Lafcadio Hearn

It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo.

Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan. It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain Fujisaki—one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners' Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show of azaleas is held once a year.

After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi for her occupation.

Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a considerable circulation in England.

There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my notions of things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald.

On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,—assisted by his wife,—he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he suddenly heard an uguisu (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made enough for you and the children."

During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully.

The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding. Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought," he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,—to prove of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging, kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,—and trying to live. Then pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,—and be astonished and pleased."

"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can, without reference to nationalities or schools."

Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people.

At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anæmia common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things," as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not." Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance. Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library, weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the rapping of his little pipe against the hibachi, the intermittent scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down, while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with uplifted hand and enigmatic smile.

Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac spread of the myiakobana, the blazing yellow of the natalé, the flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey sand-crickets, the shrilling semi, and the little red crabs astir under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs, that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the uguisu and the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.

Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers' ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by any of our English essayists.

Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.

In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully, almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject of human desire and attainment.

"He was two years old when—as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence—he asked me for the Moon.

"Unwisely I protested:—

"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.'

"He answered:—

"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.'

" ... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.

"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,—upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,—and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom....

"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,—do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,—longings that if realised could only work us woe,—such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?

"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,—even for more than the Sun, and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."

He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings, supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and become "one" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with the rapture of wind and sea—was his. The fact of his own existence was so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.

"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,—that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three! I shall see the sun again!

"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn—... Doubt the reality of the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,—doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;—there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,—one infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent for ever away;—the Sheol is naked before us,—and destruction hath no covering.

"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist—which is horror!... But—

"Must I believe that I really exist?..."

Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have been. Before the beginnings of time I was;—beyond the uttermost circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without shore I am;—and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth....

"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;—and the gloom slowly lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and multiplied. And the dimness flushed.

"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty Purifier,—symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also mine!..."

All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night, the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere.

"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight hundred"—which represent the customary abbreviation of the word yaoya (vegetable-seller)—any yaoya being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog; but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.

His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on "Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?

"The air—the delicious air!—is full of sweet resinous odours shed from the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; semi are whizzing; wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy repairing their damaged habitations....

" ... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy. They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to attempt an essay on Ants."

After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants, and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants' talk, he would hear of something to his advantage—

"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."

After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic law, he thus ends his essay:—

"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.

"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency' in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism."

In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of "things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets;—the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,—their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;—but in the knowledge of the natural,—in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,—they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,—substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,—that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed."

During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect musicians," a grass-lark or Kusa-Hibari. "The creature's cage was exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito—with a pair of antennæ much longer than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished against the light.

"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...

"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber ... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness, a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish resonance....

"Now this tiny song is a song of love,—vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory,—deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love,—and death. He has forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now—for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust of the past,—he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it. They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant, never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice,—telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,—telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely, nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,—an atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,—especially Hana the housemaid!

"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."

During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight, every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject—the polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title "Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."

Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be his.

In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation." It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions.

CHAPTER XXV

Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people, his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy—his Benjamin—in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight." "I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as the Japanese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of strong men, there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins." With intense longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western lands from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so isolated that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst Englishmen again ... with all their prejudices and conventions."

The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but—such a stubborn thing is human nature—sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born, let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love, worship as they worship."

At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was during the period of his enthusiasm for "things Japanese." When he came to issue with the officials at Kumamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an occidental—one of his own people.

All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life he had passed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad, to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action in nationalising himself a Japanese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his son is a Japanese, born in Japan under Japanese conditions, and unless he throws off all family ties and responsibilities, which, being the eldest son, are—according to communal law in Japan—considerable, he must submit to this inexorable destiny. In his father's adopted country the military or naval profession is closed to him, however, in consequence of his defective eyesight, and both would have been closed to him also in England.

Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son, made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same answer was given on every side. He is a Japanese, and must conform to the dictates of the Japanese authorities. They might permit him to go away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality. Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-class education at the Waseda University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested.

In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had anticipated, he was forced out of the Imperial University, on the pretext that as a Japanese citizen he was not entitled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during thirteen years for Japan, and sacrificed everything for Japan, I have been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the country. For while the politico-religious combination that has engineered this matter remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any position in any educational establishment here for even six months."

In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this juncture, it is well to remember that Japan was struggling for existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard, perhaps, but the Japanese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls? and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,—sturdy and not likely to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I must devote the rest of my life to looking after him."

And she—his wise friend—knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself."

"Very true," was Hearn's answer—and well did he know, for had not he, the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day? "No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid: the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,—and I flee, and bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might be, that a man should not be,—except as to bodily strength.... I taught him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil—what chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?"

The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:—

"Sense with keenest edge unused,
Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire;
Lovely feet as yet unbruised,
On the ways of dark desire;
Sweetest hope that lookest smiling
O'er the wilderness defiling!

"Why such beauty, to be blighted,
By the swarm of foul destruction?
Why such innocence delighted,
When sin stalks to thy seduction?
All the litanies e'er chanted,
Shall not keep thy faith undaunted.

"I have pray'd the Sainted Morning
To unclasp her hands to hold thee;
From resignful Eve's adorning
Stol'n a robe of peace to enfold thee;
With all charms of man's contriving
Arm'd thee for thy lonely striving.

"Me too once unthinking Nature,
—Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,—
Fashion'd so divine a creature,
Yes, and like a beast forsook me.
I forgave, but tell the measure,
Of her crime in thee, my treasure."

It seems as if he were haunted by memories of his own thwarted childhood and shipwrecked youth. If possible he wished to guard and protect his Benjamin from the pitfalls that had beset his path, knowing that the same dangers might prevail in Kazuo's case as in his own, and that there might be no one to protect and guard him.

