The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 40

Affectionately, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, February, 1899.

DEAR McDONALD,--Now don't give yourself all that trouble about coming up to Tokyo. It would have been an ugly trip for you last Sat.u.r.day or Sunday, anyhow: wait till the fine days, and till you don't know what else to do. I think I shall see you before you go to the U. S. anyhow, in Tokyo; but I don't think you will be able to manage the trip very often. If I telegraph, "Dying--quick--murder:" then I know that you will even quit your dinner and come;--isn't that pleasant to be sure of?

I was thinking the other day to ask you if you ever knew my dead friend,--W. D. O'Connor (U. S. Signal Service), Washington. He was very fond of me in his way--got me my first introduction to the Harpers. I believe that he died of overwork. I have his portrait. He was Whitman's great friend. Thinking about him and you together, I was wondering how much nationality has to do with these friendships. Is it only Irish or Latin people who make friends for friendship's sake? Or is it that I am getting old--and that, as Balzac says, men do not make friends after forty-eight? Coming to think of old times, I believe a man is better off in a very humble position, with a very small salary. He has everything then more or less trustworthy and real in his surroundings. Give him a thousand dollars a month, and he must live in a theatre, and never presume to take off his mask.

No, dear friend, I don't want _your_ book. I should not feel comfortable with it in hand: I cannot comfortably read a book belonging to another person, because I feel all the time afraid of spoiling it. I feel restrained, and therefore uncomfortable. Besides, _your_ book is where it ought to be doing the most good. Nay! I shall wait even until the crack of doom, rather than take your book.

There is to be a mail sometime next week, I suppose. Ought to come to-day--but the _City of Rio de Janeiro_ is not likely to fly in a blizzard, except downward. If she has my book on board she will certainly sink.

By the way, you did not know that I am fatal to ships. Every ship on which I journey gets into trouble. Went to America in a steamer that foundered. Came to j.a.pan upon another that went to destruction.

Travelled upon a half-dozen j.a.panese steamers,--every one of which was subsequently lost. Even lake-boats do not escape me. The last on which I journeyed turned over, and drowned everybody on board,--only twenty feet from sh.o.r.e. It was I who ran the _Belgic_ on land. The only ship that I could not wreck was the _Saikyo-Maru_, but she went to the Yalu on the next trip after I had been aboard of her,--and got tolerably well smashed up; so I had satisfaction out of her anyhow. If ever I voyage on the Empress boats, there will be a catastrophe. Therefore I fear exceedingly for the _Rio de Janeiro_; she is not strong enough to bear the presence of that book in a typhoon.

Affectionately, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, March, 1899.

DEAR FRIEND,--I really felt badly at not being able to see more of you yesterday,--especially to see you off to Shimbashi: I could not even slip down to the gate without putting on shoes that take a terrible time to lace. On the other hand, you left in the house a sense of warmth and force and sun,--that were like a tonic to me,--or like a South-wind from the sea on a summer's day; and I felt in consequence better satisfied with the world at large.

Do you recognize this pen: a U.S. pen, contributed to my pen-holder by a U.S.N. officer whom I know a little, and like very much.

I hope by this time that the Gordian knot shows some inclination to unravel; and that the worry is diminishing. I remember, with much quiet laughter, your story of the bear. I think I have found nearly as good a simile--in an Indian paper. The fat Baboo got into a post-carriage, with many furious steeds, which the driver was accustomed to drive after the manner of the driving of Jehu,--and the driver was given further to meditation, during which he had no consciousness of the base facts of earth. And the bottom of the carriage fell out; and the Baboo landed feet first, and ran,--with the carriage round him,--and the horses were rushing at a speed not to be calculated. For the Baboo, it was death or run,--because the driver neither heard nor saw; and the exertions made are said to have been stupendous. The Baboo got off with a large amount of hospital, caused--or rather necessitated--by the unusual exercise....

Well, I hope I shall some day again see you. I feel, however, that something has been gained: you have been up; and I can't find fault--even should you never again visit Tomihisa-cho.

By the way, you are a bad, bad boy to have given a present to those _kurumaya_. You spoil them. Talk again to me about ruining the morals of your "boy"! Won't I be revenged! Affectionately,

LAFCADIO.

Boy sends love to Ojisan McDonald.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, March, 1899.

DEAR McDONALD,--I don't know what to say about "Cyrano de Bergerac" as a poem, except that as for fine workmanship, it is what we should expect the best dramatic French prosody of this sort to be. The verse-smith is certainly a great craftsman. But was the subject worth the labour spent upon it? I have no doubt that upon the French stage the effect would be glorious,--exciting,--splendid: all that sort of thing; and the story is "Frenchy,"--wrap-me-up-in-the-flag-of-honour style of extravagance. It isn't natural--that is a great fault. Why it should please English and American readers I can't quite see: I don't believe the approbation is quite genuine,--any more than the admiration for Bernhardt was genuine on the part of those who went to see her without knowing a word of her language. I can understand why Frenchmen should enthusiastically praise the book, but not why Americans should. The heroine is a selfish, uninteresting little "chit;" the other characters are without any sympathetic quality that I can find. Cyrano wanting to fight with everybody about his nose--to impose his nose on the world at the point of the sword, while perpetrating rhymes the while--surely is not a very grand person. No poet could make such a nose attractive.

