The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 9

Perhaps because of the narrowness of his social life his mental life deepened and expanded, or possibly his indifference to the outer world may have resulted from the change manifesting itself in his mental view.

"Kokoro" (a j.a.panese word signifying "The Heart of Things") was written in Kobe, as was also "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," and they quite remarkably demonstrate his growing indifference to the externals of life, the deepening of his thought toward the intrinsic and the fundamental. The visible beauty of woman, of nature, of art, grew to absorb him less as he sought for the essential principle of beauty.

In one of the letters written about this time he says: "I have to acknowledge to feeling a sort of resentment against certain things in which I used to take pleasure. I can't look at a number of the _Pet.i.t Journal pour Rire_ or the _Charivari_ without vexation, almost anger. I can't find pleasure in a French novel written for the obvious purpose of appealing to instincts that interfere with perception of higher things than instincts. I should not go to the Paris Opera if it were next door.

I should not like to visit the most beautiful lady and be received in evening dress. You see how absurd I have become--and this without any idea of principle about the matter except the knowledge that I ought to avoid everything which does not help me to make the best of myself--small as it may be."

And again: "I might say that I have become indifferent to personal pleasure of any sort ... what is more significant, I think, is the feeling that the greatest pleasure is to work for others--for those who take it as a matter of course that I should do so, and would be as much amazed to find me selfish about it as if an earthquake had shaken the house down.... It now seems to me that time is the most precious of all things conceivable. I can't waste it by going out to hear people talk nonsense.... There are rich natures that can afford the waste, but I can't, because the best part of my life has been wasted in the wrong direction and I shall have to work like thunder till I die to make up for it."

The growing gravity and force of his thought was shown not only in his books but in his correspondence. Most of the letters written at this period were addressed to Professor Chamberlain, dealing with matters of heredity and the evolution of the individual under ancestral racial influences. The following extract is typical of the tone of the whole:--

"Here comes in the consideration of a very terrible possibility. Suppose we use integers instead of quintillions or centillions, and say that an individual represents by inheritance a total of 10-5 of impulses favourable to social life, 5 of the reverse. (Such a balance would really occur in many cases.) The child inherits, under favourable conditions, the father's balance plus the maternal balance of 9,--four of the number being favourable. We have then a total which becomes odd, and the single odd number gives preponderance to an acc.u.mulation of ancestral impulse incalculable for evil. It would be like a pair of scales, each holding a ma.s.s as large as Fuji. If the balance were absolutely perfect the weight of _one_ hair would be enough to move a ma.s.s of millions of tons. Here is your antique Nemesis awfully magnified. Let the individual descend below a certain level and countless dead suddenly seize and destroy him,--like the Furies."

One begins to miss the beautiful landscapes against which he had set his enchantingly realistic pictures of beautiful things and people, but in the place of the sensuous charm, the honeyed felicities of phrase, he offered such essays as the "j.a.panese Civilization" in "Kokoro," with its astounding picture of New York City, and its sublimated insight into the imponderable soul of the Eastern world--such intolerable imaginings as "Dust" in the "Gleanings from Buddha-Fields," and the delicate poignancies of "The Nun of the Temple of Amida" or of "A Street Singer."

I think it was at Kobe he reached his fullest intellectual stature.

None of the work that followed in the next eight years surpa.s.sed the results he there achieved, and much was of lesser value, despite its beauty. He had attained to complete mastery of his medium, and had moreover learned completely to master his thought before clothing it in words--a far more difficult and more important matter.

Yet the clothing in words was no small task, as witness the accompanying examples of how he laboured for the perfection of his vehicle. These are not the first struggles of a young and clumsy artist, but the efforts at the age of fifty-three of one of the greatest masters of English.

It was done, too, by a man who earned with his pen in a year less than the week's income of one of the facile authors of the "six best sellers."

As has been said of De Quincey, whom Hearn in many ways resembled, "I can grasp a little of his morbid suffering in the eternal struggle for perfection of utterance; I can share a part of his aesthetic torment over cacophony, redundance, obscurity, and all the thousand minute delicacies and subtleties of resonance and dissonance, accent and caesura, that only a De Quincey's ear appreciates and seeks to achieve or evade. How many care for these fine things to-day? How many are concerned if De Quincey uses a word with the long 'a' sound, or spends a sleepless night in his endeavour to find another with the short 'a,' that shall at once answer his purpose and crown his sentence with harmony? Who lovingly examine the great artist's methods now, dip into the secret of his mystery, and weigh verb against adjective, vowel against consonant, that they may a little understand the unique splendour of this prose? And who, when an artist is the matter, attempt to measure his hopes as well as his attainments or praise a n.o.ble ambition perhaps s.h.i.+ning through faulty attempt? How many, even among those who write, have fathomed the toil and suffering, the continence and self-denial of our great artists in words?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Specimen of Hearn's MS., first draft._]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER IV