A charming piece of prose, from which I give a few extracts, was found amongst Hearn's papers after his death. The manuscript, lent to me by Mrs. Atkinson, lies by my hand as I write; it is entitled "Fear."

"An old, old sea-wall, stretching between two boundless levels, green and blue. Everything is steeped in white sun; and I am standing on the wall. Along its broad and grass-grown top a boy is running towards me,—running in sandals of wood,—the sea-breeze blowing aside the long sleeves of his robe as he runs.... With what sudden incommunicable pang do I watch the gracious little figure leaping in the light.... A delicate boy, with the blended charm of two races.... And how softly vivid all things under this milky radiance,—the smiling child-face with lips apart,—the twinkle of the light quick feet,—the shadows of grasses and of little stones!...

"But quickly as he runs, the child will come no nearer to me,—the slim brown hand will never cling to mine. For this light is the light of a Japanese sun that set long years ago.... Never, dearest!—never shall we meet,—not even when the stars are dead!"

By the exercise of a considerable amount of diplomacy Mrs. Wetmore succeeded at this time in inducing Jacob Gould Schurmann, president of Cornell University, to enter into an arrangement with Hearn for a series of lectures on Japan.

As of old, she believed him capable of conquering Fate, in spite of the despotism of fact as exemplified in the loss of eyesight and broken health; she felt sure he could interest an American audience by the material he had to offer, and the scholarly way in which he knew how to utilise it.

His answer to the suggestion of the lectures is characteristic:—

"O fairy! what have you dared to say? I am quite sure that I do not know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or politics, or history. (You did not say 'politics' or 'history,' however, and that seems to be what is wanted.) But perhaps you know what I know better than I myself know,—or perhaps you can give me to eat a Fairy Apple of Knowledge. At present I have no acquaintance even with the Japanese language: I cannot read a Japanese newspaper: and I have learned only enough, even of the kana, to write a letter home. I cannot lie—to my Fairy; therefore it is essential that I make the following declaration:—"

Then he repeats the statement made in the preface of "Japan, an Interpretation." For these lectures prepared with so much industry and care were destined ultimately to go to the making of that beautiful and lucid exposition of the history and thought of a great people.

The world has to be grateful to President Schurmann for withdrawing from his contract, and cancelling the offer made to Hearn for the delivery of lectures at the university.

The excuse that illness had broken out at Cornell was hardly a sufficient one. There is little doubt that unfavourable reports of Hearn's state of health, and doubts as to the possibility of his being able to lecture in public, had drifted to Cornell, and the president, acting for the best interests of his university, did not feel justified in abiding by his proposals.

With that extraordinary mental elasticity that characterised him all his life, Hearn made the best of the situation, and set to work, polishing and repolishing his twenty-two lectures until they reached the high level of style that distinguishes "Japan, an Interpretation." His courage was the more extraordinary as, filled with the idea that he was at last going to America, he had gone into every detail of meeting his friend. "I would go straight to your Palace of Fairy before going elsewhere," he writes to Mrs. Wetmore, "only to see you again—even for a moment—and to hear you speak in some one of the myriad voices would be such a memory for me, and you would let me 'walk about gently touching things.'..." Then in another letter comes a sigh of regret, and as it were farewell. "But your gifts, O Faery Queen have faded away, even as in the Song ... and I am also fading away."

After the failure of his projected visit to America, a suggestion was made by the University of London that he should give a series of lectures there. But here was the "Ah-ness" of things. Had Hearn's health permitted he would probably have been in England in 1905, where he would have been received with honour. The Japanese had fought Russia and beaten her. People became wildly enthusiastic about Japan: the libraries were besieged with inquiries for Hearn's books,—just at the eleventh hour, when he had become a name, he died!

All his life his dream had been to be independent, to be able to travel. Referring to a gentleman who was in Japan, he once said, "I envy him his independence. Think of being able to live where one pleases, nobody's servant,—able to choose one's own studies and friends and books."

The offer of an easy post was made to Hearn about this time as professor of English in the Waseda University founded by Count Okuma. He closed with it at once, thus putting an end to all negotiations with the University of London.

His youngest child, Setsu-ko, was born this year, and all idea of leaving Japan was henceforth abandoned.

In his last letter to Mrs. Wetmore, dated September, 1904—the month in which he died—he touches on the dedication he had made to her in his book, "A Japanese Miscellany." To the last the same sympathy and understanding reigned between them. Patiently she exhorted, comforted. Her wise counsel and advice soothed his torn nerves and aching heart to the end. So this affection, untouched by the moth and rust of worldly intercourse, went down with him "into the dust of death."

Slowly but surely the years with their chequered story were drawing to an end. The sum of endeavour was complete, the secrets Death had in its keeping were there for the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit.

Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same impression—a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine consideration for others, the thought of the future of his wife and children, triumphing over suffering and death.

He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.'

"'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said."

While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her tokonoma she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve hours were over!

Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree in the garden,—not much to look at—but it was a blossom blooming out of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi.

"I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful, but will soon die under the approaching cold.'

"You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking that the Kaerizaki, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...."

In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of September 26th, after supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate."

CHAPTER XXVI

Yet—Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his latter years—at his death his body was taken possession of by priests, who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over, and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple!

A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held.

It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a "ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under the relentless light of the afternoon sun.

He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper gohei; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne, palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination of good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn.

While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son, Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university professors, went to the right.

Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo.

After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse, touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife, when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven, in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the ceremony ended and the congregation left the church.

Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of the day was at an end.

CHAPTER XXVII