Lafcadio Hearn

On the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening. Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law, announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the red tape—the bales of red tape—that surround social as well as official transactions in Japan.

Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter.

To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and, though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters; in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason also reminded us that Mrs. Koizumi did not understand a word of English; she must have recourse to an interpreter before communicating with her Irish sister-in-law, but, above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs. Atkinson had addressed her letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by which no properly constituted Japanese postman would find himself justified in recognising Hearn's widow. By nationalising himself a Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as his occidental inheritance went, had vanished forever. He and his wife were only known at Tokyo as Mr. and Mrs. Koizumi.

Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her, and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs, and insisted on his visitors doing the same.

The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is "another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese; it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything unexpected—all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately in a jinrikisha to see her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have fallen into one another's arms, and a close intimacy would have been begun. Not so in Japan.

"Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr. Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a letter will turn up."

Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's advice.

I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's interview with the old Buddhist priest.

Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where, embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine.

From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression, common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese picture-books—the sacred, the matchless mountain—Fuji-no-yama.

There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned from out the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision of the old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three hundred volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the interpreter Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise between them, while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat, and the song of the uguisu from the plum-tree grove, we heard the murmur of their voices.

"That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been.... Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation have no existence."

Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady, dressed in the national Japanese costume—a kimono of dark iron-grey silk—the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance.

Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles.

Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas, good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced, Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik, of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and elaborate coiffure—the usual erection worn by her country-women—she might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large English establishment.

The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried, instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and from the Imperial University.

After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision, leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the background.

At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered his father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown hair and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a queer little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to learn by heart."

Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese expression—a mask of reserve as it were—fell like a curtain over his face,—he was Japanese again.

He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible; his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative understand what he wished to say.

It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason, who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly possessed—that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had been so sensitive—a soft and musical voice.

Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England, and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese woman to wear any article of jewellery.

Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable time—Japanese visits usually do—Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo.

The Métropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room.

Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the Spring Equinox (Shunki Korei-sai). There is an autumn and a spring equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren, into the streets. The ladies were in their best kimonos, their hair elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and woman. A pretty musumé's ivory-coloured oval face against the cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically picturesque than a Tokyo street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry of rain when hundreds of these ineffective shelters with their quaint designs of chrysanthemums, cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly opened. Alas! in ten years' time, like many other quaint and beautiful Japanese productions, these oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away into the region of faintly-remembered things.

The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of the men had a little too much sake on board, their tipsiness was only betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes, indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of sake, smells of seaweed soup, smells of daikon (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of sunshine.

Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams, and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges, down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams, we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen.

Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas, and still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed kuruma men, did our journey last, through the quarter of the foreign legations, past government offices and military stations, beside the moat surrounding the mikado's palace, with its grass slopes and pine-clad fosse, down declivities and up others, through endless lanes, bordered by one-storeyed houses standing in shrubberies behind bamboo fences. At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose kuruma led the way, halted before a small gateway, surmounted by a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we understood afterwards, with Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs. Passing through, we found ourselves opposite the entrance of a lightly-built two-story house, rather resembling a suburban bungalow in England. Directly we entered we were transported into a different era. Here no modern Japan was visible. On the threshold, waiting to receive us, was an "august residence maid," kneeling, palms extended on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head touching the matting, and wondered if it belonged to Hana, the unsympathetic Hana who had let the grass-lark die. Beside her was Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child, in a brilliantly-coloured kimono, while on the step above stood Professor Tanabe, who had been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an intimate friend of the Koizumi family, living near by, and acting occasionally as interpreter for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture—as an eastern philosopher, for instance—he would have made for Moroni or Velasquez, with the delicate grey and cream background of the Japanese tatami and paper shoji. He had the clear olive complexion and intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of his own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a presence, and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was trying; for the little girl had raised her forehead from the matting, and, with hands on knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us sideways like a bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential liftings of the eyes and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals from a row that stood close by, helped us to take off our boots and put on the sandals. We then remarked that she was not at all unsympathetic-looking, but a nice, chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We hoped devoutly we had no holes in our stockings, and after a considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got through the ordeal in time to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who appeared beside Professor Tanabe on the step above us, softly inviting us to "honourably deign to enter her unworthy abode."

The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the engawa (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been Hearn's study. The fusima or paper screens separating the two rooms were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase, but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the Butsudan, or family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner.

Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped.

At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an Interpretation," and so many other wonderful books, and I felt as I looked at that room of Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive than the quick. The walls—or rather the paper panels and wood laths that did duty for walls—were haunted with memories.

I pictured the odd little figure—dressed in the kimono given him by Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems—"Surely just the kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"—with the prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in the ancient, patient manner" on his zabuton—smoking his kiseru, or standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk.

There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and clamour of the city outside—it gave an impression of restfulness, of calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels that, like the fusima, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room. I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had occupied the corner where now stands the Butsudan, contaminating that wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent, crystalline atmosphere" unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke. These hardy folk told us that they were always catching coughs and colds when they had the stove and glass windows, so they took both out, and put back the paper shoji and the charcoal brazier.

