Lafcadio Hearn Part 28

The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins it was an omen of death.

I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern j.a.pan when I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the professor, found him seated orthodox j.a.panese fashion with his feet under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him, could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of j.a.pan are growing into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch your legs and be comfortable."

After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell athwart the garden, a regular j.a.panese garden; to the left was a bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a ma.s.s of snowy white bloom.

But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs.

Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them.

Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's life.

Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies,"

daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough Corrib.

"Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas, Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these, Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land-- Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"

CHAPTER XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO

"Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands,--like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of j.a.panese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour you still can find Horai--but not elsewhere.... Remember that Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,--the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,--never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...."

Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi--through the medium of Professor Tanabe--asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had died, when, therefore, according to j.a.panese custom, the incense sticks and the lamp were lighted before the _Butsudan_ and a repast laid out in honour of the dead.

That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted, and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to the Metropole Hotel.

The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of a const.i.tution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.

The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions of those enchanted weeks in j.a.pan, however, would have lost half their charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan." To me, reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic meaning. A _Shirabyoshi_ lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a j.a.panese maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there, seated on _zabutons_ in a little shop, as large--or rather as small--as life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little _musumes_, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I pa.s.sed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising _otherness_ of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary land of Nippon.

I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting j.a.panese houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.

Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her "Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow and children.

A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens, and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a _zabuton_ (I had not yet learnt to kneel j.a.panese fashion), the intense silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abas.e.m.e.nt. The moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The j.a.panese are too courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and left a will--Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his contemptible abode to smoke a pipe--further than that he knew nothing.

The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku), where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any sort of favour by his colleagues.

In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent their time laughing at the "odd little j.a.ps," the rest were divided between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the temples mentioned in their cla.s.sic pages. Two American girls were provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the northern coast.

A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both.

Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this j.a.panese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and chances pa.s.sing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will pa.s.s away as a storm pa.s.ses across the heavens, bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human life--infinite calm, infinite rest.

"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented, with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he had hitherto subscribed?

It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its _shoji_ was comforting after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows, genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit, while on the upper step of the _genkan_ (entrance-room) with extended hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first, when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was moved by a feeling of amus.e.m.e.nt at the eccentric little genius to whom she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels in the country, and Hearn's essay on the j.a.panese smile: "To present always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely."

Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us, when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental widows when referring to the departed.

The doors of the _Butsudan_ were set wide open, and on the _kamidan_, or shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that had been given to him by Mitch.e.l.l McDonald. The one in the shrine was Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third had been buried with the writer of _j.a.pan_, beneath his tombstone in the Zoshigaya Cemetery.

As we stood in the study opposite the _Butsudan_ the ghostly charm, the emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection, crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.

Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo, describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that hangs in the study.

Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste, subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit.

Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and ma.n.u.scripts that had belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the donkey that had created so much amus.e.m.e.nt in the establishment--a donkey being an unknown animal in j.a.pan--when it arrived at k.u.mamoto. Another represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.

It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some sort--everything amongst the old-world j.a.panese is looked upon as a good or bad omen.

Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys, were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the subject of Anglo-j.a.panese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to the statement, in an interview with the j.a.panese amba.s.sador in 1898, of the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and j.a.panese, declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine race produced by the mixture of occidental and j.a.panese, especially, indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and intelligent.

What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_ and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English books, the Buddhist shrine and j.a.panese _kakemonos_ and ideographs.

Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up.

The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days "freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."

I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of una.s.sertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her knowledge of the world circ.u.mscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient, indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the _Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern education as a material weakness?

"The j.a.panese child is as close to you as the European child," says Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."

After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of "tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)--his Papa San's favourite cake, Kazuo told us--had been handed round and partaken of, jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery.

As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove, stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies--along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the j.a.panese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots, enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the impression that it was a portion of the j.a.panese cemetery allotted by government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab was the inscription--

"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"--"Believing Man Similar to Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment."

The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand, as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman, Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the moment, buried--an alien amongst aliens--in a Buddhist grave, under a j.a.panese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own people.

CONCLUSION

LAFCADIO HEARN'S was a personality and genius which people will always judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of j.a.panese kimono and obi, or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow his trumpet too l.u.s.tily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages"; while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament.

If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature, would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology"

that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we patch up things."

Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal, will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's work there is no authentic equivalent, no subst.i.tute.

He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it.

Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more, discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries: oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appet.i.tes as a means to more elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and self-indulgence. All this phase in j.a.panese life he has recounted in exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many a day by cultured readers and thinkers.

Besides his j.a.panese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbia.s.sed. A thing was so because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so, and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own, and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the s.p.a.ces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another, he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform himself of details before discussing them.

As to his feelings on the political development of j.a.pan, so entirely conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in the insulting remarks cast at him as he pa.s.sed through the streets of Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that j.a.pan was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that "he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents inventions shall be killed!"

Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and bia.s.sed as his political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a season.