The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 7

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Alas! the time flies too fast. Soon all this will be a dream:--the white cottages shadowed with leafy green,--the languid rocking-chairs upon the old-fashioned gallery,--the cows that look into one's window with the rising sun,--the dog and the mule trotting down the flower-edged road,--the goose of the ancient Margot,--the muttering surf upon the bar beyond which the sharks are,--the bath-bell and the bathing belles,--the air that makes one feel like a boy,--the pleasure of sleeping with doors and windows open to the sea and its everlasting song,--the exhilaration of rising with the rim of the sun.... And then we must return to the dust and the roar of New Orleans, to hear the rumble of wagons instead of the rumble of breakers, and to smell the smell of ancient gutters instead of the sharp sweet scent of pure sea wind. I believe I would rather be old Margot's goose if I could. Blessed goose! thou knowest nothing about the literary side of the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_; but thou dost know that thou canst have a good tumble in the sea every day. If I could live down here I should certainly live to be a hundred years old. One _lives_ here. In New Orleans one only exists.... And the boat comes--I must post this incongruous epistle.

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Good-bye,--wish you were here, sincerely.

Very truly, LAFCADIO HEARN.

This jesting letter makes but little reference to the beauties of this tropical island, which had, however, made a profound impression upon Hearn, and later they were reproduced with astonishing fidelity in the book. Some distance to the westward of Grande Isle lies L'Isle Derniere, or--as it is now commonly called--Last Island, then a mere sandbank, awash in high tides, but thirty years before that an island of the same character as Grande Isle, and for half a century a popular summer resort for the people of New Orleans and the planters of the coast. On the 10th of August, 1856, a frightful storm swept it bare and annihilated the numerous summer visitors, only a handful among the hundreds escaping. The story of the tragedy remained a vivid tradition along the coast, where hardly a family escaped without the loss of some relation or friend, and on Hearn's return to New Orleans he embodied a brief story of the famous storm, with his impressions of the splendours of the Gulf, under the t.i.tle of "Torn Letters," purporting to be the fragments of an old correspondence by one of the survivors. This story--published in the _Times-Democrat_--was so favourably received that he was later encouraged to enlarge it into a book, and the Harpers, who had already published some articles from his pen, issued it as a serial in their magazine, where it won instant recognition from a large public that had heretofore been ignorant of, or indifferent to, his work.

Oscar Wilde once declared that life and nature constantly plagiarized from art, and would have been pleased with the confirmation of his suggestion afforded by the fact that nearly twenty years after the publication of "Chita" a storm, similar to the one described in the book, swept away in its turn Grande Isle, and Les Chenieres, and a girl child was rescued by Manila fishermen as Hearn had imagined. After living with one of their families for some time she was finally recovered by her father (who had believed her lost in the general catastrophe), under circ.u.mstances astoundingly like those invented by the author so many years before.

The book was dedicated to Dr. Rodolfo Matas, a Spanish physician in New Orleans, and an intimate friend,--frequently mentioned in the letters to Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia, with whom a correspondence was begun at about this time.

It was because of the success of "Chita" that Hearn was enabled to realize his long-nourished dream of penetrating farther into the tropics, and with a vague commission from the Harpers he left New Orleans, in 1887, and sailed for the Windward Islands. The journey took him as far south as British Guiana, the fruit of which was a series of travel-sketches printed in _Harper's Magazine_. So infatuated with the Southern world of colour, light, and warmth had he become that--trusting to the possible profits of his books and the further material he hoped to gather--two months after his return from this journey, and without any definite resources, he cast himself back into the arms of the tropics, for which he suffered a life-long and unappeasable nostalgia.

