Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 13

"One great secret of his success in interpreting the j.a.panese mind and temperament lay in his patience in seeking out and studying minutely the little things of a people said to be great in such. As Amenomori says of Hearn's mind, it 'called forth life and poetry out of dust.'" (327.)[20]

[20] The numbers refer to the corresponding items in the Bibliography.

"As an interpreter of the j.a.panese heart, mind, hand and soul, Mr. Hearn has no superior. But he will not convert those who in health of body and mind love the landmarks of the best faith of the race. It is very hard to make fog and miasmatic exhalations, even when made partly luminous with rhetoric, attractive to the intellect that loves headlands and mountain-tops. The product of despair can never compete in robust minds with the product of faith." (357.)

"Sympathy and exquisiteness of touch are the characteristics of Mr.

Hearn's genius. He is a chameleon, glowing with the hue of outer objects or of inward moods, or altogether iridescent. He becomes translucent and veined like a moth on a twig, or mottled as if with the protective golden browns of fallen leaves. We may not look for architectonic or even plastic powers. His is not the mind which constructs of inner necessity, which weaves plots and schemes, or thinks of its frame as it paints. He attempts no epic of history. The delver for sociologic or theologic spoil must seek deeper waters....

"In his later books the all-potent influence of j.a.panese restraint seems to have refined and subdued his wonderful style to more perfect harmonies....

"His chapters are long or short as are his moods. There is little organic unity in them; no scientific aim or philosophic grasp rounds them into form. Even his paragraphs have little cohesion. Speaking of the forming of his sentences, he himself has compared it to the focussing of an image, each added word being like the turn of a delicate screw." (306.)

"The secret of the charm that we feel to such a marked degree in Mr.

Lafcadio Hearn's volumes is that, in contrast to other writers, he does take the j.a.panese very seriously indeed." (316.)

"To the details of life and thought in j.a.pan Mr. Hearn's soul seems everywhere and at all times responsive. He catches in his eye and on his pen minute motes scarcely noticeable by the keen natives themselves."

(367.)

"He has written nothing on j.a.pan equal in length to his tales of West Indian life. But while we deplore this reserve of a writer who possesses every quality of style, except humour, we have reason to be grateful for whatever he gives us." (307.)

"The matchless prose and the sympathy of Mr. Hearn." (324.)

"Mr. Hearn has the sympathetic temperament, the minute mental vision, the subdued style peculiar to all that is good in j.a.panese art and literature, needed for the accomplishment of a labour which to him has been a labour of love indeed. Here we have no mawkish sentimentality, no excessive laudation, on the one hand; on the other, no Occidental harshness, no Occidental ignorance of the sweet mystery of Eastern ways of life and modes of thought. What this most charming of writers on Far Eastern subjects has seen all may see, but only those can understand who are endowed with a like faculty of perception of un.o.btrusive beauty, and a like power, it must be added, of patient and prolonged study of common appearances and everyday events." (295.)

"A man has just died, intelligent and generous, who had succeeded in reconciling in his heart, the clear, rational ideas of the West together with the obscure deep sense of Extreme--Asia: Lafcadio Hearn. In the hospitality of his recipient soul, high European civilization and high j.a.panese civilization found a meeting-place; harmonized; completed, one in the other....

"In English-speaking countries, especially in the United States, Lafcadio Hearn already enjoys a just reputation. The lovers of the exotic, esteem him as equal to Kipling or Stevenson. In France, the _Revue de Paris_ has begun to make him known, by publishing some of his best articles, elegantly and faithfully translated. His budding fame is destined to increase, as Europe takes a greater interest in the arts and the thoughts of the Extreme-Orient. His prose, exact and harmonious, will be admired as one of the finest since Ruskin wrote: his very personal style, at the same time subtle and powerful, will be noted: he will be especially admired for his delicate and profound intelligence of that j.a.panese civilization which, to us, remains so mysterious. What characterizes the talent of Lafcadio Hearn, that which gives it its precious originality, is the rare mixture of scientific precision and idealistic enthusiasm: his work might justly be ent.i.tled Truth and Poesy: 'In reading these essays,' says one of our best existing j.a.panese scholars, Professor Chamberlain, 'one feels the truth of Richard Wagner's statement: "_Alles verstandniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe._" (All understanding comes to us only through Love.) If Lafcadio Hearn understands j.a.pan best, and makes it better understood than any other writer, it is because he loves it best.'

