The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 1

The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn.

Volume 1.

by Elizabeth Bisland.

PREFACE

In the course of the preparation of these volumes there was gradually acc.u.mulated so great a number of the letters written by Lafcadio Hearn during twenty-five years of his life, and these letters proved of so interesting a nature, that eventually the plan of the whole work was altered. The original intention was that they should serve only to illuminate the general text of the biography, but as their number and value became more apparent it was evident that to reproduce them in full would make the book both more readable and more ill.u.s.trative of the character of the man than anything that could possibly be related of him.

No biographer could have so vividly pictured the modesty and tender-heartedness, the humour and genius of the man as he has unconsciously revealed these qualities in unstudied communications to his friends. Happily--in these days when the preservation of letters is a rare thing--almost every one to whom he wrote appeared instinctively to treasure--even when he was still unknown--every one of his communications, though here and there regrettable gaps occur, owing to the accidents of changes of residence, three of which, as every one knows, are more destructive of such treasures than a fire. To all of his correspondents who have so generously contributed their treasured letters I wish to express my sincere thanks. Especially is grat.i.tude due to Professor Masanubo Otani, of the s.h.i.+nshu University of Tokyo, for the painstaking accuracy and fulness of the information he contributed as to the whole course of Hearn's life in j.a.pan.

The seven fragments of autobiographical reminiscence, discovered after Hearn's death, added to the letters, narrowed my task to little more than the recording of dates and such brief comments and explanations as were required for the better comprehension of his own contributions to the book.

Naturally some editing of the letters has been necessary. Such parts as related purely to matters of business have been deleted as uninteresting to the general public; many personalities, usually both witty and trenchant, have been omitted, not only because such personalities are matters of confidence between the writer and his correspondent, a confidence which death does not render less inviolable, but also because the dignity and privacy of the living have every claim to respect.

Robert Browning's just resentment at the indiscreet editing of the FitzGerald Letters is a warning that should be heeded, and it is moreover certain that Lafcadio Hearn himself would have been profoundly unwilling to have any casual criticism of either the living or the dead given public record. Of those who had been his friends he always spoke with tenderness and respect, and I am but following what I know to be his wishes in omitting all references to his enemies.

That such a definite and eccentric person as he should make enemies was of course unavoidable. If any of these retain their enmity to one who has pa.s.sed into the sacred helplessness of death, and are inclined to think that the mere outline sketch of the man contained in the following pages lacks the veracity of shadow, my answer is this: In the first place, I have taken heed of the opinion he himself has expressed in one of his letters: "I believe we ought not to speak of the weaknesses of very great men"--and the intention of such part of this book as is my own is to give a history of the circ.u.mstances under which a great man developed his genius. I have purposely ignored all such episodes as seemed impertinent to this end, as from my point of view there seems a sort of gross curiosity in raking among such details of a man's life as he himself would wish ignored. These I gladly leave to those who enjoy such labours.

In the second place, there is no art more difficult than that of making a portrait satisfactory to every one, for the limner of a man, whether he use pen or pigments, can--if he be honest--only transfer to the canvas the lineaments as he himself sees them. _How_ he sees them depends not only upon his own temperament, but also upon the aspect which the subject of the picture would naturally turn towards such a temperament. For every one of us is aware of a certain chameleon-like quality within ourselves which causes us to take on a protective colouring a.s.similative to our surroundings, and we all, like the husband in Browning's verse,

"Boast two soul-sides," ...

which is the explanation, no doubt, of the apparently irreconcilable impressions carried away by a man's acquaintances.

Which soul-side was the real man must finally resolve itself into a matter of opinion. Henley, probably, honestly believed the real Stevenson to be as he represented him, but the greater number of those who knew and loved the artist will continue to form their estimate of the man from his letters and books, and to them Henley's diatribe will continue to seem but the outbreak of a mean jealousy, which could not tolerate the lifting up of a companion for the world's admiration.

Of the subject of this memoir there certainly exists more than one impression, but the writer can but depict the man as he revealed himself throughout twenty years of intimate acquaintance, and for confirmation of this opinion can only refer to the work he has left for all the world to judge him by, and to the intimate revelations of thoughts, opinions, and feelings contained in his letters.

