Lafcadio Hearn

( Originally Published 1922 )

HAS the Silence fallen upon thee, O Lafcadio, in that far Eastern land of strange flowers, strange gods and myths, where thou, grown weary of a world whence the spirit of romance had flown, didst fix thy later home? Art thou indeed gone for-ever from us who loved thee, being of thy brave faith in the divinity of the human spirit, and art thou gathered to a strange Valhalla of thy wiser choice,—naturalized now, as we may of a truth believe, among the elect and heroic shades of old Japan? Is that voice stilled which had not its peer in these lament-able days, sounding the gamut of beauty and joy that has almost ceased to thrill the souls of men? Child of Hellas and Erin, are those half-veiled eyes, that yet saw so deeply into the spiritual Mystery that enfolds our sensuous life, forever closed to this earthly scene? Hath Beauty lost her chief witness and the Lyre of Prose her anointed bard and sacerdos? Shall we no more hearken to the cadences of that perfect speech which was thy birthright, sprung as thou wert from the poesy of two immemorial lands, sacred to eloquence and song?

Ill shall we bear thy loss, O Lafcadio, given over as we are to the rule and worship of leaden gods. Thou wert for us a witness against the iron Law that crushed, and ever crushes, our lives; against the man-made superstition which impudently seeks to limit the Ideal. From beyond the violet seas, in thy flower-crowned retreat, thou didst raise the joyous pan of the Enfranchised. Plunged deep into mystic lore hidden from us, exploring a whole realm of myths and worships of which our vain science knows nothing, thou wouldst smile with gentle scorn at the monstrous treadmill of creeds and cultures—gods and words—where we are forever doomed to toil without fruit or respite.

We hearkened to thy wondrous tales of a land whose babes have more of the spirit of Art than the teachers of our own; where love is free, yet honored and decency does not consist in doing that privately which publicly no man dare avow; where religion, in our sophistical sense, does not exist, and where crime, again in our brutal sense, is all but unknown. We heard thee tell, with ever more wonder, how this people of Japan has gone on for hundreds, nay, thousands of years, producing the humblest as well as the highest virtues with-out the aid of an officious religion; how these Japanese folk have the wisdom of age and the simplicity of childhood, being simple and happy, loving peace, contented with little, respectful toward the old, tender 'toward the young, merciful toward women, submissive under just authority, and loving their beautiful country with a fervor of patriotism which we may not conceive. All this and more didst thou teach us, Lafcadio, in the way of thy gracious art, with many an exquisite fancy caught from the legendary lore of ancient Nippon, and with the ripe fulness of thy strangely blended genius. So we listened as to a far-brought strain of music, and were glad to hear, hailing thee Master—a title thou hadst proudly earned. Yet even as we sat at thy feet drinking in the tones of thy voice, there came One who touched thee quickly on the lips—and we knew the rest was Silence. . . .

Peace to thee, Lafcadio, child of Erin and Hellas, adopted son and poet of Nippon. Thy immortality is sure as the dayspring; for thou sleepest in the Land of the Sunrise . . . and Nippon, who has never learned to forget, watches over thy fame!

LAFCADIO HEARN was a poet working in prose, as all true poets now inevitably are, a literary artist of original motive and distinction among the rabble of contemporary scribblers. For these two things a man is not easily forgiven or forgotten when he has passed the Styx.

Half Irish, half Greek, the flower of this man's genius took unwonted hue and fragrance from his strangely blended paternity; the hybrid acquired a beauty new and surprising in a world that looks only for the stereotype.

Despairing of the tame effects produced by regularity, Nature herself seems to have set an example of lawlessness.

Lafcadio Hearn took care to avoid the conventional in the ordering of his life as sedulously as in the products of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and silent, the conventional takes a familiar revenge upon his memory.

The conventional—lest we forget—is the consensus of smug souls, the taboo uttered by mediocrity, the Latin invidia whereat Flaccus flickered, with all his assurance. It has much the same voice in every age.

Notwithstanding, one plain fact, avouched by all human experience, may reassure the wide-scattered fraternity of those who prize the work and cherish the memory of Lafcadio Hearn. It is this :—No man ever succeeded in writing himself down better or worse than he really was. You may write, but the condition is that you make a faithful likeness of yourself —nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice.

The true Lafcadio Hearn, the shy, pitiably myopic genius nursed on tears, the dreamer of strange dreams, the prose poet of a new dower of fancy, the weaver of hitherto unwrought cadences for the inner ear, the latest brave worshipper of truth and beauty,—where shall we look for him but in his enduring work?—soul and man to the essential life!

I have been re-reading the work of Hearn, and an old conviction of mine is thus reaffirmed,—that in him we have to reckon with one of the few men of the Nineteenth century who made literature that promises to endure.

