Lafcadio Hearn Part 14

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 princ.i.p.ally 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 Mitch.e.l.l McDonald, Nishida Sentaro, and Amenomori, it is the same story of perversity and estrangement.

An unceremonious entry into his house, without deference to ancient j.a.panese 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 grat.i.tude 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 j.a.pan.

"Out of the city and over the hills to Izumo, the Land of the Ancient G.o.ds!" The incantation is spoken, we find ourselves in the region of Horai--the fairyland of j.a.pan--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 j.a.pan was the charm of nature in human nature, and in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness, politeness ... for in j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese sense of beauty and form. "Indeed, wherever to-day in j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan, 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 superst.i.tions 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 j.a.pan" was the result. It is perhaps not as finished as some of his later j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan"--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' j.a.pan, not the j.a.pan of bowler hats and red-brick warehouses, but the j.a.pan 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 pa.s.s. We hear it, and see it all with him: the first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, m.u.f.fled echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most pathetic of the sounds of j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 G.o.ds, 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ddess 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 j.a.pan.

If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was called to the task of interpreting the superst.i.tions 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 j.a.pan to conquer China, and had placed her practically in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to a.n.a.lyse 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; superst.i.tious, 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 pa.s.s away.

An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of superst.i.tion, 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 j.a.panese superst.i.tions 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 superst.i.tion, 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 G.o.ds 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 superst.i.tions in a.n.a.lysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the j.a.panese.

"Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated j.a.panese think nothing,"

said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation.

Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated j.a.panese 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 G.o.ds, and the G.o.ds the people make are the best." Hearn did not attempt, therefore, a mechanical repet.i.tion 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 superst.i.tions 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 j.a.pan, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan 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 pa.s.sing 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 j.a.pan amongst the simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where the ancient G.o.ds 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 att.i.tude. Perhaps the man who comes to j.a.pan 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 pa.s.sion may sometimes lead n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionate sentiment is doubtful. Marriages in j.a.pan are generally arranged on the most businesslike footing. By the young j.a.panese man, it is looked upon as a natural duty that has duly to be performed for the perpetuation of his family. Pa.s.sion 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 s.e.x 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 j.a.pan. 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese women."

It seems an unromantic statement to make with regard to an artist who has written such exquisite pa.s.sages 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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 p.r.o.nouncing the names of the boys, even with the cla.s.s-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 k.u.mamoto, 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, j.a.pan 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 ill.u.s.trious 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, pa.s.sed at starvation prices to those whom "misery makes rich." Amongst these aristocrats the Koizumis were numbered. Nishida Sentaro, knowing their miserable circ.u.mstances, and seeing how advisable it would be, if it were Hearn's intention to remain in j.a.pan, 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.