is that which the splendour of Nature gives--the thrill and awe of terrible beauty. This is that inexplicable communication of the mind with the Unknowable that has created the religious sense. Said a friend to me yesterday, who is not a believer:--"I stood in the Alps at sunrise, and I knew what religion meant." And I think that pa.s.sage in Wilson on Fetichism superb where he says that the sight of the splendid sky first created the religious sense. Terribly perverted this sense has been, no doubt; but it belongs, I fancy, to those things which are eternal, and will have many a glorious avatar before our planet floats off into the cemetery of dead worlds. It is, I believe, the most powerful possible motive for true modern poetry--in harmony with science and scientific faith; and that is what I am going to look for.

Such quotations could be multiplied indefinitely, but toward the end they become begging, and moaning in character. The "inspiration" is diligently hunted, hungrily waited for; at last the failure in its coming grows pitiful and tragic. For what is inspiration? If, with the fatal fas.h.i.+on of our fas.h.i.+onable fatalism, we think "we have outgrown all that," all that which was real and genuine inspiring, we at least cannot outgrow that which bred the belief in the inspiring, the trust in spirit and in spiritual truths and forces. Is it all primitive childishness, this faith in a real breathing-in of the higher life into our more carnal hearts and minds? Far from it! It is the veriest of verities, and the _deniers_ of the conditions of inspiration dry up the springs of that "inspiration" which they so hungrily seek. The semblance cannot be without the reality. It will not come, lasting and inexhaustible, by any trick of literary technic. Out of the light of common day is not born that which never was on any sea or sh.o.r.e. Place, time, circ.u.mstance, are not, as Hearn thought, the G.o.ds of "Inspiration." "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and even a heathen G.o.d would hardly visit the altar with his sacred fire if the priests mocked at the power and the very existence of the deity. It is most plain that Hearn early and zealously studied the Bible--hundreds of allusions bear witness of the fact--and that he learned from it the revivification of words, the use of phrase, metaphor, belief, something of the art of reaching in toward the depths of men's moral and religious nature and experience: but all, just so evidently, as a literary art, a _tour de force_, the skill of the expert workman, handling them as symbols for the sake of the skill, while smiling scornfully at any belief in their reality. Language is the most spirit-like creation of man's mind, the thing nearest him, woven out of his own soul-substance, instinct with his life, haunted with his love, his hate, his suffering.

Playing with words, using them as art-stuff, regardless of the experience and love and suffering which gave them conceiving and gives them quickening, is likely to bring upon the artist a sad revenge.

Pleading in vain for "inspiration," Hearn died a score or more of years before he should have died.

It should be emphasized that Hearn had but one possible way, chosen or compelled, to make a living. His terrible myopia shut him out from every calling except that of a writer. Moreover, leaving aside the danger to his little vision from so much ocular labour, he had other and almost insurmountable handicaps as a poet or maker of literature: He had no original thing to say, for he was entirely without creative power, and had always to borrow theme and plot. Then he had never seen form, knew almost nothing of it as it exists out there, so that his sole technic was that of a colourist, and also to endow our dead and dying words with life--a "ghostly" life it was, and as he chose it to be--but living it a.s.suredly was. That he over-coloured his pictures, that he over-sensualized his words, of this there is no question--but monotones and senescents that we are, let us not smile too superciliously! Let us learn; and above all let us enjoy!

For, his alone was the palette of the painter of the afterglow of Earth's last sunset. And his the unique miracle of clothing with the hues of a hopeless rainbow, the faint reverberations of bells far sunk in the wreck and wrack of ruined centuries; of reintoning the prayers of Nirvana-entering souls; of remoaning dear ancient and expiring griefs; of seeing with shut eyes the sad smiles of never-answered loves and never-meeting lovers. With him, hushed, we hearken to Muezzin Bilal's call from his tower, to the broken sobs of a dancing-girl's pa.s.sion, or to the plaintive beggings of dying babes for the cold b.r.e.a.s.t.s of dead mothers.

