Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 20

"But the most beautiful of all, 'A Dancing Girl,' is drawn from the chronicles of that far-off past, from which, say what one may, he is certainly wise in drawing his inspirations. It is the story of a courtesan in love.

"At the height of her celebrity, this idol of a capital disappears from public life, and n.o.body knows why. Leaving fortune behind, she flies with a poor youth who loves her. They build for themselves a little house in the mountains, and there exist apart from the world, one for the other. But the lover dies one cold winter, and she remains alone, with no other consolation than to dance for him every evening in the deserted house. For he loved to see her dance, and he must still take pleasure in it. Therefore, daily, she places on the memorial altar the accustomed offerings, and at night she dances decked out in the same finery as when she was the delight of a large city. And the day comes, when old, decrepit, dying, reduced to beggary, she carries her superb costume faded with time, to a painter who had seen her in the days of her beauty, that he may accept it in exchange for a portrait made from memory, which shall be placed before the altar always bearing offerings, that her beloved may ever see her young, the most beautiful of the _shirabyashi_, and that he may forgive her for not being able to dance any more.

"This _shirabyashi_, from the distance of time, appears to us here, clothed with I know not what of hieratical dignity, such as the modern _geisha_ could never possess. Lafcadio Hearn in no wise pretends in the pages he devotes to these latter, to idealize them beyond measure. They appear under his pen as pretty animals somewhat dangerous; but is it not their calling to be so? Whatever be the rank of the j.a.panese woman, he only speaks of her with an extreme discretion, and with a caution that one would look for in vain in the portrait of _Mme. Chrysantheme_. The subtle voluptuousness of his style is never extended to the scenes he reproduces; it is a style immaterial to a rare degree; he knows how to make us understand what he means, without one word to infringe those proprieties that are dear to the j.a.panese, even more than virtue itself.

And to believe him, the young, well-brought-up girl, the honest wife, are in j.a.pan the most perfect types of femininity that he has ever met in any part of the world;--he, who has travelled so much. Opinions formed superficially by globe-trotters on this subject that he scarcely glances at because of respect, arouse as much indignation in him as could they in the j.a.panese themselves. Evidently he has penetrated into their inner life, into the mystery of their thoughts, into their hidden springs of action, to the point of partic.i.p.ating in their feelings."

(390.)

From Hoki to Oki there is much to learn about the landscapes of Western and Central j.a.pan; and Hearn gives many legends, and many more impressions and intimate glimpses.

As there are only walls of thin paper separating the lives of these j.a.panese people, no privacy can exist. Really everything is done in public, even your thoughts must be known. And it never occurs to a j.a.panese that there should be any reason for living un.o.bserved. This must show a rare moral condition, and is understood only by those who appreciate the charm of the j.a.panese character, its goodness, and its politeness.

No one endeavours to expand his own individuality by belittling his fellow; no one tries to make himself appear a superior being: any such attempt would be vain in a community where the weaknesses of each are known to all, where nothing can be concealed or disguised, and where affectation could only be regarded as a mild form of insanity.

Hearn speaks of the strange public curiosity which his presence aroused at Urago. It was not a rude curiosity; in fact, one so gentle that he could not wish the gazers rebuked. But so insistent did it become that he had to close his doors and windows to prevent his being watched while he was asleep.

Kinjuro, the ancient gardener, knows a great many things about souls.

"No one is by the G.o.ds permitted to have more souls than nine."

Kinjuro also knows legends about ghosts and goblins.

An essay penetrating the very heart of the j.a.panese, is the chapter on the "j.a.panese Smile." It crowns Hearn's work as a superb interpretation of j.a.panese soul-life. This smile is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of self-sacrifice. It is metaphysically and psychologically exquisite. It is an etiquette which for generations has been cultivated. It was a smile, _in origin_, however, demanded by hard heathen G.o.ds of the victims they sacrificed; and, in history, it was demanded of the subject race by the early conquerors. If refused, then off came their heads! The smile is born with the j.a.panese child, and is nurtured through all the growing years.

The smile is taught like the bow; like the prostration; like that little sibilant sucking-in of the breath which follows, as a token of pleasure, the salutation to a superior; like all the elaborate and beautiful etiquette of the old courtesy.

The j.a.panese believe that one should always turn one's happiest face to people. It is a wrong to cause them to share your sorrow or misfortune, and so hurt or sadden them. One should never look serious. It is not only unkind but extremely rude to show one's personal griefs or anger: these feelings should always be hidden. Even though it is death one must face, it is a duty to smile bravely.

It was with such a smile that the dying boy Shida wrote and pasted upon the wall over his bed:--

Thou, my Lord-Soul, dost govern me. Thou knowest that I cannot now govern myself. Deign, I pray thee, to let me be cured speedily. Do not suffer me to speak much. Make me to obey in all things the command of the physician.

