The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 29

I am thinking about Velvet Souls in general, and all ever known by me in particular. Almost in every place where I lived long, it was given me to meet a velvet soul or two--presences (male or female mattered nothing) which with a word or look wrapped all your being round in a softness and warmth of emotional caress inexpressible. "Velvet" isn't a good word.

The effect is more like the bath of tropical light and warmth to the body of a sick voyager from lands of consumption and rheumatism. These souls are intellectual in many cases, but that is not the interest of them--the interest is purely emotional. A purely intellectual person is unpleasant; and I fancy our religion is chiefly hateful because it makes its G.o.ds of the intellectual kind now-a-days. I should like to write about such souls--but how difficult. A queer thing for me is that in memory _they unite_, without distinction of s.e.x, into one divine type of perfect tenderness and sympathy and knowledge,--like those Living Creatures of Dante's Paradise composed of many different persons. I have found such souls also in j.a.pan--but only j.a.panese souls. But they are melting into the night.

LAFCADIO.

P.S. A very sad but curious story. A charming person, of high rank, bore twins. A Western woman would be proud and pleased. Shame struck the j.a.panese mother down. She became insane for shame. All j.a.panese life is not beautiful, you see. Imagine the cruelty of such a popular idea,--a peasant would have borne the trouble well,--but a daughter of princes--no!

TO SENTARO NISHIDA

TOKYO, 1897.

DEAR NISHIDA,--Your last kind letter came just after I had posted mine to you. Since then I have been horribly busy, and upset, and confused,--and even now I write rather because feeling ashamed at having been so long silent, than because I have time to write a good letter. We got a house only on the 29th, and are only half-settled now.

The house is large--two-storied, and new--but not pretty, and there is no garden (at least nothing which deserves to be called a garden). We moved into it _before it was finished_, so as to make sure of it. It is all j.a.panese, of course--ten rooms. It belongs to a man who owns seven hundred and eighty houses!--a very old man, a _Sakeya_, named Masumoto Kihei. (Somebody tells me I am wrong,--that he has more than eight hundred houses.) He buries poor people free of charge--that is one of his ways of showing charity. He has one superintendent who, with many a.s.sistants, manages the renting of the houses. The house is very far from the university--forty-five minutes by _kuruma_--in Ushigome, and almost at the very end of Tokyo. But it was a case of _Shikata ga nai_.

I teach only twelve hours. I have no text-books except for two cla.s.ses,--one of which studies Milton's "Paradise Lost" and the other Tennyson's "Princess" (at my suggestion). I did not suggest "Paradise Lost;" but as the students wanted in different divisions of the cla.s.s to study different books, made them vote, and, out of seventy-eight, sixty-three voted for "Paradise Lost"! Curious! (Just because it was hard for them, I suppose.) My other cla.s.ses are special, and receive lectures on special branches of English literature (such as Ballad Literature, Ancient and Modern; Victorian Literature, etc.);--the professor being left free to do as he pleases. Of course, the position, as I try to fill it, will be an expensive one. I shall probably have to buy $1000 worth of books before next summer. Ultimately everything will be less expensive. The cla.s.ses are very badly arranged (_badly_ is a gentle word); for the 1st, 2d and 3d years of literature make one cla.s.s;--the 2d and 3d together another cla.s.s;--the 3d by itself a third cla.s.s. You will see at once how difficult to try to establish a systematic three-years' course. I am doing it, however,--with Professor Toyama's approval;--hoping that the cla.s.ses may be changed next year.

The students have been very kind and pleasant. My old k.u.mamoto pupils invited me to a meeting, and I made a speech to them. They meet in the same temple where Yaoya-O-Shichi used to meet Kichizo Sama,--her acolyte-lover. It is called Kichijoji.--I met some of my old pupils who had become judges, others who were professors, others engineers. I felt rather happy.

Professor Toyama I like more and more. He is a curious man,--really a _solid_ man and a man of the world,--but not at all unkind, and extremely straightforward. He _can_ be very sarcastic, and is very skilful at making jokes. Some of the foreign professors are rather afraid of his jokes: I have heard him make some sharp ones. But he does not joke yet with me directly--seems to understand me very well indeed.