It was to St. Pierre in the island of Martinique--the place that had most attracted him on his travels--that he returned. That island of "gigantic undulations," that town of bright long narrow streets rising toward a far ma.s.s of glowing green ... which looks as if it had slid down the hill behind it, so strangely do the streets come tumbling to the port in a cascade of masonry,--with a red billowing of tiled roofs over all, and enormous palms poking up through it. That town with "a population fantastic, astonishing,--a population of the Arabian Nights ... many coloured, with a general dominant tint of yellow, like that of the town itself ... always relieved by the costume colours of Martinique--brilliant yellow stripings or chequerings which have an indescribable luminosity, a wonderful power of bringing out the fine warm tints of tropical flesh ... the hues of those rich costumes Nature gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,--her honey-lovers,--her insects: wasp-colours." Here, under the shadow of Mt. Pelee "coiffed with purple and lilac cloud ... a magnificent _Madras_, yellow-banded by the sun," he remained for two years, and from his experiences there created his next book. "Two Years in the French West Indies" made a minute and astonishing record of the town and the population, now as deeply buried and as utterly obliterated as was Pompeii by the lava and ashes of Vesuvius. Eighteen centuries hence, could some archaeologist, disinterring the almost forgotten town, find this book, what pa.s.sionate value would he give to this record of a community of as unique a character as that of the little Graeco-Roman city! What price would be set to-day upon parchments which reproduced with such vivid fidelity the world, so long hid in darkness, of that civilization over whose calcined fragments we now yearningly ponder!

One English commentator upon the work of Lafcadio Hearn speaks of "Chita" and "Two Years in the French West Indies" with negligent contempt as of "the orchid and c.o.c.katoo type of literature," and pa.s.ses on to his j.a.panese work as the first of considerable importance. Other critics have been led into the same error, welcoming the cooler tones of his later pictures as a growth in power and a development of taste. It is safe to say that the makers of such criticisms have not seen the lands and peoples of whom these books attempt to reproduce the charm.

Those who have known tropic countries will realize how difficult is the task of reproducing their multi-coloured glories, and that to bring even a faint shadow of their splendours back to eyes accustomed to the pale greys and half tints of Northern lands is a labour not only arduous in itself, but more than apt to be ungratefully received by those for whom it is undertaken. A mole would find a b.u.t.terfly's description of an August landscape exaggerated to the point of vulgarity, and the average critic is more likely to find satisfaction in "A Grey Day at Annisquam"

than in the most subtly handled picture of the blaze of noon at Luxor.

"Chita" is marred occasionally by a phrase that suggests the journalism in which the hand of the writer had been so long submerged, but in "Two Years in the French West Indies" the artist has at last emanc.i.p.ated his talent and finished his long apprenticeship. Though the author himself in later years finds some fault with it, giving as excuse that much of it was done when he was physically exhausted by fever and anxiety, and "with but a half-filled stomach," it remains one of his most admirable achievements.

The risks he had a.s.sumed in returning to the tropics proved greater than he had imagined. Publishers' delays and rigid exactions of all their part of the writer's pound of flesh left him at times entirely without means, and had it not been for the generosity and kindliness of the people of the now vanished city he would not have lived to return. It was some memory of humble friends there that is recorded in the sixth part of the autobiographical fragments, written after the disaster at St. Pierre.

IN VANISHED LIGHT

... A bright long narrow street rising toward a far ma.s.s of glowing green--burning green of lianas: the front of a tropic wood. Not a street of this age, but of the seventeenth century: a street of yellow facades, with yellow garden-walls between the facades. In sharp bursts of blue light the sea appears at intervals,--blue light blazing up old, old nights of mossy steps descending to the bay. And through these openings ships are visible, far below, riding in azure.

Walls are lemon-colour;--quaint balconies and lattices are green.

Palm-trees rise from courts and gardens into a warm blue sky--indescribably blue--that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things, within or without the yellow vista, are steeped in a sunshine electrically white,--in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavements of basalt the glitter of silver ore.

