Lafcadio Hearn Part 20

Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed to reside in the city under j.a.panese law.

During the six weeks on board the P. & O. coming out, I had been reading Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji--gateway of the Inland Sea--it had blown a gale, and the j.a.panese steamer, the _Chikugo Maru_, to which we had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea, made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly pa.s.sed before our eyes, and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm of the spirit of Old j.a.pan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by symbolic _Torii_ leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing villages that seemed to have grown on the sh.o.r.e, their thatched roofs covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "_Yane-shobu_."

At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in _geta_ and _kimono_, like figures on a j.a.panese screen depicting a scene of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic of j.a.pan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,--a magic that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions, telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur.

A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then paled to green.

There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead.

And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy peculiar to j.a.pan, we dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the Ghost of Waters. We saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the water gra.s.ses that bend in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the falling dew was the spray from the herdsman's oar. And the heavens "seemed very near, and warm, and human; and the silence about us was filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning and for ever young, and for ever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the G.o.ds."

The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream.

It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick erections, factory chimneys, and plate-gla.s.s shop-fronts; easy was it to understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country.

Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short _kuruma_ journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again in the era of Kusimoki Marahige.

Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea coast,--Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;--ancient Nippon keeps them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface of a mirror is changed by pa.s.sing reflections, as says their interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn.

Next to the hotel--as if to emphasise its nationality--was an ancient pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood; while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of tiles, a cedar world of _engawa_ and _shoji_, indescribable whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects that a strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you pa.s.sed along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity--another race soul, charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated itself to your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the arrangement of flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns with marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery rhymes in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman with elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and rouged and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter, while behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes writing on long strips of paper from right to left.

Enigmatical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross, red-faced women; no coa.r.s.e, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling.

Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to be found in European cities.

The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season, about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen--about half a dollar in American money at the present rate of exchange."

From the upper balcony of his house the j.a.panese street, with its rows of little shops, was visible to the bay; from thence he watched the cholera patients being taken away, and the bereaved, as soon as the law allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered abodes, while the ordinary life of the street went on day and night, as if nothing particular had happened. The itinerant vendors with their bamboo poles, and baskets or buckets, pa.s.sed the empty houses, and uttered their accustomed cry; the blind shampooer blew his melancholy whistle; the private watchman made his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; and the children chased one another as usual with screams and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished, but the survivors continued their play as if nothing had happened, according to the wisdom of the ancient East.

A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of 1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which the said Lafcadio never deserved, and never will deserve."

Death had no terrors for Lafcadio Hearn, but the premonitions of physical shipwreck that beset him now depressed him heart and soul because of the work still left undone.

He would like nothing so much, he said, as to get killed, if he had no one but himself in the world to take care of--which is just why he wouldn't get killed. He couldn't afford luxuries until his work was done.

To his sister he writes:--

"I have been on my back in a dark room for a month with inflammation of the eyes, and cannot write much. Thanks for sweet letter. I received a _Daily News_ from you,--many, many thanks. Did not receive the other papers you spoke of--probably they were stolen in k.u.mamoto. I fear I cannot do much newspaper work for some time. The climate does not seem to suit my eyes,--a hot climate would be better. I may be able to make a trip next winter to some tropical place, if I make any money out of my books. My new book--"Out of the East"--will be published soon after this letter reaches you.

"Future looks doubtful--don't feel very jolly about it. The mere question of living is the chief annoyance. I am offered some further work in Kobe, that would leave me leisure (they promise) for my own literary work, but I am not sure. However, the darkest hour is before the dawn, perhaps.

"Kaji is well able to walk now, and talks a little. Every day his hair is growing brighter; a thorough English boy.

"Excuse bad eyes.

"Love to you, "LAFCADIO."

Although more than twelve years had elapsed between our visit and the period when Hearn had resided in Kobe, nearly every one remembered the odd little journalist, who might be seen daily making his way, in his shy, near-sighted fashion, from his house in Kitinagasa Dori, to the office of the _Kobe Chronicle_.

Dr. Papellier of Kobe, who attended Hearn in a professional capacity at this time, was full of reminiscences. Long before meeting him at Kobe Dr. Papellier had been a great admirer of his genius, had, indeed, when surgeon on board a German vessel, translated "Chita" for a Nuremburg paper.

Being an oculist, one of his first injunctions, as soon as he examined Hearn's eyes, was cessation from all work and rest in a darkened room if he wished to escape total blindness. The right eye was myopic to an extent seldom seen, and at the moment was so severely inflamed by neuritis that the danger of an affection to the retina seemed imminent,--the left was entirely blind. For the purpose of keeping up his spirits, under this unwonted constraint, Dr. Papellier, in spite of his professional engagements, went out of his way to visit the little man frequently, and would stop hours chatting; showed him, indeed, a kindness and consideration that, we were told, were quite exceptional.

Hearn, Dr. Papellier relates, was a good and fluent talker, content to keep the ball rolling himself, and preferred an attentive listener rather than a person who stated his own opinions.

Their topics of conversations circled round the characteristics of the civilisation in which they were living. Hearn's emotional enthusiasm for the j.a.panese, the doctor said, had cooled; he had received several shocks in dealing with officials at k.u.mamoto, and said his illusions were vanishing, and he wanted to leave the country; France, China, or the South Sea Islands seemed each in turn to attract his wayward fancy.

The account of Stevenson's life in Samoa had made a great impression on him. He declared that if he had not his j.a.panese family to look after he would pack up his books of reference and start at once for Samoa.

"His wife, who understood no English at all, seldom appeared, a servant girl usually attending to his wants when I was present.

"It struck me at the time that his knowledge of the j.a.panese vernacular was very poor for a man of his intelligence, who, for nearly four years, had lived almost entirely in the interior, surrounded by those who could only talk the language of the country.

"It was plain that what he knew about j.a.pan must have been gained through the medium of interpreters. I was still more surprised when I discovered how extremely near-sighted he was. His impressions of scenery or j.a.panese works of art could never have been obtained as ordinary people obtain them. The details had to be studied piece by piece with a small telescope, and then described as a whole."

His mode of life, Dr. Papellier said, was almost penurious, although he must have been receiving a good salary from the _Kobe Chronicle_, and was making something by his books. At home he dressed invariably in j.a.panese style; his clothes being very clean and neat. The furniture of his small house was scanty. His food, which was partly j.a.panese and partly so-called "foreign," was prepared in a small restaurant somewhere in the town. In his position as medical attendant Papellier regarded it as his duty to remonstrate on this point, impressing upon him that he ought to remember the drain on his const.i.tution of the amount of brain work that he was doing, both at the _Kobe Chronicle_ office and writing at home.

There were reasons for this that Hearn would not care to tell Papellier.

Mrs. Koizumi was in delicate health, expecting her second child, and Hearn doubtless, with that consideration that invariably distinguished him in his treatment of his wife, had his food brought from outside so as to save her the trouble and exertion of cooking it at home. Only in one way, Papellier said, did he allow himself any indulgence, and that was in the amount he smoked. Although he seldom took spirits, he smoked incessantly--not cigars, but a small j.a.panese pipe--a _kiseru_--which he handled in a skilful way, lighting one tiny tobacco pellet in the glowing ashes of the one just consumed. One of his hobbies was collecting pipes, the other was collecting books. He had already got together a valuable library at New Orleans, he did the same in j.a.pan. He was able to exercise these hobbies inexpensively, but they needed knowledge, time and patience. At his death he possessed more than two hundred pipes, all shapes and sizes.

Every one whom we met when we arrived at Kobe advised us to call on the editor of the _Kobe Chronicle_ if we wanted information on the subject of Lafcadio Hearn. We therefore made our way to the _Kobe Chronicle_ office as soon as we could. Mr. Young as well as Mrs. Young, whose acquaintance we made subsequently, were both full of reminiscences of the odd little genius.

He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events, the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding--a plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as Hearn was in Kobe. "The j.a.panese," he was wont to say, "are a very clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding."

Absence of mind, and inattention to events pa.s.sing around him, was very noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the ident.i.ty of the individual with whom he was conversing.

Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in j.a.panese. At last one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not j.a.panese." "Oh, really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised the fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English.

Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's opinions and conclusions, with regard to the j.a.panese and their religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary qualities. The flint-edged s.p.a.ce of the newspaper column cramped and hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but writing for money an impossibility.

Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became n.o.body again; and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a fool. So he had to sit and wait for the G.o.ds. His mind, however, ate itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional, romantic--and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result was an essay that the editor of the _Atlantic_ declared was a veritable illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even he himself.

Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated considerably against his being an effective newspaper correspondent, were his personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must, above all things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did not possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!--why not collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the same doom."

No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary reader if it suited him so to do. He had always pa.s.sionately resisted the christianising of j.a.pan, not only from a religious, but from an artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,--a wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in j.a.pan.

"For myself," he says in one of the _Kobe Chronicle_ leaders, "I could sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause.

Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a destroyer,--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent the edge,--the _acies_,--to use the Roman word--of Occidental aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in many ways a n.o.bler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by the 'n.o.ble army.'"

Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial element in Kobe, p.r.o.nouncing them rough and common. After life in the interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the life in Old j.a.pan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every way, with only the bare means of j.a.panese comfort, than the luxury and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the j.a.panese peasant was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--bra.s.s bands--churches! and white shirts! and "_yof.u.ku_"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have conceived without a long sojourn in Old j.a.pan--the only civilised country that existed since Antiquity."

"Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated, from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things, the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of j.a.pan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the t.i.tle 'Kokoro'

(Heart)."

Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning--just as we say in English, "the heart of things."

It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of j.a.pan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist who told him before she came to j.a.pan she had read Hearn's books and thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his descriptions!"

The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's princ.i.p.al book on j.a.pan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan." The conditions and people that he describes are certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for instance, said that he once showed him a report in the _Kobe Chronicle_, describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in "Out of the East," which Papellier declared to be an entirely distorted account of the facts as they really occurred. It is the old story of imaginative genius and ordinary commonplace folk. In discussing the question, Hearn insisted that every artist should carry out the theory of selection. A photograph would give the unessential and the essential; an artist picks out important aspects; the portrait-painter's work, though manifestly less exact, is incomparably finer because of its spirituality; though less technically correct, it has acquired the imaginative sentiment of the mind of the artist. When depicting the j.a.panese he felt justified in emphasising certain excellent qualities, putting these forward and ignoring the rest; choosing the grander qualities, as portrait-painters do, and pa.s.sing over the petty frailties, the mean characteristics that might impress the casual observer. Nothing is more lovely, for instance, than a j.a.panese village amongst the hills, when seen just after sunrise--through the mists of a spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the enchantment pa.s.ses with the vapours: in the raw clear light he can find no palace of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks.

He attained to a certainty and precision of form in these "Kokoro"

essays that places them above any previous work. Now we can see the benefit of his concentration of mind, of his earnestness of purpose and monastic withdrawal from things of the world; no outside influences disturbed his communing with himself, and it is this communing that imparts a vague and visionary atmosphere, a ghostly thrill to every page of the volume.

Yet here was he, in the forty-fifth year of his age, a master amongst masters, arguing with solemn earnestness upon the use or mis-use of the word "shall" and "will," begging Professor Hall Chamberlain for information and guidance.