This ninth day of the eleventh month of the twenty-fourth year of Meiji.

From the sick body of Shida to his Soul.

The key to the mystery of the most unaccountable smiles is j.a.panese politeness. The servant sentenced to dismissal for a fault prostrates himself, and asks for pardon with a smile. That smile indicates the very reverse of callousness or insolence: "Be a.s.sured that I am satisfied with the great justice of your honourable sentence, and that I am aware of the gravity of my fault. Yet my sorrow and my necessity have caused me to indulge the unreasonable hope that I may be forgiven for my great rudeness in asking pardon." The youth or girl beyond the age of childish tears when punished for some error, receives the punishment with a smile which means: "No evil feeling arises in my heart; much worse than this my fault has deserved."

This quality, which has become as natural to the j.a.panese as the very breath of his body, is the sweet tonic-note of his whole character.

_Sayonara!_ Across the waters echoes the cry, _Manzai, Manzai!_ (Ten thousand years to you! ten thousand years!). Hearn is leaving. He is going far away. His pupils write expressing their sorrow and regret. He sends them a letter thanking them for their gift of a beautiful sword, and in a loving farewell says:--

May you always keep fresh within your hearts those impulses of generosity and kindliness and loyalty which I have learned to know so well, and of which your gift will ever remain for me the graceful symbol!

And a symbol not only of your affection and loyalty as students to teachers, but of that other beautiful sense of duty expressed, when so many of you wrote down for me, as your dearest wish, the desire to die for His Imperial Majesty, your Emperor. That wish is holy: it means perhaps more than you know, or can know, until you shall have become much older and wiser.

This is an era of great and rapid change; and it is probable that many of you, as you grow up, will not be able to believe everything that your fathers believed before you, though I sincerely trust you will at least continue always to respect the faith, even as you still respect the memory, of your ancestors.

But however much the life of New j.a.pan may change about you, however much your own thoughts may change with the times, never suffer that n.o.ble wish you expressed to me to pa.s.s away from your souls. Keep it burning there, clear and pure as the flame of the little lamp that glows before your household shrine.

OUT OF THE EAST[31] (8), followed "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan." The charm of the first impression is waning.

[31] Copyright, 1895, by Lafcadio Hearn; and published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

In a letter Hearn writes:--

Every day, it strikes me more and more how little I shall ever know of the j.a.panese. I have been working hard at a new book, which is now half finished, and consists of philosophical sketches chiefly. It will be a very different book from the "Glimpses," and will show you how much the j.a.panese world has changed for me. I imagine that sympathy and friendship are almost impossible for any foreigner to obtain,--because of the amazing difference in the psychology of the two races. We only guess at each other without understanding.

In another letter, speaking of the t.i.tle for this book, he continues:--

It was suggested only by the motto of the Oriental Society, "_Ex Oriente lux._" ... The simpler the t.i.tle, and the vaguer--in my case--the better: the vagueness touches curiosity. Besides, the book is a vague thing.

The _Academy_, writing of "Out of the East," says:--

"Each book marks a longer step towards the Buddhist mysticism, wherein we have lost our poet. 'The Stone Buddha,' in the first mentioned book, is a dreamy dialogue between the wisdom of the West; Science, with her theories of evolution, revolution and dissolution; Buddhism, with its re-birth on re-rebirth; and Nirvana at the end. This thing also is vanity. As there can be no end, so there can be no beginning; even Time is an illusion, and there is nothing new beneath a hundred million suns." (286.)

The old charm of word colour sparkles in "The Dream of a Summer Day."

Mile after mile I rolled along that sh.o.r.e, looking into the infinite light. All was steeped in blue,--a marvellous blue, like that which comes and goes in the heart of a great sh.e.l.l.

Glowing blue sea met hollow blue sky in a brightness of electric fusion; and vast blue apparitions--the mountains of Higo--angled up through the blaze, like ma.s.ses of amethyst. What a blue transparency! The universal colour was broken only by the dazzling white of a few high summer clouds, motionlessly curled above one phantom peak in the offing. They threw down upon the water snowy tremulous lights. Midges or ships creeping far away seemed to pull long threads after them,--the only sharp lines in all that hazy glory. But what divine clouds! White purified spirits of clouds, resting on their way to the beat.i.tude of Nirvana? Or perhaps the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago?

The gnat of the soul of me flitted out into that dream of blue, 'twixt sea and sun,--hummed back to the sh.o.r.e of Suminoye through the luminous ghosts of fourteen hundred summers.

And Hearn tells with charm why "the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago," and also of the old, old woman who drank too deeply of the magical waters of youth.