He knows a great deal about English authors and their values,--but says very little about his own studies. I do not understand how he found time to learn as much about the English and American authors as he seems to know. He gave me some kind hints about the students--told me exactly what they liked, and how far to humour them. I had only one long talk with him,--that was at the house of Dr. Florenz one evening. The doctor had invited five of us to dinner.

What else is there to tell you? I must not say too much about the mud, the bad roads, the horrible confusion caused by the laying-down of those new water-pipes. The weather is vile, and Tokyo is hideous in Ushigome. But Setsu is happy--like a bird making its nest. She is fixing up her new home, and has not yet had time to notice what ugly weather it is.

In Tokyo we find everything _very_ cheap,--except house-rent. And even house-rent is much lower than in Kobe,--very much lower. I pay only $25 for a very big house; but I expect to do even better than that.

Affectionate regards,

LAFCADIO HEARN (Y. KOIZUMI).

TO SENTARO NISHIDA

TOKYO, 1897.

DEAR NISHIDA,--This morning (the 17th) Mr. Takahashi came with your letter of introduction. He is a charming gentleman, and I felt unhappy at not being able to talk j.a.panese to him. He brought a most beautiful present--a tea-set of a sort I had never even seen before,--"crackled"

porcelain inside to the eye, and outside a chocolate-coloured clay etched with pretty designs of houses and groves and lakes with boats upon them. The cups were a great surprise and delight--especially as they were made in Matsue. Mr. Takahashi gave me better news of you than your last letter brought me: he thought you were getting stronger,--so I have hopes of pleasant chats with you. He told us many things about Matsue. He is a very correct, courteous gentleman; and I felt quite clumsy, as I always do when I meet a real gentleman of the j.a.panese school. I think I should like any of your friends. Mr. Takahashi had something about him which brought back to me the happy feeling of my pleasant time in Izumo.

I don't feel to-day, though, like I used to feel in Izumo. I have become very grey, and much queerer looking; and as I never make any visits or acquaintances outside of my quiet little neighbourhood, I have become also rather _henjin_. But I have written half a new book. I am not able to say now what it will be like: for the things I most wish to put into it--stories of real life--have not yet been written. I have finished only the philosophical chapters. One subject is "Nirvana," and another the study of matter in itself as unreality,--or at least as a temporary apparition only. Then I have taken up the defence of j.a.panese methods of drawing, under the t.i.tle of "Faces in the Old Picture-Books." My public, however, is not all composed of thinkers; and I have to please the majority by telling them stories sometimes. After all, every public more or less resembles a school-cla.s.s. They say, just like my students always used to say when they felt very tired or sleepy, hot days,--"Teacher, we are tired: please tell us some extraordinary story."

I can't just now remember when--at Matsue--a man came into the cla.s.sroom to watch my teaching. He came from some little island. I have quite forgotten the name. He looked a little like Mr. Takahashi;--but there was something different in his face,--a little sad, perhaps. When the cla.s.s was over he came to me and said something very good and kind, and pressed my hand and went away to his island. It is a queer thing that experiences of this kind are often among the most vivid of one's life--though they are so short. I have often dreamed of that man. Often and often. And the dream is always the same. He is the director of a beautiful little school in a very large garden, surrounded by high white walls. I go into that garden by an iron gate. It is always summer. I teach for that man; and everything is gentle and earnest and pleasant and beautiful, just as it used to be in Matsue,--and he always repeats the nice things he said long ago. If I can ever find that school, with the white walls and the iron gate,--I shall want to teach there, even if the salary be only the nice things said at the end of the cla.s.s. But I fear the school is made of mist, and that teacher and pupils are only ghosts. Or perhaps it is in _Horai_.

Ever with best regards from all of us, faithfully,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

TOKYO, August, 1897.

DEAR HENDRICK,--As for Miss Josephine's letter, I believe that I cannot answer it at all: it was so sweet that I could only sit down quietly and think about it,--and I feel that any attempt to answer it on paper would be no use. There is only one way that it ought to be adequately answered, and that way I hope that you will adopt for my sake.