THE LAST STAGE

With methods of work such as those of which the foregoing examples give suggestion, with increasing indifference to the external details of life, and growing concentration of esoteric thought, it was plain that literature and journalism would not suffice to sustain a family of thirteen persons. For Hearn in becoming a j.a.panese subject had accepted the j.a.panese duty of maintaining the elder members of the family into which he had been adopted, and his household included the ancestors of his son. He referred to the fact occasionally with amused impatience, but seems never to have really resented or rebelled against the filial duties which to the Western point of view might appear excessive. His eyes, too, began to give warnings that could not be ignored, and with reluctance he yielded to the necessity of earning a larger income by reentering the Government service as a teacher. Professor Chamberlain again came to his aid and secured for him the position of Professor of English in the Imperial University of Tokyo, where his salary was large compared to anything he had as yet received, and where he was permitted an admirable liberty as to methods of teaching.

Of his lectures an example is given in the appendix, under the t.i.tle "Naked Poetry." This, it is interesting to mention, was taken down in long-hand during its delivering by Teizaburo Inomata, who possesses five ma.n.u.script volumes of these records, for Hearn transcribed none of his lectures, delivering them without notes, and had it not been for this astonis.h.i.+ng feat by a member of one of his cla.s.ses all written record of his teaching would have been lost. Mr. Inomata is the Ochiai of the letter given on page 64 of the present volume, and was one of the pupils of the Jinjo-chugakko of Matsue. Another of these Matsue pupils was Masan.o.bu Otani, whom Hearn a.s.sisted to pa.s.s through the university by employing him to collect data for many of his books. In the elaborately painstaking ma.n.u.script volume of information which Mr.

Otani sent me to a.s.sist in the writing of these volumes, he says:--

"Here I want not to forget to add that I had received from him 12 yen (6 dollars) for my work each month. It was too kind of him that a poor monthly work of mine was paid with the money above mentioned. To speak frankly, however, it was not very easy for me to pa.s.s each month with the money through the three years of my university course. I had to pay 2 yen and a half as the monthly fee to the university; to pay 6 or 7 yen for my lodging and eating every month; to buy some necessary text books, and to pay for some meetings inevitable. So I was forced to make some more money beside his favour. Each month I contributed to some newspapers and magazines; I reprinted the four books of Nesfield's grammar; I published some pamphlets. Thus I could equal the expense of each month, but I need hardly say that it was by his extraordinary favour that I could finish my study in the university. I shall never forget his extreme kindness forever and ever."

A revelation this, confirmatory of the constant references made by Hearn to the frightful price paid in life and energy by j.a.pan in the endeavour to a.s.similate a millennium of Western learning in the brief s.p.a.ce of half a century.

From these notes by Mr. Otani, Mrs. Hearn, and Mr. Inomata it is possible to reconstruct his life in Tokyo with that minuteness demanded by the professors of the "scientific school" of biography:--

"When he came to the university he immediately entered the lecture room, and at the recreation hour he was always seen in a lonely part of the college garden, smoking, and walking to and fro. No one dared disturb his meditations. He did not mingle with the other professors....

"Very regular and very diligent in his teaching, he was never absent unless ill. His hours of teaching being twelve in the week....

"He never used an umbrella....

"He liked to bathe in tepid water....

"He feared cold; his study having a large stove and double doors; he never, however, used gloves in the coldest weather."...

And so on, to the _nth_ power of fatigue. Personally nothing would have been so obnoxious to the man as this piling up of unimportant detail and ba.n.a.l ana about his private life. He was entirely free of that egotism, frequently afflicting the literary artist, which made the crowing c.o.c.ks, the black beetles, and the marital infelicities of the Carlyles matters of such import as to deserve being solemnly and meticulously recorded for the benefit of an awestruck world.

At first the change of residence, the necessary interruption of the heavy work of preparing lectures, the teaching, and its attendant official duties seem to have broken the train of his inspiration--for "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," though published the year after his arrival in Tokyo, had been completed while in Kobe, and he complains bitterly in his letters that "the Holy Ghost had departed from him," and was constantly endeavouring to find some means of renewing the fire. In a letter to his friend Amenomori he says: "But somehow, working is 'against the grain.' I get no thrill, no _frisson_, no sensation. I want new experiences, perhaps; and Tokyo is no place for them. Perhaps the power to feel thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year.

Perhaps the only land to find the new sensations is in the Past,--floats blue-peaked under some beautiful dead sun 'in the tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again to feel the charm of the Far East;--or will n.o.bus.h.i.+ge Amenomori discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the Fountain of Immortality? Alas, I don't know!"

Indeed, in "Exotics and Retrospectives" he returned for part of his material to old memories of the West Indies, and the next four volumes--"In Ghostly j.a.pan" (with its monstrous fantasy of the Mountain of Skulls), "Shadowings," "A j.a.panese Miscellany," and "Kotto"--show that the altar still waited for the coal, the contents of these being merely studies, masterly as they were, such as an artist might make while waiting for some great idea to form itself, worthy of a broad canvas.

