Lafcadio Hearn Part 29

It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in his artistic career. His New Orleans h.e.l.lenism was the h.e.l.lenism of the banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the h.e.l.lenism 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 cla.s.sicism, 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 j.a.panese 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and Orpheus, who sought h.e.l.l 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 j.a.panese legends, with its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness, breathes the very essence of Romanticism.

Literary brother to Loti and Renan 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 j.a.pan, 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 j.a.panese home--the simple love and courtesy of Old j.a.pan and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might catch a b.u.t.terfly.

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 att.i.tude 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 _Pecheur d'Islande_; but on most of his j.a.panese 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 G.o.ds" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The subt.i.tle, "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 j.a.pan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on j.a.pan, afterwards published in a volume ent.i.tled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling.

As to his knowledge of j.a.pan having been gleaned from industriously exploited j.a.panese sources, he himself would have been the first to admit the truth of this statement. Nis.h.i.+da 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 pa.s.sed 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 j.a.panese took natural manifestations and wove them into religious creeds, coa.r.s.e 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 j.a.pan. 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 j.a.pan, 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 j.a.panese women, to make a colossal seated figure of the G.o.d; 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 j.a.panese, which has by some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was drawing a salary from the j.a.panese government, and adapting himself to j.a.panese social conditions, he was d.a.m.ning the j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan he never changed his opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view, over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to acc.u.mulate 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. Circ.u.mstances 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 j.a.pan, 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. j.a.pan 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 d.a.m.nable, 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 wors.h.i.+pper. 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion, 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."