Men wearing only white canvas trousers, and immense hats of bamboo-gra.s.s,--men naked to the waist, and muscled like sculptures,--pa.s.s noiselessly with barefoot stride. Some are very black; others are of strange and beautiful colours: there are skins of gold, of brown bronze, and of ruddy bronze. And women pa.s.s in robes of brilliant hue,--women of the colour of fruit: orange-colour, banana-colour,--women wearing turbans banded with just such burning yellow as bars the belly of a wasp. The warm thick air is sweet with scents of sugar and of cinnamon,--with odours of mangoes and of custard-apples, of guava-jelly and of fresh cocoanut milk.

--Into the amber shadow and cool moist breath of a great archway I plunge, to reach a court filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. There a little boy and a little girl run to meet me, with Creole cries of "_Mi y!_" Each takes one of my hands;--each holds up a beautiful brown cheek to kiss. In the same moment a voice, the father's voice--deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell--calls from an inner doorway, "_Entrez donc, mon ami!_" And with the large caress of that voice there comes to me such joy of sympathy, such sense of perfect peace, as Souls long-tried by fire might feel when pa.s.sing the Gateway of Pearl....

But all this was and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city;--never again will its ways be trodden;--never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams.

He was again in New York in 1889, occupied with the final proofs of "Chita" before its appearance in book form, preparing the West Indian book for the press, but in sore distress for money, and making a translation of Anatole France's "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" in a few weeks by Herculean labour, in order to exist until he could earn something by his original work. The half-yearly payment of royalties imposed by publishers bears hardly on the author who must pay daily for the means to live. For a time he visited Dr. Gould in Philadelphia, but after his return to New York an arrangement was entered into with Harper and Brothers to go to j.a.pan for the purpose of writing articles from there, after the manner of the West Indian articles, later to be made into a book. An artist was to accompany him to prepare the ill.u.s.trations, and their route was by way of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

His last evening in New York was spent in the company of his dear friend Mr. Ellwood Hendrick, to whom many of the most valuable letters contained in the second volume were written, and on May 8, 1890, he left for the East--never again to return.

CHAPTER III

A MASTER-WORKMAN

It was characteristic of the oddity of Hearn's whole life that his way to the Farthest East should have led through the Farthest West, and that his way to a land where one's first impressions are of having strayed into a child's world of faery,--so elfishly frail and fantastically small that one almost fears to move lest a rude gesture might destroy a baby's dear "make believe,"--should have led through plains as gigantic as empires, and mountain gorges vast as dreams.

Something of the contrast and amazement are recorded in "My First Day"--the introductory paper in "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan":--

"The first charm is intangible and volatile as a perfume.... Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small and queer and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes.... Hokusai's own figures walking about in straw rain-coats and straw sandals--bare-limbed peasants; and patient-faced mothers, with smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their _geta_....

And suddenly a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before a weirdly sculptured portal,--a sensation of dream and doubt. It seems to me that the steps, and the dragon-swarming gate, and the blue sky arching over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and the shadow of myself there stretching upon the grey masonry, must all vanish presently ... because the forms before me--the curved roofs, the coiling dragons, the Chinese grotesqueries of carving--do not really appear to me as things new, but as things dreamed.... A moment and the delusion vanishes; the romance of reality returns, with freshened consciousness of all that which is truly and deliciously new; the magical transparencies of distance, the wondrous delicacy of tones, the enormous height of the summer blue, and the white soft witchery of the j.a.panese sun."

That first witchery of j.a.pan never altogether failed to hold him during the fourteen years in which he wrought out the great work of his life, though he exclaims in one of his letters of a later time, "The oscillation of one's thoughts concerning j.a.pan! It is the hardest country to learn--except China--in the world." He grew aware too in time that even he, with his so amazing capacity for entering into the spirit of other races, must forever remain alien to the Oriental. After some years he writes:--

"The different ways of thinking and the difficulties of the language render it impossible for an educated j.a.panese to find pleasure in the society of a European. Here is an astounding fact. The j.a.panese child is as close to you as a European child--perhaps closer and sweeter because infinitely more natural and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the farther you push him from you.

