Lafcadio Hearn

Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of Ushaw College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:—

"He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc.

"As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who were considered very good English writers—for boys. In other subjects, he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose he exerted himself except in English.

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

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

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

Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel. His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects, and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque. Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces, and glinting on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts shrieking in the gale—these were favourite topics of conversation, and in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich.

"I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in, I think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.' [5] This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a correct copy of it:—

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

"He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd. His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when the passing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell summoned us again to study.

"A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio said his address was longer—'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, Space, God.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the Times Democrat, he alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist, declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind. "I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being haunted—haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he says, in his essay on "Dust."

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

It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw. Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees.

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

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

At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane, had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady. The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore.

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

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

CHAPTER V

A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters—the only ones we have of his at this time—written to his school-friend, Mr. Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open, or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and excitable imagination.

The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law. It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling against overwhelming odds—poverty-stricken, starving—than lazily and luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne and chicken mayonnaise on board.

Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance. Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping, was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work.

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

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

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

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

At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body—sometimes to the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up. He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self, lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all, his own genius.

"Well, you too have had your revelations,—which means deep pains. One must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making."

Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings, strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum, where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain? Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good and true.'"

We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the white-winged ships, "swift Hermæ of traffic—ghosts of the infinite ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day destined to become the interpreter.

We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were the sheets—destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical stuff—that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.

"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two little words—'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain—pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and dead suns.

"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual being—vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past." [7]

It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the future.

Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers, called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The Germ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans, and kakemonos embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon marbles."

Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text, seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy."

Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter," indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters contributed to the Commercial from New Orleans. There is a certain pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and character of Midwinter made to his imagination. "What had I known of strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and cheated and starved."

Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain endeavoured to penetrate.

Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven," alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who had 'run away from a Monastery in Wales,' and who still had part of his monk's garb for clothing."

In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow, told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France, and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or destroyed.

Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman Catholic institution of the Petits Précepteurs at Yvetot, near Rouen. Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle Richard, who was living there at the time.

Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor, disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore, not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.

It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity—appanage of his artistic nature—with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris, where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to clutch the Unattainable."

A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital memories—memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.

It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin," while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the Chat Noir, and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, François Millet, in poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing "The Sowers" and "The Angelus."

Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's. Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers. However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.

It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit, which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.

It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands, Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"—"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.

In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law.

It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.

CHAPTER VI

In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later, Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr. Watkin's frugal meals."

In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in the year 1859.

"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"

"To write, sir."

"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first, try your hand at writing later on."

Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to, but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy, Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant, regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's weird tales.

The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely near-sighted—one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white—he was intensely shy, and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says, hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality, and conceived an immediate affection for the boy.

Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati.

Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself in considerable difficulties.

Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food, he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a beauty and charm that never were hers—and under the title of "My First Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers.

After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot."

"My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson, when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.

"I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen from the house."

This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses, unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen.

His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft, delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was, yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did not.

"I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was touchy—went off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends refused to do anything further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of doors. At last I became a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires, shovelled coals, etc., in exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on the floor of the smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half years, finding time to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap Weekly Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for them. I tried other occupations also—canvassing, show-card writing, etc. These brought enough to buy smoking tobacco and second-hand clothes—nothing more."

It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop, with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law.

In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," [9] Dr. George Milbury Gould alludes to this gentleman in the following terms:—