"Lafcadio Hearn describes with intelligence, with love all aspects of j.a.panese life: Nature and inhabitants; landscapes, animals and flowers; material life and life moral; cla.s.sic Art and popular literature; philosophies, religions and superst.i.tions. He awakens in us an exquisite feeling of old aristocratic and feudal j.a.pan: he explains to us the prodigious revolution that modern j.a.pan has created in thirty years....

"Hearn has consecrated to the study of j.a.panese art some of his most curious psychological a.n.a.lyses.

"Lafcadio Hearn takes a deep interest in the religious life of the j.a.panese. He studies with the minutest exactness the ancient customs of Shintoism, high moral precepts of Buddhism, and also the popular superst.i.tions that hold on, for instance, to the worship of foxes, and to the idea of pre-existence." (393.)

"To a certain large cla.s.s of his adopted countrymen, his hatred of Christianity, which was p.r.o.nounced long before he went to j.a.pan, and his fondness for Oriental cults of all kinds, was recommendation. But it is still an open question whether he did harm or good to the j.a.panese by his advocacy of their superst.i.tions....

"Hearn's books are little known to the mult.i.tude. But they are familiar to an influential cla.s.s the world over. In him j.a.pan has lost a powerful and flattering advocate, and the English world one of its masters in style." (332.)

"Mr. Hearn was not a philosopher or a judicial student of life. He was a gifted, born impressionist, with a style resembling that of the French Pierre Loti. His stories and descriptions are delicate or gorgeous word pictures of the subtler and more elusive qualities of Oriental life."

(293.)

"His art is the power of suggestion through perfect restraint.... He stands and proclaims his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic sense of j.a.pan, Mr. 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.... In these essays and tales, whose substance is so strangely mingled together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of j.a.pan and the relentless science of Europe, I read vaguely of many things which hitherto were quite dark." (308.)

"He brings to the study of all aspects of j.a.panese life, intelligence, and love; he also sets sail in his descriptions and a.n.a.lyses towards a general theory on life; he is a j.a.panizing psychologist: he is also a philosopher....

"At all events, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of recalling powerfully to the Europeans of Europe the importance, often misunderstood, of Eastern civilization. No one better than this j.a.panizing enthusiast to make us feel what there is of narrowness in our habitual conception of the world, in our individualistic literature, misunderstanding too much the influence of the Past in our anthropocentric art, neglecting Nature too often, penetrated too 'singly' in our cla.s.sic philosophy with Greco-Latin and Christian influences. 'Till now,' says Lafcadio Hearn very forcibly, 'having lived only in one hemisphere, we have thought but half thoughts.' We should enlarge our hearts and our minds by taking into our circle of culture, all the art and all the thought of the extreme East.

"From the philosophical view-point, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of calling attention to the high value of Shintoism, and above all of Buddhism. His work deserves to exercise an influence on the religious ideas of the West. If religion can no longer occupy any place in the intellectual life of humanity, more and more invaded by science, she can subsist a long time yet, perhaps always, in her sentimental life."

(392.)

"For that role [as interpreter of j.a.pan] he was eminently unfitted both by temperament and training. Indeed he was not slow to recognize his lack of the judicial faculty, and on one occasion acknowledged that he is a 'creature of extremes.' ... But Hearn often succeeds in reaching the heart of things by his faculty of sympathy, in virtue of which alone his books deserve perusal; when he fails it is because of a lack of the unimpa.s.sioned judicial faculty, a tendency to subordinate reason to feeling, an inclination to place sympathy in the position of judge rather than guide." (359.)

"Lafcadio Hearn not only buried himself in the j.a.panese world, but gave his ashes to the soil so often devastated by earthquake, typhoon, tidal wave and famine, but ever fertile in blooms of fancy which lies under the River of Heaven. The air of Nippon, poor in ozone, is overpopulated by goblins. No writer has ever excelled this child of Greece and Ireland in interpreting the weird fancies of peasant and poet in the land of bamboo and cherry flowers.... Hearn's life seemed crushed under 'the horror of infinite Possibility.' Hence perhaps the weird fascination of his work and style." (348.)

EPITOMES

AVATAR (281).--It was during the Cincinnati period that Hearn made this--his first translation from the French. Writing of it in 1886, he says:--

I have a project on foot--to issue a series of translations of archaeological and artistic French romance--Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint-Antoine"; De Nerval's "Voyage en Orient"; Gautier's "Avatar"; Loti's most extraordinary African and Polynesian novels; and Beaudelaire's "Pet.i.ts Poemes en Prose."