Reviewing the present volume, the _Spectator_ remarks:--

"The main drift of his books, however, is to bring into view not so much the glories of j.a.panese sunlight or the charms of animate or inanimate Nature, on which it falls, as the prevalence, at any rate in extensive sections of j.a.panese society, of modes of thought and standards of conduct which, though often widely apart from our own, demand the respect of every candid Englishman. And certainly in this endeavour he meets with a large measure of success. His account of the essays written and the questions asked by the members of his cla.s.s in English language and literature at the Government college, or Higher Middle School, of Kyushu, discloses not only what must be regarded as a very good development of general intelligence among those young men, but a moral tone which in many respects is quite as high, though with interesting differences in point of view, as would be expected among English boys or young men in the upper forms of our great public-schools or at the Universities. Of course, what boys or young men write for or say to their masters and tutors cannot by any means always be taken as sure evidence of their inner feelings or of the character of their daily life. But, so far as one can judge, Hearn's pupils appear to have given him their confidence, and what he tells us of them may therefore reasonably be taken without much discount. It certainly ill.u.s.trates an attractive simplicity of character and thought, not untouched by poetic imagination, together with a high development of family affection and strong sense of family duty, and also a remarkably high level of patriotic feeling. This spirit is apparently inherited from the old military cla.s.s of the island of Kyushu, and it is not surprising to hear that rich men at a distance are keen to give their sons the opportunity of acquiring the Kyushu 'tone.' Towards the close of his book Mr. Hearn gives an extremely interesting account of a farewell visit paid him in the autumn of 1894 by an old pupil who had entered the army after leaving college, and had been placed, at his own request, in one of the divisions ordered for service in Corea:--

"And now I am so glad," he exclaimed, his face radiant with a soldier's joy, "we go to-morrow." Then he blushed again, as if ashamed of having uttered his frank delight. I thought of Carlyle's deep saying, that never pleasures, but only suffering; and death are the lures that draw true hearts. I thought also--what I could not say to any j.a.panese--that the joy in the lad's eyes was like nothing I had ever seen before, except the caress in the eyes of a lover on the morning of his bridal.

"A beautiful thought, the reader will agree; but why could it not be uttered to a j.a.panese? A good deal will be found on this subject in Mr.

Hearn's book, and, as we have indicated, we do not think it all holds together. His cla.s.s of students, we learn, professed to think it 'very, very strange' that there should be so much in English novels about love and marrying; and then he tells us that--

Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the authors of one's being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of the parents by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves ... appears, to the j.a.panese student of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.

"Now, of course, it is known here that in j.a.pan, as in other Oriental countries, it is a rule for marriages to be family arrangements, as regards which it is expected that the young persons will conform to the wishes of their respective parents.

"But of course some inconsistencies are to be expected from an author enamoured of the whole country. He is very Buddhist, and is anxious to show that Buddhists have always held, in matters of faith, something very like the doctrines of modern science with regard to the perpetual sequence of evolution and dissolution. On this subject he argues cleverly and effectively; but when, by implication or expressly, he compares Buddhism with Christianity, it is evident that the latter faith has not received any very close study from him. None the less is his book, though dominated by a somewhat uncritical enthusiasm, full of interest and instruction as to the difference between the gifts, the motives, and the mental and moral att.i.tude of the j.a.panese and the peoples of the West, ourselves in particular. It is well worth while to study that remarkable people as they are seen by one who is so much captivated by them, and believes in them so strongly, as Mr. Lafcadio Hearn." (380.)

The _Athenaeum_ does not speak so cordially, and a review in the _Atlantic Monthly_ says:--

"Mr. Hearn is not at his best as a metaphysician.... But we can forgive him in that he stands forth a staunch champion, defying the West from the heart of the j.a.panese people. He does this most clearly in his finest essay, 'Jiujutsu.' Here the very meaning of the martial exercise, to 'conquer by yielding' is taken as text to explain the phenomena or national awakening which foreign cities have denounced as a 'reversal.'

j.a.pan has borrowed weapons of force from the West, in order successfully to resist its insidious influence. True progress is from within. Mr.

Hearn writes:--

However psychologists may theorize on the absence or the limitations of personal individuality among the j.a.panese, there can be no question at all that, as a nation, j.a.pan possesses an individuality stronger than our own." (306.)

Hearn further brings out in a conversation with a young j.a.panese the fact that j.a.pan, in order to keep pace with the compet.i.tion of other nations, must adopt the methods which are in direct variance to her old morality, and all that which has made the j.a.panese what he is. j.a.pan's future depends upon her industrial development, and the fine old qualities of self-sacrifice, simplicity, filial piety, the contentment with little, are not the weapons for the modern struggle. In a postscript to this essay, written two years later, after the war with China, Hearn adds that "j.a.pan has proved herself able to hold her own against the world.... _j.a.pan has won in her jiujutsu._"