Why?--Because here the race antipodalism shows itself. As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more he will think in the opposite direction from you."

Though he arrived at a happy moment, his artistic _Wanderjahre_ done, and the tools of his art, after long and bitter apprenticeship, at last obedient to his will and thought in the hand of a master-workman; the material with which he was to labour new and beautiful; yet he never ceased to believe that his true medium was denied to him. In one of his letters he cries:--

"Pretty to talk of my 'pen of fire.' I've lost it. Well, the fact is, it is of no use here. There isn't any fire here. It is all soft, dreamy, quiet, pale, faint, gentle, hazy, vapoury, visionary,--a land where lotus is a common article of diet,--and where there is scarcely any real summer. Even the seasons are feeble ghostly things. Don't please imagine there are any tropics here. Ah! the tropics--they still pull at my heart-strings. Goodness! my real field was there--in the Latin countries, in the West Indies and Spanish America; and my dream was to haunt the old crumbling Portuguese and Spanish cities, and steam up the Amazon and the Orinoco, and get romances n.o.body else could find. And I could have done it, and made books that would sell for twenty years."

Perhaps he never himself quite realized how much greater in importance was the work chance had set him to do. In place of gathering up in the outlying parts of the new world the dim tattered fragments of old-world romance--as a collector might seek in Spanish-American cities faded bits of what were once the gold-threaded, glowing tapestries brought to adorn the exile of Conquistadores--he had the good fortune to be chosen to a.s.sist at one of the great births of history. Out of "a race as primitive as the Etruscan before Rome was"--as he declared he found them--he was to see a mighty modern nation spring full-armed, with all the sudden miraculous transformation of some great mailed beetle bursting from the grey hidden sh.e.l.l of a feeble-looking pupa. He saw the fourteenth century turn swiftly, amazingly, into the twentieth, and his twelve volumes of studies of the j.a.panese people were to have that unique and lasting value that would attach to equally painstaking records of Greek life before the Persian wars. Inestimable, immortal, would be such books--could they anywhere be found--setting down the faiths, the traditions, the daily lives, the songs, the dances, the names, the legends, the humble lore of plants, birds, and insects, of that people who suddenly stood up at Thermopylae, broke the wave from the East, made Europe possible, and set the cornerstone of Occidental thought. This was what Lafcadio Hearn, a little penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer had come to do for j.a.pan. To make immortal the story of the childhood of a people as simple as the early Greek, who were to break at Mukden the great wave of conquest from the West and to rejuvenate the most ancient East.

So naturally humble was his estimate of himself that it is safe to a.s.sert that not at this time, perhaps at no time, was he aware of the magnitude and importance of the work he had been set to do. For the moment he was concerned only with the odylic charm of the new faery world in which he found himself, but even in faery-land one may find in time rigidities underlying the charm. No Occidental at that period had as yet divined the iron core underlying the silken courtesy of the j.a.panese character. Within the first l.u.s.trum of his residence there Hearn had grasped the truth, and expressed it in a metaphor. In the volume ent.i.tled "Out of the East" he says:--

"Under all the amazing self-control and patience there exists an adamantine something very dangerous to reach.... In the house of any rich family the guest is likely to be shown some of the heirlooms.... A pretty little box, perhaps, will be set before you. Opening it you will see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with a silk running-cord decked with tiny ta.s.sels. Very soft and choice the silk is, and elaborately figured. What marvel can be hidden under such a covering? You open the bag and see within another bag, of a different quality of silk, but very fine. Open that, and lo! a third, which contains a fourth, which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth, which contains a seventh bag, which contains the strangest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay that you ever beheld. Yet it is not only curious but precious; it may be more than a thousand years old."

In time he came to know better than any other Occidental has ever known all those smooth layers of the j.a.panese nature, and to understand and admire that rough hard clay within--old and wonderful and precious.

Again he says:--

"For no little time these fairy folk can give you all the softness of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream--never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a j.a.panese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, into a world that is not, and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century, over s.p.a.ces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into a vanished age, back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal; the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence."