It was a more than happy little romance--that which you told me of, and makes one feel new things about the great complex life of your greater world. The poetry of the story makes a singular appeal to me now--possibly because in this Far East such loving sympathy is non-existent (at least outside of the household). Artistic life depends a great deal upon such friendships: I doubt whether it can exist without them, any more than b.u.t.terflies or bees could exist without flowers.

The ideal is created by the heart, no doubt; but it is nourished only by others' faith and love for it. In all this great Tokyo I doubt if there is a man with an ideal--or a woman (I mean any one not a j.a.panese); and so far as I have been able to hear and see there are consequently no friendships. Can there possibly be friendships where there is no aspirational life? I doubt it very much.

I must eat some humble pie. My work during the past ten months has been rather poor. Why, I cannot quite understand--because it costs me more effort. Anyhow I have had to rewrite ten essays: they greatly improved under the process. I am trying now to get a Buddhist commentary for them--mostly to be composed of texts dealing with preexistence and memory of former lives. I took for subjects the following:--Beauty is Memory;--why beautiful things bring sadness;--the riddle of touch--i.

e., the _thrill_ that a touch gives;--the perfume of youth;--the reason of the pleasure of the feeling evoked by bright blue;--the pain caused by certain kinds of red;--mystery of certain musical effects;--fear of darkness and the feeling of dreams. Queer subjects, are they not? I think of calling the collection "Retrospectives." It might be dedicated to "E. B. W.,"--I fancy that I should do well to use the initials only; for some of the essays might be found a little startling. But when the work will be finished I cannot tell.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

In this Tokyo, this detestable Tokyo, there are no j.a.panese impressions to be had except at rare intervals. To describe to you the place would be utterly impossible,--more easy to describe a province.

Here the quarter of the foreign emba.s.sies, looking like a well-painted American suburb;--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several centuries old; a little further square miles of indescribable squalor;--then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and bounded by hideous barracks;--then a great park, full of really weird beauty, the shadows all black as ink;--then square miles of streets of shops, which burn down once a year;--then more squalor;--then rice-fields and bamboo groves;--then more streets. All this not flat, but hilly,--a city of undulations. Immense silences--green and romantic--alternate with quarters of turmoil and factories and railroad stations. Miles of telegraph-poles, looking at a distance like enormous fine-tooth combs, make a horrid impression. Miles of water-pipes--miles and miles and miles of them--interrupt the traffic of the princ.i.p.al streets: they have been trying to put them underground for seven years,--and what with official trickery, etc., the work makes slow progress. Gigantic reservoirs are ready; but no water in them yet. City being sued by the foreign engineer (once a university professor) for $138,000 odd commission on plans! Streets melt under rain, water-pipes sink, water-pipe holes drown spreeing men and swallow up playful children; frogs sing amazing songs in the street.--To think of art or time or eternity in the dead waste and muddle of this mess is difficult.

The Holy Ghost of the poets is not in Tokyo. I am going to try to find him by the seash.o.r.e.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The other night I got into a little-known part of Tokyo,--a street all ablaze with lanterns about thirty feet high, painted with weird devices. And I was interested especially by the insect-sellers. I bought a number of cages full of night-singing insects, and am now trying to make a study of the subjects. The noise made by these creatures is very much more extraordinary than you could imagine; but the habit of keeping them is not merely due to a love of the noise in itself. No: it is because these little orchestras give to city-dwellers the _feeling_ of the delight of being in the country,--the sense of woods and hills and flowing water and starry nights and sweet air. Fireflies are caged for the same reason.

This is a refinement of sensation, is it not?--only a poetical people could have imagined the luxury of buying summer-voices to make for them the illusion of nature where there is only dust and mud. Notice also that the singers are _night-singers_. It is no use to cage the cicadae: they remain silent in a cage, and die.

In this horrid Tokyo I feel like a cicada:--I am caged, and can't sing. Sometimes I wonder whether I shall ever be able to sing any more,--except at night?--like a bell-insect which has only _one_ note.

What more and more impresses me every year is the degree to which the writer is a creature of circ.u.mstance. If he can make the circ.u.mstance, like a Kipling or a Stevenson, he can go on forever. Otherwise he is likely to exhaust every motive in short order, to the same extent that he depends on outer influence.