E. B.

CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD

Lafcadio Hearn was born on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1850.

He was a native of the Ionian Isles, the place of his birth being the Island of Santa Maura, which is commonly called in modern Greek Levkas, or Lefcada, a corruption of the name of the old Leucadia, which was famous as the place of Sappho's self-destruction. This island is separated from the western coast of Greece by a narrow strait; the neck of land which joined it to the mainland having been cut through by the Corinthians seven centuries before Christ. To this day it remains deeply wooded, and scantily populated, with spa.r.s.e vineyards and olive groves clinging to the steep sides of the mountains overlooking the blue Ionian sea. The child Lafcadio may have played in his early years among the high-set, half-obliterated ruins of the Temple of Apollo, from whence offenders were cast down with mult.i.tudes of birds tied to their limbs, that perchance the beating of a thousand wings might break the violence of the fall, and so rescue them from the last penalty of expiation.

In this place of old tragedies and romance the child was born into a life always to be shadowed by tragedy and romance to an extent almost fantastic in our modern workaday world. This wild, bold background, swimming in the half-tropical blue of Greek sea and sky, against which the boy first discerned the vague outlines of his conscious life, seems to have silhouetted itself behind all his later memories and prepossessions, and through whatever dark or squalid scenes his wanderings led, his heart was always filled by dreams and longings for soaring outlines, and the blue, "which is the colour of the idea of the divine, the colour pantheistic, the colour ethical."

Long years afterward, in the "Dream of a Summer Day," he says:--

"I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before, I cannot tell, but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world--almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer.... The sea was alive and used to talk--and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived among the peaks, I have dreamed for a moment the same wind was blowing--but it was only a remembrance.

"Also in that place the clouds were wonderful and of colours for which there are no names at all,--colours that used to make me hungry and thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer than these days,--and every day there were new pleasures and new wonders for me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done, and there fell the great hush of light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old."

A strange mingling of events and of race-forces had brought the boy into being.

Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, of the 76th Foot, came of an old Dorsets.h.i.+re family in which there was a tradition of gipsy blood--a tradition too dim and ancient now to be verified, though Hearn is an old Romany name in the west of England, and the boy Lafcadio bore in his hand all his life that curious "thumb-print" upon the palm, which is said to be the invariable mark of Romany descent. The first of the Hearns to pa.s.s over into Ireland went as private chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant in 1693, and being later appointed Dean of Cashel, settled permanently in West Meath. From the ecclesiastical loins there appears to have sprung a numerous race of soldiers, for Dr. Hearn's father and seven uncles served under Wellington in Spain. The grandfather of Lafcadio rose during the Peninsula Campaign to the position of lieutenant-colonel of the 43d regiment, and commanded his regiment in the battle of Vittoria. Later he married Elizabeth Holmes, a kinswoman of Sir Robert Holmes, and of Edmund Holmes the poet, another member of her family being Rice Holmes, the historian of the Indian Mutiny. Dr.

Charles Hearn, the father of Lafcadio, was her eldest son, and another son was Richard, who was one of the Barbizon painters and an intimate friend of Jean Francois Millet.

It was in the late '40's, when England still held the Ionian Isles, that the 76th Foot was ordered to Greece, and Surgeon-Major Hearn accompanied his regiment to do garrison duty on the island of Cerigo. Apparently not long after his arrival he made the acquaintance of Rosa Cerigote, whose family is said to have been of old and honourable Greek descent.

Photographs of the young surgeon represent him as a handsome man, with the flowing side-whiskers so valued at that period, and with a bold profile and delicate waist. A pa.s.sionate love affair ensued between the beautiful Greek girl and the handsome Irishman, but the connection was violently opposed by the girl's brothers, the native bitterness toward the English garrison being as intense as was the sentiment in the South against the Northern army of occupation immediately after the American Civil War. The legend goes that the Cerigote men--there was hot blood in the family veins--waylaid and stabbed the Irishman, leaving him for dead. The girl, it is said, with the aid of a servant, concealed him in a barn and nursed him back to life, and after his recovery eloped with her grateful lover and married him by the Greek rites in Santa Maura.

