Lafcadio Hearn Part 25

"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three!

I shall see the sun again!

"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of the substance ... the faiths of men, the G.o.ds,--doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and destruction hath no covering.

"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But--

"_Must I believe that I really exist?..._"

Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but seem to pa.s.s: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without sh.o.r.e I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth....

"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and multiplied. And the dimness flushed.

"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also mine!..."

All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night, the dog that was everybody's and n.o.body's, owned nowhere.

"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her back in big j.a.panese characters. But the neighbours did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_ (vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog; but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.

His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on "Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?

"The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: b.u.t.terflies of queer j.a.panese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing; wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy repairing their damaged habitations....

"... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy.

They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to attempt an essay on Ants."

After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants, and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants'

talk, he would hear of something to his advantage--

"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."

After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic law, he thus ends his essay:--

"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.

"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to l.u.s.t. There may be no G.o.ds; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would seem to be much more exacting than G.o.ds. To prove a 'dramatic tendency'

in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism."

In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of "things j.a.panese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient j.a.panese records to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,--subst.i.tuting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed."

During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect musicians," a gra.s.s-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was exactly two j.a.panese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antennae much longer than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished against the light.

"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...

"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cuc.u.mber ... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness, a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish resonance....

"Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.

It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy gra.s.ses of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust of the past,--he calls to the silence and the G.o.ds for the return of time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it.

They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant, never thought of subst.i.tuting a slice of onion or cuc.u.mber. So the fairy music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a G.o.d,--telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely, nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!... May the G.o.ds forgive us all,--especially Hana the housemaid!

"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."

During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight, every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the t.i.tle "j.a.pan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which is a cla.s.sic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."

Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be his.

In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "j.a.pan, an Interpretation."

It is a challenge to those who say that his views of j.a.pan were fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superst.i.tions.

CHAPTER XXV HIS DEATH

"... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating farther and farther one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colours, must melt forever into the colourless Void...."

Ten years after his arrival in j.a.pan the lode-star of Lafcadio Hearn's life and genius rose above the far eastern horizon, to cast her clear and serene radiance on the shadowed path that henceforth was but a descent towards the end. We conclude that "The Lady of a Myriad Souls"

had written an appreciative letter on the subject of his work, and his, dated January, 1900, was in answer to hers.

The thread was taken up where it had been dropped, the old affection and friendship reopened, unchanged, unimpaired.

Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people, his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy--his Benjamin--in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight."

"I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as the j.a.panese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of strong men, there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins."

With intense longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western lands from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so isolated that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst Englishmen again ... with all their prejudices and conventions."

The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but--such a stubborn thing is human nature--sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born, let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love, worship as they worship."

At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was during the period of his enthusiasm for "things j.a.panese." When he came to issue with the officials at k.u.mamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an occidental--one of his own people.

All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life he had pa.s.sed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad, to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action in nationalising himself a j.a.panese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his son is a j.a.panese, born in j.a.pan under j.a.panese conditions, and unless he throws off all family ties and responsibilities, which, being the eldest son, are--according to communal law in j.a.pan--considerable, he must submit to this inexorable destiny. In his father's adopted country the military or naval profession is closed to him, however, in consequence of his defective eyesight, and both would have been closed to him also in England.

Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son, made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same answer was given on every side. He is a j.a.panese, and must conform to the dictates of the j.a.panese authorities. They might permit him to go away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality.

Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-cla.s.s education at the Waseda University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested.

In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had antic.i.p.ated, he was forced out of the Imperial University, on the pretext that as a j.a.panese citizen he was not ent.i.tled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during thirteen years for j.a.pan, and sacrificed everything for j.a.pan, I have been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the country. For while the politico-religious combination that has engineered this matter remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any position in any educational establishment here for even six months."

In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this juncture, it is well to remember that j.a.pan was struggling for existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard, perhaps, but the j.a.panese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the j.a.panese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for j.a.panese gallantry he railed at j.a.panese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls?

and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far from England. Two of the boys are all j.a.panese,--st.u.r.dy and not likely to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I must devote the rest of my life to looking after him."

And she--his wise friend--knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that awful American life of compet.i.tion and struggle, enjoined prudent action and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself."

"Very true," was Hearn's answer--and well did he know, for had not he, the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day?

"No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid: the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,--and I flee, and bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might be, that a man should not be,--except as to bodily strength.... I taught him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil--what chance for him in such a world as j.a.pan? Do you know that terribly pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?"

The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:--