Lafcadio Hearn Part 23

Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald wrapped him up in his own to send him home--an incident which Hearn declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died.

Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius, the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination.

It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper again--treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his attacks of temper at Cincinnati.

So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's, lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the sale of the copyright of his books in the United States.

CHAPTER XXIII

USHIGOME

"Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all Dopplegangers?--and is not the invisible the only life we really enjoy?"

In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other sojournings in j.a.pan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue.

To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things, sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that rustled through the bamboo-grove.

Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else.

This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's "Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised, also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but in England.

The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that "he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada that could not sing."

No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit of the public.

Though he had not much sympathy with j.a.panese and foreign professors, and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University, at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a j.a.panese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything was favourable to absorption in his work.

He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write."

Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the drawer of his mind when he pa.s.sed away.

Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's common-sense.

"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely j.a.panese household, or direct j.a.panese according to his own light, things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned to prize some of them at their weight in gold."

Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-j.a.panese union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitch.e.l.l McDonald. "'But you did not bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"

On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."

She describes him blowing for fun into a conch sh.e.l.l he had bought one day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the j.a.panese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals.

"He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he laughed the whole household laughed, too."

His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his att.i.tude towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would play "_onigokko_," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in the garden. "Though no adept in the j.a.panese language, he succeeded in learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song, for instance--

"Yu-yake!

Ko-yake!

As.h.i.ta wa tenki ni nare."

"Evening-burning!

Little-burning!

Weather, be fair to-morrow!"

or the Song of "Urashima Taro."

He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches ill.u.s.trating quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming, distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In one, ill.u.s.trative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of storm and impending disaster which is wonderful.

He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling, crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see.

But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya, Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as they pa.s.sed along.

An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the sh.o.r.e, smoking his j.a.panese pipe.

Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half of his stay at Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond: "Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."

Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse, though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided the foreign community in j.a.pan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine, the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to recall."

Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose j.a.panese books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal mental balance. Nothing but "Old j.a.pan" was admitted inside his garden fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers, ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.

We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune, which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination with an earnest prayer to the G.o.ds. In the winter of 1903 he was found frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows not his own fate," is a j.a.panese saying quoted by Hearn in connection with the incident.

But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast, where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for sea-bathing, that he was in his element.

The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than that of college professors.

As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi, who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw sandals, gourds for holding _sake_, and bottles of lemonade, while surmounting all was the _kamidana_--the shelf of the G.o.ds--with its _Daruma_, or household divinity.

Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the gale--floating in the mists--shuddering in the leaf--flickering in the light of waters--or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf, to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a boy at school, lying looking at the clouds pa.s.sing across the sky, and imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating round him.

It is impossible in the s.p.a.ce at my command, to examine Hearn's work at Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published after his appointment as professor of English at the university was "Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East."

Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his j.a.panese literary work was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at Matsue, Kobe, k.u.mamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary mill.

Amongst the essays comprising the volume ent.i.tled "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on "Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: _and the outer-man is the ghost_."

In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions and changes of statement. His deductions need cla.s.sifying and substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy.

In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that the j.a.panese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West.

Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of occidental fiction being revolting to the j.a.panese moral sense is far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much of our fictional work the s.e.xual question is given a great deal too much prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male j.a.panese, being bound by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous, and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove that he is incapable of feeling them.

All j.a.panese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and suggestive instead of detailed. "_Ittakkiri_" (entirely vanished, in the sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who, instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words.

The art of writing poetry is universal in j.a.pan; verses, seldom consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs, panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains and women's crepe silk underwear, they are written by every one and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The translations given by him in his essay ent.i.tled "Out of the Street,"

contradict his statement that the j.a.panese are incapable of deep feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them are charming.

"To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going; Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.

"Things never changed since the Time of the G.o.ds: The flowing of water, the Way of Love."