There was a little under-ripple of premonition in that very sweet letter from Miss Josephine,--just the faintest suggestion of a thought that the future might hold troubles in its shadow. Now I suppose that for none can the future be only luminous; but that you will have a smooth and steady current to bear you along to the great sea appears to me a matter of course. I do not imagine there will be rocks and reefs and whirlpools for you. You have both such large experience of life as it is, and of the laws and the arts of navigating that water, that I have no anxiety about you at all. Such little disillusions as you may have should only draw you nearer together. But there is the sensation of being afraid for somebody else--one has to face that; and the more boldly, perhaps, the less the terror becomes. It is worse in the case where one would be helpless without the other. But I imagine that your union is one of two strong independent spirits--each skilled in self-guidance. That makes everything so much easier.

One thing you _will_ have to do,--that is, to take extremely good care of yourself for somebody else's sake. Which redounds to my benefit; for I really don't know what I should do without that occasional wind of sympathy wherewith your letters refresh me. I keep telling my wife that it would be ever so much better to leave Tokyo, and dwell in the country, at a very much smaller salary, and have peace of mind. She says that nowhere could I have any peace of mind until I become a Buddha, and that with patience we can become independent. This is good; and my few j.a.panese friends tell me the same thing. But perhaps the influence from 40 Kilby Street, Boston, is the most powerful and saving of all.

An earthquake and several other things (I _hate_ earthquakes) interrupted this letter. It is awfully dull, I know--forgive its flatness....

Ever, dear H., your LAFCADIO.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

TOKYO, 1897.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with which we look at a thing,--half angered by inability to a.n.a.lyze within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think the feeling is una.n.a.lyzable, simply because, as Kipling says in that wonderful narrative, "The Finest Story in the World," "the doors have been shut behind us." The pleasure you felt in looking at that tree, at that lawn,--all the pleasure of the quaint summer in that charming old city,--was it only _your_ pleasure? There is really no singular,--no "I." "I" is surely collective. Otherwise we never could explain fully those movements within us caused by the scent of hay,--by moonlight on summer waters,--by certain voice tones that make the heart beat quicker,--by certain colours and touches and longings. The law that inherited memory becomes trans.m.u.ted into intuitions or instincts is not absolute. Only some memories, or rather parts of them, are so transformed. Others remain--will not die. When you felt the charm of that tree and that lawn,--many who would have loved you were they able to live as in other days, were looking through you and remembering happy things. At least I think it must have been so. The different ways in which different places and things thus make appeal would be partly explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest. But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home--in which happy generations have been. Then how much dead love lives again, and how many ecstasies of the childhoods of a hundred years must revive! We do not _all_ die,--said the ancient wise man. How much of us dies is an unutterable mystery.

Science is rather provoking here. She tells us we are advancing toward equilibration, to be followed by dissolution, to be succeeded by another evolution, to end in another disintegration--and so on forever. Why a cosmos must be dissipated into a nebula, and the nebula again resolved into a sun-swarm, she confesses that she does not know. There is no comfort in her except the comfort of doubt,--and that is wholesome. But she says one encouraging thing. No thought can utterly perish. As all life is force, the record of everything must pa.s.s into the infinite.

Now what is this force that shapes and unshapes universes? Might it be old thoughts and words and pa.s.sions of men? The ancient East so declares. There can be rest eternal only when--not in one petty world, but throughout all the cosmos--the Good only lives. Here all is, of course, theory and ignorance,--for all we know. Still the faith ought to have value. How would the well-balanced man try to live if once fully persuaded that his every thought would affect not only the future of himself, but of the universe! The other day something queer happened. I was vexed about something wrong that had been done at a distance. Some days after, one said to me: "The other day, while you were so angry, people were killed"--mentioning the place. "I know that," I said. "But do you not feel sorry?" "Why should I feel sorry?--I did not kill anybody." "_How do you know you did not? Your anger might have been added to the measure of the anger that caused the wrong._" Unto this I could not reply. Thinking over the matter, indeed, who can say what his life may be to the life of the unseen about him?

Ever very affectionately, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

1897.