As the letters show, prodigious care and patience were expended upon each of these sketches. In advising a friend he explains his own methods:--

"Now with regard to your own sketch or story. If you are quite dissatisfied with it, I think this is probably due _not_ to what you suppose,--imperfection of expression,--but rather to the fact that some _latent_ thought or emotion has not yet defined itself in your mind with sufficient sharpness. You feel something and have not been able to express the feeling--only because you do not yet quite know what it is.

We feel without understanding feeling; and our most powerful emotions are the most undefinable. This must be so, because they are inherited acc.u.mulations of feeling, and the multiplicity of them--superimposed one over another--blurs them, and makes them dim, even though enormously increasing their strength.... _Unconscious_ brain-work is the best to develop such latent feeling or thought. By quietly writing the thing over and over again, I find that the emotion or idea often _develops itself_ in the process,--unconsciously. Again, it is often worth while to _try_ to a.n.a.lyze the feeling that remains dim. The effort of trying to understand exactly what it is that moves us sometimes proves successful.... If you have any feeling--no matter what--strongly latent in the mind (even only a haunting sadness or a mysterious joy), you may be sure that it is expressible. Some feelings are, of course, very difficult to develop. I shall show you one of these days, when we see each other, a page that I worked at for _months_ before the idea came clearly.... When the best result comes, it ought to surprise you, for our best work is out of the Unconscious."

In all these studies the tendency grew constantly more marked to abandon the earlier richness of his style; a pellucid simplicity was plainly the aim of his intention. The transparent, shadowy, "weird stories" of "Kwaidan" were as unlike the splendid floridity of his West Indian studies as a s.h.i.+nto shrine is unlike a Gothic cathedral. These ghostly sketches might have been made by the brush of a j.a.panese artist; a grey whirl of water about a phantom fish--a shadow of a pine bough across the face of a spectral moon--an outline of mountains as filmy as dreams: brief, almost childishly simple, and yet suggesting things poignant, things ineffable.

"Ants," the last study in "Kwaidan," was, however, of a very different character. The old Occidental fire and power was visible again; his inspiration was reillumined. Then suddenly the broad canvas was spread for him and he wrote "j.a.pan: an Attempt at Interpretation," one of the most astonis.h.i.+ng reviews of the life and soul of a great nation ever attempted.

To understand the generation of this book it is necessary to explain the conditions of the last years of his life in Tokyo. Of his private existence at this time Mrs. Hearn's reminiscences furnish again a delightful and vivid record.

"It was on the 27th Aug., 1896, that we arrived at Tokyo from Kobe.

"Having heard of a house to let in Us.h.i.+gome district, we went to see it.

It was an old house of a pure j.a.panese style, without an upper story; and having a s.p.a.cious garden and a lotus-pond in it, the house resembled to a Buddhist temple. Very gloomy house it was and I felt a sense of being haunted. Hearn seemed fond of the house. But we did not borrow it.

"We heard afterward that it was reputed to be haunted by the ghost; and though the house-rent was very cheap, no one would dare to borrow the house; and finally it was broken down by its owner. 'Why then did we not inhabit that house?' Hearn said, with regret, 'It was very interesting house, I thought at that time!'

"At last we settled at a house at Tomihisa-cho, Us.h.i.+gome district, about three miles from the university. The house was situated on a bluff, with a Buddist temple called Kobu-dera in the neighbourhood.

'Kobu-dera' means 'Knots Temple,' because all the pillars in the building have knots left, the natural wood having been used without carpenter's planes. Formerly it was called Hagi-dera on account of many _hagi_[3] flowers in the garden.

[3] Bush clover.

"Being very fond of a temple, he often went for rambling in Kobu-dera, so that he became acquainted with a goodly old priest there, with whom he was pleased to talk on Buddhist subjects, I being always his interpreter in such a case.

"Almost every morning and every evening he took walk in Kobu-dera.

"The children always said when he was absent, 'Papa is in Kobu-dera.'

"The following is one of his conversations in one of our ramblings there: 'Can I not live in this temple?' 'I should be very glad to become a priest--I will make a good priest with large eyes and high nose!'

'Then you become a nun! and Kazuo a little boy priest!--how lovely he would be! We shall then every day chant the texts. Oh, a happy life!'

'In the next world you shall be born a nun!'

"One day we went to the temple for our usual walk. 'O, O!' he exclaimed in astonishment. Three large cedars had been lying on the ground. 'Why have they cut down these trees? I see the temple people seem to be poor.

They are in need of money. Oh, why have they not told me about that? I should be very much pleased to give them some amount. What a long time it must have taken to grow so large from the tiny bud! I have become a little disgusted with that old priest. Pity! he has not money, though.

Poor tree!' He was extremely sad and melancholily walked for home. 'I feel so sad! I am no more pleasant to-day. Go and ask the people to cut no more trees,' he said.