The first child died immediately after birth, and the boy, Lafcadio, was the second child; taking his name from the Greek name of the island, Lefcada. Another son, James, three years later in Cephalonia, was the fruit of this marriage, so romantically begun and destined to end so tragically.

When England ceded the Ionian Isles to Greece Dr. Hearn returned with his family to Dublin, pausing, perhaps, for a while at Malta, for in a letter written during the last years of his life Lafcadio says: "I am almost sure of having been in Malta as a child. My father told me queer things about the old palaces of the knights, and a story of a monk who on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railing with green paint."

The two boys were at this time aged six and three. It was inevitable, no doubt, that the young wife, who had never mastered the English tongue, though she spoke, as did the children, Italian and Romaic, should have regretted the change from her sunlit island to the dripping Irish skies and grey streets of Dublin, nor can it be wondered at that, an exile among aliens in race, speech, and faith, there should have soon grown up misunderstandings and disputes. The unhappy details have died into silence with the pa.s.sage of time, but the wife seems to have believed herself repudiated and betrayed, and the marriage being eventually annulled, she fled to Smyrna with a Greek cousin who had come at her call, leaving the two children with the father. This cousin she afterwards married and her children knew her no more. The father also married again, and the boy Lafcadio being adopted by Dr. Hearn's aunt, a Mrs. Brenane, and removing with her to Wales, never again saw either his father or his brother.[1]

[1] The following version of the story is reproduced from a letter written by Mrs. Hearn in reply to a request for any knowledge she might have gained on this subject from her husband's conversations with her during their life together in j.a.pan. Its poignant simplicity is heightened by the trans.m.u.tations through two languages.

"Mama San--When about four years old I did very rude things. Mama gave me a struck on my cheek with her palm. It was very strong. I got angry and gazed on my Mama's face, which I never forget. Thus I remember my Mama's face. She was of a little stature, with black hair and black eyes, like a j.a.panese woman. How pitiable Mama San she was. Unhappy Mama San; pitiable indeed! Think of that--Think: you are my wife, and I take you with Kazuo and Iwao to my native country: you do not know the language spoken there, nor have any friend. You have your husband only, who prove not very kind. You must be so very unhappy then. And then if I happened to love some native lady and say 'Sayonara' to you, how you would trouble your heart! That was the case with my Mama. I have not such cruel heart. But only to think of such thing makes me sad. To see your face troubled just now my heart aches. Let us drop such subject from our talk."

"Papa San--It is only once that I remember I felt glad with my papa. Yes, on that occasion! Perhaps I was then a boy like Iwao or Kiyos.h.i.+. I was playing with my nurse. Many a sound of 'gallop-trop' came from behind. The nurse laughed and lifted me high up. I observed my papa pa.s.s; I called him with my tiny hand--now such a big hand. Papa took me from the hands of nurse. I was on horseback. As I looked behind a great number of soldiers followed on horseback with 'gallop-trop.' I imagined myself that I was a general then. It was only on that time that I thought how good papa he was."

The emotions are not hard to guess at of a pa.s.sionate, sensitive boy of seven, suddenly flung by the stormy emotions of his elders out of the small warm circle of his narrow sphere. To a young child the relations of its parents and the circle of the home seem as fundamental and eternal as the globe itself, and the sudden ravishment of all the bases of his life make his footing amid the ties and affections of the world forever after timid and uncertain.

A boy of less sensitive fibre might in time have forgotten these shocks, but the eldest son of Charles Hearn and Rosa Cerigote was destined to suffer always because of the violent rending of their ties. From this period seems to have dated his strange distrusts, his unconquerable terror of the potentialities which he suspected as lurking beneath the frankest exterior, and his constant, morbid dread of betrayal and abandonment by even his closest friends.

Whatever of fault there may have been on his mother's part, his vague memories of her were always tender and full of yearning affection.