For in time he realized that feudal j.a.pan, with its gentleness and altruism, had attained to its n.o.ble ideal of duty by tremendous coercion of the will of the individual by the will of the rest, with a resultant absence of personal freedom that was to the individualism of the Westerner as strangling as the stern socialism of bees and ants.

These, however, were the subtler difficulties arising to confront him as the expatriation stretched into years. The immediate concern was to find means to live. His original purpose of remaining only long enough to prepare a series of ill.u.s.trated articles for _Harper's Magazine_--to be later collected in book form--was almost immediately subverted by a dispute with the publishers. The discovery, during the voyage, that the artist who accompanied him was to receive more than double the pay allowed for the text, angered him beyond measure, and this, added to other matters in which he considered himself unjustly treated, caused him to sever abruptly all his contracts.

It was an example of his incapacity to look at business arrangements from the ordinary point of view that he declined even to receive his royalties from the books already in print, and the publishers could discharge their obligations to him only by turning over the money to a friend, who after some years and by roundabout methods succeeded in inducing him to accept it. That his indignation at what he considered an injustice left him without resources or prospects in remote exile caused him not a moment's hesitation in following this course. Fortunately a letter of introduction carried him within the orbit of Paymaster Mitch.e.l.l McDonald, a young officer of the American navy stationed in Yokohama. Between these two very dissimilar natures there at once sprang up a warm friendship, from which Hearn derived benefits so delicately and wisely tendered that even his fierce pride and sensitiveness could accept them; and this friendship, which lasted until the close of his life, proved to be a beautiful and helpful legacy for his children. The letters to Paymaster McDonald included in Volume II have a special character of gaiety and good fellowship--with him he forgot in great measure the prepossessions of his life, and became merely the man-of-the-world, delighting in the memories of good dinners, good wine and cigars, enjoyed together; long evenings of gay talk and reminiscences of a naval officer's polyglot experiences; long days of sea and sunshine; but agreeable as were these cheerful experiences--so foreign to his ordinary course of existence--he was continually driving from him, in comic terror, the man who drew him now and again to forget the seriousness of his task.

Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, already famous for his studies of j.a.panese life and literature, also became interested in the wanderer,--and through his potent influence Hearn received an appointment to the Jinjo-chugakko or Ordinary Middle School at Matsue, in the province Izumo, in Shimane Ken, to which he went in August of 1890.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAFCADIO HEARN AND MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD]

Matsue lies on the northern coast, near that western end of j.a.pan which trails like a streaming feather of land through the Eastern Pacific along the coast of China. It is a town of about thirty-five thousand inhabitants, situated at the junction of Lake Shinji and the Bay of Naka-umi, and was at that time far out of the line of travel or Western influence, the manners of the people remaining almost unchanged, affording a peculiarly favourable opportunity for the study of feudal j.a.pan. The ruins of the castle of the Daimyo, Matsudaira,--descendant of the great Shogun Ieyasu,--who was overthrown in the wars of the Meiji, still frowned from the wooded hill above the city, and still his love of art, his conservatism of the old customs, his rigid laws of politeness were stamped deeply into the culture of the subjects over whom he had reigned, though ugly modern buildings housed the schools of that Western learning he had so contemned, and which the newcomer had been hired to teach. But this was a teacher of different calibre from those who had preceded him. Here was one not a holder of the "little yellow monkey" prepossession. Here was a rare mind capable at the age of forty of receiving new impressions, of comprehending a civilization alien to all its previous knowledge.

Out of this remarkable experience--a stray from the Nineteenth Century moving about in the unrealized world of the Fourteenth--grew that portion of his first j.a.panese book, "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan,"

which he called "From the Diary of an English Teacher," and "The Chief City of the Province of the G.o.ds." It is interesting to compare the impression made upon the teacher by his pupils with the opinion formed by the pupils of their foreign teacher.