Lafcadio Hearn

It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew, or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these years—the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his mother's brain.

In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety, strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says, "remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of brotherhood, I was totally indifferent—especially for the reason that he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again."

The following reminiscence requires little comment:—

"I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way. Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady came to meet us. She seemed to me tall—but a child cannot judge stature well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after."

The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time in Dublin.

Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny, odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long, lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent, myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from him.

"Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells of—the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down easily. 'Ah!' she said:—'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But how I would love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day—great huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels.

"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now. I rather think I should like to see her."

Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life.

In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma, the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever person, beloved by her children and all her family connections, especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old." [1]

"The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister, when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him again.

"I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him by some tale told her about his life in Paris."

The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the tablets of her memory.

After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.

Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith.

Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his grand-aunt.

Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard in Paris.

Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she wished me to, and I was lazy."

Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of Indian fever, on board the English steamship Mula at Suez, thus ending a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years.

With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end. We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame, remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness—that tenderness generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the arena of life.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house, Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now.

Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous idea—common to most of Hearn's biographers—has originated from Hearn himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales, but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere. Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's "Wanderings in Wales."

Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan," [2] one of Hearn's last books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his memory, and calls them "Welsh hills."

The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China, when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend."

The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes, under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong.

Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib, his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth—

"Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..."

The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose to his eyes.

In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been eight or nine years old—I might have been twelve. And that's all."

It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday.

Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered, spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience of the artistic productions of the Far East.

One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.

By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was, moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so as a child; I was a perfect imp."

Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief—traps arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened, the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono' (flatterer) and run away and hide myself."

He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days after, she would discover it half-rotten.

Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a lap-dog."

But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore, and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys, and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy, of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs. Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling, whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled, for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion over the Celtic mind.

Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled "Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy.

He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings, ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not "ghosts."

The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain, brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before the accident at Ushaw.

The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from eyestrain.

After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre de la Pitié et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant incidents made too important.

"Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in me—thus producing obvious incongruities."

"My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish mind by a certain cousin Jane—apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell fire if he did not believe in God.

When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later, dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were apparently uninfluenced by her religious views.

In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane, Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of those who wanted to come and go daily to London.

Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street.

When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt—we see his name assigned by the Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866—the house at Redhill was given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment.

Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance.

Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction—but was not sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an annuity of (I think, but am not sure) £500. 'Henry,' who had 'made himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own, as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor, but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'—at fourteen. I used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a year or two....

"Well,—there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under pressure of work, I have to say good-bye.

"Lovingly ever,

"Lafcadio Hearn."

In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if accurately known, give revelation about some other matters."

CHAPTER III

Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.

There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's brain—perhaps after the lapse of years—of a day spent by the sea listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness, something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse, raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos, sometimes of inspiration.

Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes unconsciously, memories of these childish days.

At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo hedge—or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black beach—or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable in the touch of the wind,—or by all these—he could not say; but slowly there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....

Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world, the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries, the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.

The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a fragment entitled "Gulf Winds," [3] shows his inspiration at its best. Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the Commercial, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of last century.

"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with sudden light. Chita, at the Viosca Chénière, conquering her terror of the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the dawn—like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; Chita learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which, the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds, darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own childish existence at Tramore.

For him, as for Chita, there was no factitious life those days, no obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without.

When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.

Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered for his habit of "drawing the long bow."

Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was not distinguished by accuracy of statement.

The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those surrounding him—not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world. While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul entrenched itself.

Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and divine—the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it, recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."

It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as having been found amongst his papers after his death.

His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly, stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however, exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear. Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediæval creed seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.

The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow; the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places, but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had been put on the gods—large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....

After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees, in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.

A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the "Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.

CHAPTER IV

We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his religious education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early impressions.

That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says: "You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic."

Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the "mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This disposes of one of the many Hearn myths.

That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject" was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching.

All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst those whom the French term deséquilibrés, one of those ill-poised and erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to madness.

Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism was artistic and æsthetic.

Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof.

"I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!"

That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist?

If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his prototype, Flaubert, there was a fond d'ecclésiastique in Hearn's nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry, and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line?

It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger, better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry, French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition for three years of his residence at Ushaw.

He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance on many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible dream of modern æsthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.'

"Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas, and the Sagas, and the Chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of the Vikings and Berserks, he had at his finger ends, because they were mighty and awesomely grand."

Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from Kobe, in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me incapacitated to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of having dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge of some one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything I learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..."

In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D——, one of those in his class at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you much about him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember him as a boy about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming with delight at some of his many mischievous plots with which he disturbed the College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or three classes, or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But he was always considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and the terror of his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I fancy very popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody, but he loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or of glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,' [4] who was one of his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many whippings, wrote poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in fact, quite irresponsible."