Lafcadio Hearn Part 24

His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so, as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character.

Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant Friendship."

The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific imagination, the curious a.n.a.logy existing between certain teachings of Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my cl.u.s.ter of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define."

The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the mighty day.

The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour when thought itself must fade.

"Ghostly j.a.pan," written in 1899, was dedicated

to Mrs. Alice von Behrens for auld lang syne.

We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was one of his New York acquaintances.

"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the j.a.panese poem on the first page.

To Mitch.e.l.l McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to do with regard to "Ghostly j.a.pan." Then later he says, he has been and gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the G.o.ds. To save himself further trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased about terms--and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a man liberated from prison--smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring day.

In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitch.e.l.l McDonald. Some of the fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,--a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of Heaven,--eyes otherwhere pa.s.sed into darkness and dust.... Thus and only thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes--the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory."

"Shadowings" was succeeded by a "j.a.panese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs.

Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book is perhaps more intensely j.a.panese and fanciful than any yet written, and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches, inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a paean, as it were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because of its impressionist translations of j.a.panese poems.

"Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf.

... Ah! the autumn rains!"

And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing b.u.t.terflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:--

"Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone to-day."

CHAPTER XXIV NISHI OKUBO

"From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold the selfsame Moon."--_Buddhist poem translated by_ Lafcadio Hearn.

It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo.

Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in j.a.pan.

It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain Fujisaki--one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners'

Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show of azaleas is held once a year.

After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as it is now called, and a guest-room, which was a.s.signed to Mrs. Koizumi for her occupation.

Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike ac.u.men, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a considerable circulation in England.

There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my notions of things," he writes to Mitch.e.l.l McDonald.

On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,--a.s.sisted by his wife,--he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he suddenly heard an _uguisu_ (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made enough for you and the children."

During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his eyes; each month more powerful gla.s.ses had to be used; and he was obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully.

The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would have been a cruel test for most writers. His ma.n.u.script had to float round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding.

Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought,"

he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging, kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then pray G.o.d, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and pleased."

"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can, without reference to nationalities or schools."

Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and religious superst.i.tions of the genius of a remarkable people.

At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anaemia common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things,"

as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not."

Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance.

Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency was forgotten, even the sense of personal ident.i.ty. He beheld ghostly apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a mult.i.tude of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library, weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down, while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with uplifted hand and enigmatic smile.

Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his wanderings amongst the hills and by the seash.o.r.e in distant parts of j.a.pan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natale_, the flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs, that universal song of the land in j.a.pan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.

Hearn is princ.i.p.ally known in England by his letters and essays on the social and political development of j.a.pan. Cultured people who have Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers'

ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by any of our English essayists.

Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After some grim j.a.panese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.

In a sketch ent.i.tled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully, almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject of human desire and attainment.

"He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence--he asked me for the Moon.

"Unwisely I protested:--

"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.'

"He answered:--

"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.'

"... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.

"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom....

"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?

"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun, and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."

He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings, supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with the rapture of wind and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.