Lafcadio Hearn Part 11

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 compet.i.tion with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss Bisland consented.

After her return, under the t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sionately 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 j.a.pan, and then a long, long interval intervened. He married a j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 "j.a.panese 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 "j.a.pan, 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-gla.s.s, 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 n.o.ble 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 j.a.pan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin.

"Splendid field in j.a.pan--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 j.a.pan."

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 princ.i.p.al 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 j.a.panese 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 b.u.t.terflies; 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 a.n.a.lytic 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 pa.s.sage 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, pa.s.sion, 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 j.a.pan, 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 G.o.d, 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 j.a.pan, 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 G.o.ds--at compound interest!"