The "Life and Letters" by Elizabeth Bisland is a worthy piece of literary craftsman-ship. The appreciation of Hearn both as man and artist is suffused with the warmth and color of a generous woman's temperament. More critical and tempered estimates will be written, as time goes by and he comes into his own, but none that can ever supersede Elizabeth Bisland's charming work. She has done well for her friend throughout, but her care in gathering and presenting the Letters is really a priceless service to his memory and an addition to the treasures of literature.

Hearn was often doubtful of his blessings, and there was one which he perhaps never justly estimated. I mean his relation to a small but interested circle of friends for whom he was moved to pour himself out with the frankness and force that characterize his letters. Mind, I do not say that Hearn failed to appreciate his friends, but I suspect that he did not fully realize his blessedness in having a few friends whom he found a real pleasure in writing to, and who challenged him, as it were, to the fullest self-revelation.

Literary men nowadays are too self-conscious to write good letters, or they lack the talent (which is perhaps nearer the mark), or they prefer to telegraph, or they wish to save all for the shop. But we must not forget that it takes two to write a real letter—one to summon and one to send it. In very truth, such letters as give the world delight are a real collaboration, though the work be signed by only one hand.

We should not have Lamb's Letters (choicest of all the epistolary tribe) but for Words-worth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Procter, Manning, Cary, et al.; and we should not have Hearn's but for Miss Bisland and Messrs. McDonald, Chamberlain, Krehbiel, Hendrick, and others.

Moreover, if the credit of authorship is but for the hand that held the pen, there is honor and remembrance for the silent collaborators.

I doubt if Hearn ever thought of his letters as a literary asset, yet they are being eagerly read by many who are incapable of the delicate esoteric beauty of his Japanese creations. The reason is plain: Hearn's letters tell the most fascinating story in the world. The story of a man of true genius who fought a brave fight through long years against poverty, half-blindness, and all the misfortunes of an un-toward fate, until he finally achieved some image of the Ideal that haunted him, and set his light on a hill where all the world might see it. The story, too, of a man who never took himself as a hero, nor asked to be taken as such, but made his hard course as pluckily as if the world's applause attended him. Who was never at pains to make himself out different from what he was, but gave a true likeness which, by the grace and fortune of genius, turns out to be an incomparable Portrait of a Man!

These letters of Hearn are, in truth, hardly inferior to any in our literature. I am not sure but that they give us the most interesting and faithful picture of a true literary man's life, of his soul and his environment, that literature affords. Like Lamb's letters, they complement his formal literary work, and are even superior to it on several counts, as in their deep human interest, their flashing fun and satire, their touches of quaint wisdom, their treasures of patient observation.

THESE ten or a dozen handsome volumes, then, represent the literary bequest of Lafcadio Hearn: it was to give these that he lived and toiled and suffered. "Give" is the word, for little enough he got from them in the way of compensation. No writer ever more fully exemplified the truth that the highest service in literature goes unpaid. Compensation of a kind there was indeed for Lafcadio Hearn,—the compensation that arises from the doing of one's chosen work, the fulfilment of one's artistic instinct, the gratification of that craving need of expression which is at once the joy and penalty of such a nature as his. But of money, or success in the common acceptation, there was so little for him that he may truly be said to have given all his work for art's sake. In 1903, with less than two years to live, we find him writing to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland) :

"Literary work is over. When one has to meet the riddle of how to live, there is an end of revery and dreaming and all literary 'labor of-love.' It pays not at all. A book brings me in about $300—after two years' waiting. My last payment on four books (for six months) was $44. Also, in my case, good work is a matter of nervous condition. I can't find the conditions while having to think about home, which is `the most soul-satisfying of fears,' according to Rudyard Kipling."

But all his life he had been dedicate to the stern muses of Poverty and Labor. Utterly incapable of business and bargain-making—("the moment I think of business," he says, "I wish I had never been born")—he could not peddle his precious mental wares to advantage, and so abandoned everything to the shrewd bargainers of the publishing trade,—glad to do it, too, if they would only let him correct his proofs! This is the recurrent note in his private, unreserved correspondence. In 1899 he writes to one of his best friends, whom he chose as his literary executor, Paymaster Mitchell McDonald of the United States Navy, stationed then at Yokohama:

"Don't know whether I shall appear in print again for several years. Anyhow, I shall never write again except when the spirit moves me. It doesn't pay, and what you call `reputation' is a most damnable, infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug. . . . While every book I write costs me more than I get for it, it is evident that literature holds no possible rewards for me; and like a sensible person, I'm going to do something really good that won't sell."

