Lafcadio Hearn

CHAPTER XXII

His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo—of the old stories and picture-books—still existed in her provincial mind; she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.

Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing façade, a structure that would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or London.

After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a "rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.

In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.

When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a sake-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great trees, dreaming out of space, out of time.

The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university. One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!"

Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly realistic—the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted American suburb—near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor; then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess, was difficult. But Setsu was happy—like a bird making its nest, she was fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly weather it was.

In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo, there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor, seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers.

His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals, and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an impossible task.

In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students. Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal, therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical explanation of technique and style.

The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form, through every condition of society, and almost into every household. Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part would talk about things as they ought to be,—bang, fizz, chaos and confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."

The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.

Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.

No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of gold—luckily for themselves.

He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on you!" All the professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow—no overcoats allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far East—'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest. There is a reason for things—for anything except—a plug hat...."

As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn, representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about them."

With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic. Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested, looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in Japan. He describes his landlord, the old sake-brewer, coming to definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,—you ought to have been a girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his father about pretty girls,—what shall I do with him? Marry him at seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."

He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century false,—everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.

After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was dedicated:—

TOKYO

"to my friend
Amenomori Nobushige
poet, scholar and patriot."

We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year—perhaps the only land to find the new sensation is in the Past,—floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to feel the charm of the Far East—or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality? Alas! I don't know...."

Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese, however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.

Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.

In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she mentions McDonald of Yokohama—in brown boots and corduroys—as escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.

"After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio."

Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in uniform,—a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up till midnight, talking about things.

The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Antæus I feel always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality, not so much of a literary man however."

The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks, the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"—only real facts—not names or dates—real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy. He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in Japan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible—"especially hidden from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn."

If he could get together a book of short stories—six would be enough—he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he could.

Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past life—that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?"

The communion between these two was more like that between some popular, athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an audacious proceeding that few ventured upon.

Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street—the charming way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs.

In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's visits. A rocking-chair,—rare piece of furniture in a Japanese establishment—a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder.

McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald, therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of all sorts.

"With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man! How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'"

They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and "blue soul"—names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years.

"What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,—with philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher (Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an indefinite way that some divine attribute was his.

McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti. Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he wished him to write fiction—he wanted him to make some profit out of his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which alone can furnish the material. They can divine, but must have some chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social existence."

Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to officialdom—but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy to college there must remain merely a possibility.

The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession, and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.

He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.

He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him, who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her 'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"

The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals—six-legged calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.

But his friends!—they were the real destroyers, they praised his work, believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly. Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost—"against whom sin shall not be forgiven,—either in this life, or in the life to come."

Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet here I am, smoking a divine cigar—out of my friend's gift-box—and brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald wrapped him up in his own to send him home—an incident which Hearn declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died. Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius, the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination.

It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper again—treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his attacks of temper at Cincinnati.

So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's, lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the sale of the copyright of his books in the United States.

CHAPTER XXIII

"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years after his marriage—"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light, things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,—so impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned to prize some of them at their weight in gold."

Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the valise?... Oh! but you are queer—always, always dreaming! And don't you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"

On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."

She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden and simple things—"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the Japanese poem says—we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals. "He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he laughed the whole household laughed, too."

His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would play "onigokko," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song, for instance—

"Yu-yake!
Ko-yake!
Ashita wa tenki ni nare."

"Evening-burning!
Little-burning!
Weather, be fair to-morrow!"

or the Song of "Urashima Taro."

He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming, distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of storm and impending disaster which is wonderful.

He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling, crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see. But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya, Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as they passed along.

An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore, smoking his Japanese pipe.

Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half of his stay at Tokyo,—whilst his health indeed still permitted the indulgences—to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond: "Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."

Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse, though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine, the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to recall."

Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers, ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.

We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune, which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection with the incident.

But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast, where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for sea-bathing, that he was in his element.

The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than that of college professors.

As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi, who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw sandals, gourds for holding sake, and bottles of lemonade, while surmounting all was the kamidana—the shelf of the gods—with its Daruma, or household divinity.

Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the gale—floating in the mists—shuddering in the leaf—flickering in the light of waters—or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf, to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating round him.

It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published after his appointment as professor of English at the university was "Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East." Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at Matsue, Kobe, Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary mill.

Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on "Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: and the outer-man is the ghost."

In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy.

In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West. Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous, and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove that he is incapable of feeling them.

All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and suggestive instead of detailed. "Ittakkiri" (entirely vanished, in the sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who, instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words.

The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs, panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains and women's crêpe silk underwear, they are written by every one and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street," contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them are charming.

"To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going;
Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.

"Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:
The flowing of water, the Way of Love."

His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so, as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character. Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant Friendship."

The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of Eastern faith,—particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and thoughts,—might have suggested something much more significant than my cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define."

The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote—the immense poetry of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the mighty day.

The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable—a memory of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour when thought itself must fade.

"Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated

to
Mrs. Alice von Behrens
for auld lang syne.

We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was one of his New York acquaintances.

"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the Japanese poem on the first page.

To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he says, he has been and gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods. To save himself further trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased about terms—and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a man liberated from prison—smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring day.

In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,—a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of Heaven,—eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust ... Thus and only thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes—the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory."

"Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written, and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches, inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a pæan, as it were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems.

"Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf.
... Ah! the autumn rains!"

And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:—

"Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone
to-day."

CHAPTER XXIV