Lafcadio Hearn Part 4

"I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to say and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from the Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and brightness, disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He was so very curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that you felt he might do anything in different surroundings."

Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat the same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati, Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it.

His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very close to his eyes. He had a great taste for the strange and weird, and had a certain humour of a grim character. There was always something mysterious about him, a mystery which he delighted in increasing rather than dissipating. The confession which he is supposed to have made to Father William Wrennal that he hoped the devil would come to him in the form of a beautiful woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the desert, was worthy of his fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic mischief and humour.

Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been Lafcadio's princ.i.p.al chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel.

His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects, and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque.

Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low red moons throwing their dim light across desolate s.p.a.ces, and glinting on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts shrieking in the gale--these were favourite topics of conversation, and in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich.

"I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I were at one time in the same cla.s.s; but he was kept for two years in, I think, the cla.s.s or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'[5]

This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Cla.s.s.' A note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a correct copy of it:--

[5] "High Figures" is the name of a cla.s.s or "School" (as we call "cla.s.ses" at Ushaw), _e.g._ Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or cla.s.s for two years, _e.g._ High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to be moved up into the next cla.s.s, Grammar. Each cla.s.s has its own library, so that a boy in the cla.s.s of High Figures would not be allowed to intrude into the Library of the school or cla.s.s above him, Grammar.

"'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door, Ma.s.sive and quaint, of the days of yore; When the spectral forms of the mighty dead Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread; When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak Shrieks forth his note so wild, And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak In the moonlight soft and mild, When the dead in the lonely vaults below Rise up in grim array And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow, Weird forms, unknown in day; When the dismal death-bells clang so near, Sounding o'er world and lea, And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear Like the moan of the sobbing sea.'

"He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd.

His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when the pa.s.sing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell summoned us again to study.

"A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio said his address was longer--'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, s.p.a.ce, G.o.d.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest.

"You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland or Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during the vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I believe I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having told me anything of his relations with his family, or of his childhood."

It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a heading to this chapter.

At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of Hearn's subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to slip from his hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched out at school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in Jesuitical schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in Dublin in the hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation.

Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton, has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the j.a.panese army.

There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of the ghostliness in his present sh.e.l.l must have belonged, he imagined, to the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests, and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos.

Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in appearance, especially to women, always pursued him.

Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power, Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power.

Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist, declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind.

"I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he says, in his essay on "Dust."

The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power.

It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw.

Ecclesiastics are not p.r.o.ne to state their reasons for any line of action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees.

Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as time went on.

Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable any longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded her that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and declared her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a Christian household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that she, who only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned a home of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail himself of Molyneux's hospitality.

At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane, had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady.

The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore.

Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited it would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont to say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself to things of the imagination and spirit."

Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live upon, might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating vague philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of being driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and children?

CHAPTER V LONDON

"In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no escape, save by an iron ladder.

"As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the climber."[6]

[6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly comfortable circ.u.mstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr.

Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open, or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and excitable imagination.

The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law.

It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne and chicken mayonnaise on board.

Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance.

Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping, was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he might have been in easy circ.u.mstances by the sale of his work.

As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to submit to discipline or restraint of any kind.

Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this period of his life later, in j.a.pan, he tells a pupil that, though some of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home, surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was forced to become a servant.

This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his destiny to leave him in a state of dest.i.tution. A certain allowance was probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr.

Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses.

With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by official life in j.a.pan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going.

At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up.

He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self, lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.

Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then, as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or when, on his first arrival in j.a.pan, he insisted on adopting a diet of rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight and acute dyspepsia.

Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.

Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.

After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic material?

Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling, as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance, that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient sharpness. "a.n.a.lyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. a.n.a.lysing the feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising; for our best work is often out of the unconscious."

Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which was possible to a man of his temperament.