We can forget the nose of Mephistopheles because his wit and force dazzle us; but Mephistopheles has no weaknesses,--not at least in the first part of "Faust." Cyrano has many; and one even suspects that his virtues are the outgrowth of his despair about his nose. But I am glad to have read the wonderful thing; and I shall prize the book as long as I live,--because it came up here in your coat-pocket, and was given me with a smile and a twinkle of the eye that were (in my poor judgement) incomparably more beautiful than the writer's best lines; for these latter are not quite out of the heart, you know.

Speaking of an ugly subject for heroic treatment, I was thinking to-day about something that you would have done better than the man who did it,--the ugly subject being a hairy caterpillar in a salad at a banquet.

The lady of the palace had ladled the salad and the caterpillar into the plate of some admiral or commodore, and saw what she had done when it was too late. The seaman caught her horrified eye, held it, and, smiling, swallowed the caterpillar unseen by the other guests. After the banquet, the beauty came to thank him--out of the innermost rosy chamber of her heart--when he is reported to have said: "Why, Madam, did you think that I would permit your pleasure of the evening to be spoiled by a miserable G--d d--d caterpillar!" Yes, you would have consumed the caterpillar; but you would not have "cussed" in the closing scene--though that was a lovable profanity in a man of the older school.

Well, I think that commodore, or whatever his t.i.tle may have been, a better man out and out than Cyrano. He would have done just as much, and made no fuss at all about it. Affectionately,

LAFCADIO.

TO MRS. FENOLLOSA

APRIL, 1899.

DEAR MRS. FENOLLOSA,--To say that you have sent me the most beautiful letter that I ever received--certainly the one that most touched me--is not to say anything at all! Of course I hope to see more of the soul that could utter such a letter,--every word a blossom fragrant like the lovely flower to which the letter was tied.

And yet--strange as it may seem--I feel like reproaching you!--It is not _good_ for a writer to get such a letter;--he ought to be severely maintained rather in a state of perpetual self-dissatisfaction. You would spoil him! Nevertheless, how pleasant to know that there is somebody to whom I can send a book hereafter with a tolerable certainty of pleasing! I shall not even try to thank you any more now; and I shall not dare to _re_read your letter for at least a month. But I hope that my next publication--which is all new--will not have a less welcome in your heart.

Ever with kindliest sympathies,--and unspoken grat.i.tude for the delicious letter and the delicious flower,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, May, 1899.

DEAR MITCh.e.l.l,--I am sending you the address of the great silk house, or rather dry-goods house, in Tokyo; but a word in addition. If you and the consul are not afraid of taking cold by walking about in stocking-feet awhile, I strongly advise you to visit also the j.a.panese show-rooms,--just to see the crepe-silks, spring goods, embroidered screens, etc.,--the things made to suit j.a.panese taste, according to real art principles. You will find them much more interesting, I imagine, than the displays made to please foreigners. Even the _towels_ and the _yukata_ stuffs ought to tempt you into a trifling purchase or two in spite of yourselves; but n.o.body will grumble even if you do not buy at all. It is just like a bazaar, you need only go upstairs and walk through, from room to room, looking at the cases.

I was delighted with the little book which good Consul Bedloe so kindly gave me--I read it in the train. Please thank him with the best thanks in your capacity (which is practically unlimited) for the picture: it will be always a souvenir for me of one of the most, if not the absolutely most, delightful days that I pa.s.sed in Yokohama. If you think he would care for the enclosed shadow of this old owl, please kindly give it him. I would I had at the moment some better way of acknowledging the rare pleasure which his merry good fellowship and his inimitable stories and everything about himself filled me with. I can't help feeling as if I had made a new friend--though that would not do to say, you know, upon such short acquaintance, to him. I only want to tell _you_ just how the experience affected me.

I shall not thank you for my happy two days with you, and all the beautiful things that you "so beautifully _did_." But I felt as if the sky had become more blue and the gra.s.s more green than could really be the case. You know what that means.

With hope to see you soon again, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, May, 1899.

DEAR MITCh.e.l.l,--I am still, o' nights, holding imaginary conversations with you from the windows of a waiting train,--or listening to wonderful stories from a delightful phantom-consul. In other words, the impressions of my last days in Yokohama are still haunting me, and--I fear--creating too much desire after the flesh-pots of Egypt. But in spite of these moral and intellectual debaucheries, I have been doing fair work,--and have in hand a ghost-story of a new and pathetically penetrating kind.

Speaking of ghosts, the design for the cover is to be plum-blossoms against a grey-blue sky. Can't say this is appropriate--the plum-blossom being the moral emblem of female virtue. A lotus in a golden lake,--a willow in rainy darkness,--would be better. But so long as I am not consulted, exact appropriateness cannot be expected; besides, it would be lost upon the public.

I've been thinking over all your plans and hopes for me, and I am going to blast them unmercifully. I am quite convinced that you can do nothing at all, until the day when I make a hit on my own spontaneous account.

_Then_ you can do anything. For the interval, I must be very careful not to seem anxious to want attention of any sort, and do better work than I ever did before. You will only be able to find me a literary agent--or something of that sort,--and to talk nicely about me to personal friends.

Give my most grateful, most sincere, most unchangeable regards to Dr.

Bedloe. I think more on his subject than I am going to put on paper just now.

Affectionately, LAFCADIO.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Beauties of the landscape--scenery between Tokyo and Yokohama.]

TO MRS. FENOLLOSA