But three years later, he writes:--

The work of Gautier cited by you--"Avatar"--was my first translation from the French. I never could find a publisher for it, however, and threw the MS. away at last in disgust. It is certainly a wonderful story; but the self-styled Anglo-Saxon has so much--prudery that even this innocent phantasy seems to shock his sense of the "proper."

LA TENTATION DE SAINT-ANTOINE (282) was probably translated at about the same time. Hearn failed to find a publisher who would take it, but the ma.n.u.script is still in my possession. Hearn's own complete _scenario_, together with a description of the ma.n.u.script, is given on another page.

I quote from Hearn about this work:--

The original is certainly one of the most exotically strange pieces of writing in any language, and weird beyond description.

Of his own translation, he writes:--

The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed. That serpent-scene, the crucified lions, the breaking of the chair of gold, the hideous battles about Carthage,--these pages contain pictures that ought not to remain entombed in a foreign museum.

The winter of 1877, the year Hearn arrived in New Orleans, he corresponded with the Cincinnati _Commercial_ under the name of "Ozias Midwinter" (219). Excerpts from this series of letters are given in the chapter, "The New Orleans Period."

ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS (20) was the first book to be published. The translations were made during the latter part of the Cincinnati period, but the volume did not appear until some years later, while Hearn was in New Orleans. It was prepared at the hour when his craving for the exotic and weird was at its height. From the opening word to the last the six stories are one long Dionysian revel of an Arabian Night's Dream, and within their pages it is not difficult to feel that "one is truly dead only when one is no longer loved." What an exotic group of names it is:--Cleopatra, "she that made the whole world's bale and bliss;"

Clarimonde,

"Who was famed in her lifetime As the fairest of women;"

Arria Marcella; the Princess Hermonthis; Omphale; and the one "fairer than all daughters of men, lovelier than all fantasies realized in stone"--Nyssia. It is a tapestry woven of the lights and jewels and pa.s.sion of an antique world. "You will find in Gautier," Hearn writes, "a perfection of melody, a warmth of word colouring, a voluptuous delicacy;" "Gautier could create mosaics of word jewellery without equals." Hearn's "pet stories" are "Clarimonde" and "Arria Marcella." Is it strange that he should delight in these beautiful vampires?

In this work, and in the tales to follow, we already perceive that colour is to become a sort of a fetich to be worshipped. Here in the studio of another artist, he serves his first apprenticeship, and from the highly toned palette of Gautier he learns how to mix and lay on the colours that he himself is later to use so richly.

In speaking of this book, a critic says:--

"His learning and his inspiration were wholly French in these productions, as also in what was his first and in some ways his best book, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and other tales translated from Theophile Gautier. While Hearn was faithful to his original, he also improved upon it, and many a scholar who knows both French and English has confessed under the rose that Gautier is outdone." (332.)

Of his work, Hearn writes:--

You asked me about Gautier. I have read and possess nearly all his works; and before I was really mature enough for such an undertaking I translated his six most remarkable short stories. The work contains, I regret to say, several shocking errors, and the publishers refused me the right to correct the plates. The book remains one of the sins of my literary youth, but I am sure my judgment of the value of the stories was correct.

While preparing his next book, Hearn published in the _Century_, "The Scenes of Cable's Romances" (220). In this article he vivifies the quarters and dwellings that Mr. Cable in his delightful stories had already made famous.

THE FIRST MUEZZIN, BILaL (405), was written in the fall of 1883, during the New Orleans period. It is a beautiful, serious piece of work, and is written with the fine, sonorous quality that such a theme should inspire. That it was a labour of love is shown in Hearn's letters written at its inception to Mr. Krehbiel, who was an invaluable aid to him in compiling its musical part. "Bilal" was probably published finally in the _Times-Democrat_, after being refused by _Harper's_, the _Century_, and some others.

The traveller slumbering for the first time within the walls of an Oriental city, and in the vicinity of a minaret, can scarcely fail to be impressed by the solemn beauty of the Mohammedan Call to Prayer. If he have worthily prepared himself, by the study of book and of languages, for the experiences of Eastern travel, he will probably have learned by heart the words of the sacred summons, and will recognize their syllables in the sonorous chant of the Muezzin,--while the rose-coloured light of an Egyptian or Syrian dawn expands its flush to the stars. Four times more will he hear that voice ere morning again illuminates the east:--under the white blaze of noon; at the sunset hour, when the west is fervid with incandescent gold and vermilion; in the long after-glow of orange and emerald fires; and, still later, when a million astral lamps have been lighted in the vast and violet dome of G.o.d's everlasting mosque.