To the brother he never saw he wrote, when he was a man, "And you do not remember that dark and beautiful face--with large, brown eyes like a wild deer's--that used to bend above your cradle? You do not remember the voice which told you each night to cross your fingers after the old Greek orthodox fas.h.i.+on, and utter the words--?? t? ???a t?? ?at??? ?a?

t?? ???? ?a? t?? ????? ??e?at??, 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost'? She made, or had made, three little wounds upon you when a baby--to place you, according to her childish faith, under the protection of those three powers, but specially that of Him for whom alone the Nineteenth Century still feels some reverence--_the Lord and Giver of Life_.... We were all very dark as children, very pa.s.sionate, very odd-looking, and wore gold rings in our ears. Have you not the marks yet?...

"When I saw your photograph I felt all my blood stir,--and I thought, 'Here is this unknown being, in whom the soul of my mother lives,--who must have known the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as I! Will he tell me of them?' There was another Self,--would that Self interpret This?

"For This has always been mysterious. Were I to use the word 'Soul' in its limited and superannuated sense as the spirit of the individual instead of the ghost of a race,--I should say it had always seemed to me as if I had two souls: each pulling in different ways. One of these represented the spirit of mutiny--impatience of all restraint, hatred of all control, weariness of everything methodical and regular, impulses to love or hate without a thought of consequences. The other represented pride and persistence;--it had little power to use the reins before I was thirty.... Whatever there is of good in me came from that dark race-soul of which we know so little. My love of right, my hate of wrong;--my admiration for what is beautiful or true;--my capacity for faith in man or woman;--my sensitiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever little success I have,--even that language-power whose physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us,--came from Her.... It is the mother who makes us,--makes at least all that makes the n.o.bler man: not his strength or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to love. And I would rather have her portrait than a fortune."

Mrs. Brenane, into whose hands the child thus pa.s.sed, was the widow of a wealthy Irishman, by whom she had been converted to Romanism, and like all converts she was "more loyal than the King." The divorce and remarriage of her nephew incurred her bitterest resentment; she not only insisted upon a complete separation from the child, but did not hesitate to speak her mind fully to the boy, who always retained the impressions thus early instilled. In one of his letters he speaks of his father's "rigid face, and steel-steady eyes," and says: "I can remember seeing father only five times. He was rather taciturn, I think. I remember he wrote me a long letter from India--all about serpents and tigers and elephants--printed in Roman letters with a pen, so that I could read it easily.... I remember my father taking me up on horseback when coming into the town with his regiment. I remember being at a dinner with a number of men in red coats, and crawling about under the table among their legs." And elsewhere he declares, "I think there is nothing of him in me, either physically or mentally." A mistake of prejudice this; the Hearns of the second marriage bearing the most striking likeness to the elder half-brother, having the same dark skins, delicate, aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit figures. The family type is unusual and distinctive, with some racial alignment not easy to define except by the indefinite term "exotic;"

showing no trace of either its English origin or Irish residence.

Of the next twelve years of Lafcadio Hearn's life there exists but meagre record. The little dark-eyed, dark-faced, pa.s.sionate boy with the wound in his heart and the gold rings in his ears--speaking English but stammeringly, mingled with Italian and Romaic--seems to have been removed at about his seventh year to Wales, and from this time to have visited Ireland but occasionally. Of his surroundings during the most impressionable period of his life it is impossible to reconstruct other than shadowy outlines. Mrs. Brenane was old; was wealthy; and lived surrounded by eager priests and pa.s.sionate converts.

In "Kwaidan" there is a little story called "Hi-Mawari," which seems a glimpse of this period:--

On the wooded hill behind the house Robert and I are looking for fairy-rings. Robert is eight years old, comely, and very wise;--I am a little more than seven,--and I reverence Robert. It is a glowing, glorious August day; and the warm air is filled with sharp, sweet scents of resin.

We do not find any fairy-rings; but we find a great many pine-cones in the high gra.s.s.... I tell Robert the old Welsh story of the man who went to sleep, unawares, inside of a fairy-ring, and so disappeared for seven years, and would never eat or speak after his friends had delivered him from the enchantment.

"They eat nothing but the points of needles, you know," says Robert.

"Who?" I ask.

"Goblins," Robert answers.

This revelation leaves me dumb with astonishment and awe.... But Robert suddenly cries out:--