CHAPTER VII.--"IN GHOSTLY j.a.pAN"

PERHAPS I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt j.a.pan had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during the stay with me. Beyond question, Mr. Lowell's volume had a profound influence in turning his attention to j.a.pan and greatly aided me in my insistent urging him to go there. In sending the book Hearn wrote me this letter:

Gooley!--I have found a marvellous book,--a book of books!--a colossal, splendid, G.o.dlike book. You must read every line of it. Tell me how I can send it. For heaven's sake don't skip a word of it. The book is called "The Soul of the Far East," but its t.i.tle is smaller than its imprint.

HEARNEYBOY.

P.S.--Let something else go to H--, and read this book instead. May G.o.d eternally bless and infinitely personalize the man who wrote this book! Please don't skip one solitary line of it, and don't delay reading it,--because something, much! is going to go out of this book into your heart and life and stay there! I have just finished this book and feel like John in Patmos,--only a d----d sight better. He who shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off and his name blotted out of the Book of Life.[13]

[13] Mr. Percival Lowell's book soon reached me containing the inscription: "To George M. Gould, with best love of his spiritual pupil, L. H." I have intentionally retained colloquialisms in these excerpts, the indications of our familiarity, etc., to give a glimpse into the heart of the affectionate and sweet-natured man.

There is not much to say about the j.a.panese period. The splendid books speak for themselves. There is little in the almost valueless letters that interest the literature-lover and give him concern about the literature-maker. There is one short page[14] which is worth the remainder of the book. The development of inborn characteristics goes on, despite the grafted soul, almost as fatalistically as Hearn would have wished, and in this instance in accordance with his theory of the unalterability of character. But this period is of surpa.s.sing interest solely because of the beautiful books and articles written. To a.n.a.lyze them is both impossible and undesirable. They are for our enjoyment, and after us generations will be delighted by them.

[14] _Life and Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 337 and 338.

Hearn's views and practices as regards love and the feminine are not of sympathetic interest to those who think that monogamy is good and advisable. He hopes his son will not follow in his father's footsteps as regards every damozel in his path, and in this respect become the "disgraceful person he [the father] used to be." He "half suspects" the Oriental husband is right in loving his wife least of all others related to or dependent upon him, and quotes approvingly unquotable things about the laws of (s.e.xual) nature, managing, _more suo_, to make beautiful the pursuit of beauty "in vain." Than the other, the woman-beauty of soul is the lesser. "It doesn't make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife. The less intellectual the more lovable,--for intellectual converse a man _can't_ have with women." When contemplating legal marriage with "his wife" in 1892, he calculates shrewdly the advantages of the plan.

He arrived in j.a.pan in 1890 and in less than two years "my little wife and I have saved nearly 2,000 j.a.panese dollars between us." When he has made her independent he will quit teaching, and "wander about awhile and write 'sketches' at $10.00 per page." In 1893 he found difficulties in registering the birth of his son. Hearn was still a British subject. If the boy should be a j.a.panese citizen, the registry must be in the mother's name; if in the father's name, he would become a foreigner. To become a j.a.panese citizen would mean for Hearn a great reduction in his salary as a teacher under Government pay. "Why was I so foolish as to have a son?" "Really _I_ don't know." In 1895 he "cuts the puzzle" by becoming a j.a.panese citizen, "losing all chance of Government employment at a living salary." Immediately Hearn "hopes to see a United Orient yet bound into one strong alliance against our cruel Western Civilization,"

"against what is called Society and what is called Civilization."

For those who boasted of being his friends, it seems an astonis.h.i.+ng thing that they should make Hearn portray his vices, his moral nakedness, so publicly. Of course he did not dream of the _expose_. It is to his merit, however, that he would place the truth boldly and baldly before his friends. He confesses that the scandalous parts of a book are what he likes best, that he is "a Fraud," "a vile Latin,"

etc.,--"_Vive le monde antique!_" He is "_not respectable_."

"Carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--bra.s.s bands--churches! how I hate them!! Would I had been born savage; the curse of civilized cities is upon me." He admits that he "cannot understand the moral side, of course," and urges that "the most serious necessity of life is not to take the moral side of it seriously. We must play with it, as with an _hetaira_." It is needless to add that in this composition and resolve lay Hearn's weakness, his tragedy, and his missing of "greatness." A man so willed must finally see that it is the source of pitiful instabilities and waywardness. "I have been at heart everything by turns." He learns the old trick of blaming "Fate" and "the other fellow;" he is hard-pushed, ignored, starved, morally humiliated:--"the less a man has to do with his fellow-men the better;" "it becomes plain why men cannot be good to one another;" character may not be bettered or changed; "no line exists between life and not-life;" "likes and dislikes never depart;" if Spanish, Italian, or French (instead of English, German, or American) he "can be at home with a villain," etc. Finally there comes that burst of frankness:--"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?" Then increase the complaints of "treachery," the wish for "justice," the desire to go away, somewhere, anywhere; and the limit of the amazing is reached in praising _The Conservator_ and _The Whim_ for bravery and goodness, and in hating Virchow thoroughly. Was Virchow so loathsome because this great scientist found an impa.s.sable demarcation between life and the not-life?--"all cells are derived from cells." Is it surprising that his old imagined enemies, the Jesuits, are believed to be hidden in every place, lurking to thwart every ambition or success, even to kill him?[15]

[15] Those who care may see how this suspicion obfuscates his mind in an article against some of Hearn's statements, by Henry Thurston, in _The Messenger_, January 1906.

No man is wholly bad who loves children, none wholly good who does not love them. In a nation of child-lovers, as Hearn's j.a.panese writings bear witness, he began to catch glimpses of truth hitherto unrecognized.

Concerning his eldest son (a fourth child was expected in 1903) Hearn wrote: "No man can possibly know what life means until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole Universe changes,--and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before." Naturally he was drawn to the rich child-lore and fairy tales of j.a.pan. With great difficulty I have secured copies of a number of fairy stories edited by him and published in j.a.pan by T. Hasegawa, Tokyo, in a style beautiful and dainty beyond superlatives. As mine are probably the only ones in our country, I have ventured to copy herewith two of the tales:--

THE OLD WOMAN WHO LOST HER DUMPLING

Long, long ago, there was a funny old woman, who liked to laugh and to make dumplings of rice-flour.

One day, while she was preparing some dumplings for dinner, she let one fall; and it rolled into a hole in the earthen floor of her little kitchen and disappeared. The old woman tried to reach it by putting her hand down the hole, and all at once the earth gave way, and the old woman fell in.

She fell quite a distance, but was not a bit hurt; and when she got up on her feet again, she saw that she was standing on a road, just like the road before her house. It was quite light down there; and she could see plenty of rice-fields, but no one in them. How all this happened, I cannot tell you. But it seems that the old woman had fallen into another country.

The road she had fallen upon sloped very much; so, after having looked for her dumpling in vain, she thought it must have rolled farther away down the slope. She ran down the road to look, crying:

"My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?"

After a little while she saw a stone Jizo standing by the roadside, and she said:

"O Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"

Jizo answered:

"Yes, I saw your dumpling rolling by me down the road. But you had better not go any farther, because there is a wicked Oni living down there, who eats people."

But the old woman only laughed, and ran on farther down the road, crying: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And she came to another statue of Jizo, and asked it:

"O kind Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"

And Jizo said:

"Yes, I saw your dumpling go by a little while ago. But you must not run any farther, because there is a wicked Oni down there, who eats people."

But she only laughed, and ran on, still crying out: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And she came to a third Jizo, and asked it:

"O dear Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"

But Jizo said: