Lafcadio Hearn Part 22

His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind; she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.

Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing facade, a structure that would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or London.

After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a "rat-trap," compared to most j.a.panese houses, that were many of them so beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.

In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.

When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that const.i.tute a Tokyo suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in dealing with j.a.panese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a _sake_-brewer, who had owned eight hundred j.a.panese houses in the neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great trees, dreaming out of s.p.a.ce, out of time.

The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university.

One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must have "webbed feet and been able to croak and sp.a.w.n!"

Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the j.a.panese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly realistic--the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here the quarter of the foreign emba.s.sies, looking like a well-painted American suburb--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor; then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess, was difficult. But Setsu was happy--like a bird making its nest, she was fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly weather it was.

In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo, there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor, seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers.

His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals, and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if England and j.a.pan were on different planets, might well seem an impossible task.

In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while professor of English literature at k.u.mamoto and Tokyo, must not be forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students.

Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in j.a.pan." They are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal, therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical explanation of technique and style.

The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the adoption of const.i.tutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form, through every condition of society, and almost into every household.

Nothing, he said, was ever stable in j.a.pan. The whole official world was influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."

The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.

Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.

No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of gold--luckily for themselves.

He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May G.o.d put a Hat on you!" All the professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow--no overcoats allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far East--'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest.

There is a reason for things--for anything except--a plug hat...."

As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn, representing, as he did, all that const.i.tuted his most delightful memories of j.a.pan. In his last book, "j.a.pan, an Interpretation," he alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the j.a.panese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about them."

With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic.

Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested, looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient art, which had been brought to j.a.pan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in j.a.pan. He describes his landlord, the old _sake_-brewer, coming to definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,--you ought to have been a girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think superst.i.tious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."

He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and recognition of the naturally religious character of the j.a.panese.

After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only j.a.panese friendship that Hearn retained was that for Amenomori n.o.bushige, to whom "Kokoro" was dedicated:--

TOKYO "to my friend Amenomori n.o.bushige poet, scholar and patriot."

We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he left k.u.mamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous correspondence that pa.s.sed between her husband and Hearn, princ.i.p.ally on the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori n.o.bushige discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality?

Alas! I don't know...."

Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all j.a.panese, however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm of formality is over, the j.a.panese suddenly drifts away into his own world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.

Mitch.e.l.l McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.

In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she mentions McDonald of Yokohama--in brown boots and corduroys--as escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in j.a.pan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost immediately on Hearn's arrival in j.a.pan, for he mentions McDonald in one of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.

"After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most peculiarly lucky fellow, princ.i.p.ally owing to the note written by a certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio."

Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in uniform,--a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up till midnight, talking about things.

The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour wall beneath, and the ships and boats pa.s.sing to and fro beyond, never seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Antaeus I feel always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality, not so much of a _literary_ man however."

The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks, the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"--only real facts--not names or dates--real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy.

He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in j.a.pan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible--"especially hidden from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn."

If he could get together a book of short stories--six would be enough--he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he could.

Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past life--that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?"

The communion between these two was more like that between some popular, athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an audacious proceeding that few ventured upon.

Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street--the charming way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs.

In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's visits. A rocking-chair,--rare piece of furniture in a j.a.panese establishment--a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder.

McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn was killing himself by his ascetic j.a.panese mode of life. Raw fish and lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald, therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of all sorts.

"With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man!

How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'"

They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and "blue soul"--names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was tempted out of his sh.e.l.l at Ushigome to pa.s.s two or three days at Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days pa.s.sed with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years.

"What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,--with philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher (Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an indefinite way that some divine attribute was his.

McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti.

Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he wished him to write fiction--he wanted him to make some profit out of his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which alone can furnish the material. They can _divine_, but must have some chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social existence."

Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to officialdom--but he had too many little b.u.t.terfly lives to love and take care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy to college there must remain merely a possibility.

The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession, and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.

He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.

He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him, who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her 'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"

The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.

But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work, believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a b.u.t.terfly.

Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come."