It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his study. The andon—tallow-candle—stuck in a paper shade—national means of lighting a room—had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber tube.

Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single kakemono, or piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought and life—that Hearn blended so deftly in his work—joined hands. Round the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were placed, filled with books, English most of them—De Quincey, Herbert Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the Butsudan rested volumes of Browning and Kipling.

I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as hanging on the ceiling?

It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay godong given to the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all valuable and artistic objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from fire, earthquakes and floods.

Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate grey ground.

On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a kakemono or scroll-picture representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese ideographs in the corner—by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present from Kazuo to his father.

Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard, was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl.

Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one. Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance of some sort.

Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves uncomfortable in what seemed to me such an irritating and futile way. That any sane people should eat a succession of horrible concoctions made up of raw fish, lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted of Pears' soap, whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an afterthought, eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed on Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy.

The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins it was an omen of death.

I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him, could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch your legs and be comfortable."

After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a mass of snowy white bloom.

But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs. Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them. Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's life.

Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies," daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough Corrib.

"Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas,
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these,
Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land—
Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.

The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me, reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic meaning. A Shirabyoshi lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there, seated on zabutons in a little shop, as large—or rather as small—as life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little musumés, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising otherness of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary land of Nippon.

I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.

Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her "Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow and children.

A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens, and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a zabuton (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and left a will—Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his contemptible abode to smoke a pipe—further than that he knew nothing. The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku), where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any sort of favour by his colleagues.

In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the northern coast.

A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible lettering on moss-grown tombstones and sotobas, gazing at sculptures of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both. Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human life—infinite calm, infinite rest.

"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented, with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he had hitherto subscribed?

It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its shoji was comforting after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows, genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit, while on the upper step of the genkan (entrance-room) with extended hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first, when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely." Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us, when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental widows when referring to the departed.

The doors of the Butsudan were set wide open, and on the kamidan, or shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third had been buried with the writer of Japan, beneath his tombstone in the Zoshigaya Cemetery.

As we stood in the study opposite the Butsudan the ghostly charm, the emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection, crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.

Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo, describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that hangs in the study.

Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste, subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit. Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment—a donkey being an unknown animal in Japan—when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.

It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some sort—everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good or bad omen.

Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because her mother—for politeness' sake, I imagine—told her that Mrs. Atkinson was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys, were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese, declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially, indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and intelligent.

What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in kimonos and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish smile—for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of their father's birth—with the background of bookcases full of English books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese kakemonos and ideographs.

Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up. The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days "freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."

I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient, indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the Butsudan, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern education as a material weakness?

"The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."

After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of "tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)—his Papa San's favourite cake, Kazuo told us—had been handed round and partaken of, jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery. As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove, stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies—along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots, enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab was the inscription—

"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"—"Believing Man Similar to Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment."

The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand, as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman, Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the moment, buried—an alien amongst aliens—in a Buddhist grave, under a Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own people.

CONCLUSION

If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature, would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology" that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one—"not that he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap wood underneath—it looks all right, only because you don't know how we patch up things."

Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal, will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute.

He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it. Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more, discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal—the ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries: oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many a day by cultured readers and thinkers.

Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy—the eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him—as Miss Bisland does in the Preface to the last volume of Letters—great as Jean Jacques Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so, and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own, and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another, he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform himself of details before discussing them.

As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that "he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents inventions shall be killed!"

Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a season.

It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty, the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for a shadow and lost it."

Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of such experience—from a literary point of view—is proved by the force of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with its frisson, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness, breathes the very essence of Romanticism.

Literary brother to Loti and Rénan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the memory of his Japanese home—the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might catch a butterfly.

Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited, without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes, he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories.

His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"... The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain healthy habit of thought and life.

It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true, he had forfeited his birthright to produce a Pêcheur d'Islande; but on most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed. He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue," probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet Kipling, in his letters to the Pioneer on Japan, afterwards published in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling.

As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori, all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms, and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism.

Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too pronounced to please the matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands would be needed to mould the figure—an unpractical and extravagant sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion; then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a susceptible people.

As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American clothes—then and then only will they be able to understand what an artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view, over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed, if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in his expressions of literary and political opinion.

In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him.

An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is, indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach, by the Divine Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that the more appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct for art, the smaller will be his success with the general public. But never was his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of pecuniary gain. From the earliest years of his literary career, his delight in composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity, rather than delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in the working. According to him, nothing was less important than worldly prosperity, to write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most damnable, infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug.

To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that matters, and "the only success in life."

Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life. To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted.

"One minute's work to thee denied
Stands all Eternity's offence"—

he quotes from Kipling.

This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never was at issue either with himself or destiny.

Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease, Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one object, his thoughts fixed on one aim.

In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy, when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ... her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad generations that have arisen and passed away.

What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out.

As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things, emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life, making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were beautiful to die for."