Let us look a little at the artist. I have heretofore set down my own appreciation of Lafcadio Hearn as thinker and writer: my purpose now is merely to indicate by extracts from his letters the considerations by which his artistic conscience was quickened and governed. Hardly any writer has expressed himself more frankly and with less reserve on the self-imposed canons of his art. Not Flaubert himself held a more rigorous conception of the function and obligation of the writer—the priestship of art—than this man who advised one of his correspondents, a young man debating the choice of literature as a profession, to take literature seriously or leave it alone!

How seriously he took it himself, we have already seen, and the following extracts gleaned at hazard from his letters help us the better to understand :

"All the best work is done the way ants do things—by tiny but untiring and regular additions."

"Work with me is a pain—no pleasure till it is done. It is not voluntary; it is not agree-able. It is forced by necessity. The necessity is a curious one. The mind, in my case, eats itself when unemployed."

"I write page after page of vagaries, meta-physical, emotional, romantic,—throw them aside. Then, next day, I go to work rewriting them. I rewrite and rewrite them till they begin to define and arrange themselves into a whole,—and the result is an essay."

"Of course, I like a little success and praise, —though a big success and big praise would scare me; and I find that even the little praise I have been getting has occasionally unhinged my judgment. And I have to be very careful."

And hearken to this, O ye impatient acolytes in the Temple of Literature, who dream only of golden rewards, and ye others, bold traffickers in a debased art, who measure achievement by its money price in the market.

"Literary success of any enduring kind is made only by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order."

"I am going to ask you simply not to come to see your friend, and not to ask him to see you, for at least three months more. I know this seems horrid—but such are the only conditions upon which literary work is possible, when combined with the duties of a professor of literature."

And this, than which even the letters of Lamb yield nothing finer:

"My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter—with infinite subtlety—spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go,—and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them. They help me to maintain the isolation indispensable to quiet regularity of work. . . . Blessed be my enemies, and forever honored all those that hate me !

"But my friends !—ah, my friends ! They speak so beautifully of my work; they believe in it; they say they want more of it,—and yet they would destroy it! They do not know what it costs,—and they would break the wings and scatter the feather-dust, even as the child that only wanted to caress the butterfly. And they speak of communion and converse and sympathy and friendship,—all of which are in-deed precious things to others, but mortally deadly to me, representing the breaking up of habits of industry, and the sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost,—against whom sin shall not be forgiven, either in this life or the life to come."

"The strong worker and thinker works and thinks by himself. He does not want help or sympathy or company. His pleasure in the work is enough."

"One thing is dead sure: in another generation there can be no living by dreaming and scheming of art; only those having wealth can indulge in the luxury of writing books for their own pleasure."

Hearn's philosophy of life, the daily human habit of the man, as revealed in these letters to a few chosen friends, is not less racy and interesting than his literary side, and it shows him in genial, lovable aspects that will surprise many who yet recall the old libels upon his personal character. He had strong native wit (of which he was too sparing in his formal literary productions), and, for a dreamer, astonishing shrewdness of observation. Of him it might be said as of Renan, that he thought like a man and acted like a child. Though abnormally sensitive and shy, disliking society in the most limited sense, on account of his devotion to his work and also because of certain personal disadvantages, his affections were warm, sincere and constant. One cannot resist the belief,—of which indeed there is no lack of testimony,—that he was a true friend, a fond husband and father, and a genuine lover of humanity.

This article is running beyond bounds, but I venture to cite a few more extracts,—always from his personal letters,—that shed light on the man rather than the writer:

"We can reach the highest life only through that self-separation which the experience of illness, that is, the knowledge of physical weakness, brings."

"How sweet the Japanese woman is !—all the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be concentrated in her."

"My little wife said the other morning that there was a mezurashii kedamono in the next yard. We looked out, and the extraordinary animal was a goat!"

"You do not laugh when you look at moun tains, nor when you look at the sea."

"No man, as a general rule, shows his soul to another man;—he shows it only to a woman. . . . No woman unveils herself to an-other woman—only to a man; and what she unveils he cannot betray."

"It is only in home-relations that people are true enough to each other, show what human nature is, the beauty of it, the divinity of it. We are otherwise all on our guard against each other."

"No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, what anything means, until he has a child and loves it."

"Perhaps if my boy grows old, there will some day come back to him memories of his mother's dainty little world,—the hibachi,—the tako,—the garden, the lights of the shrine, —the voice and hands that shaped his thought and guided every little tottering step. Then he will feel very, very lonesome,—and be sorry he did not follow after those who loved him into some shadowy resting place where the Buddhas still smile under their moss !"

"I have at home a little world of about eleven people to whom I am Love and Light and Food. It is a very gentle world. It is only happy when I am happy. If I even look tired, it is silent and walks on tiptoe. It is a moral force. I dare not fret about anything when I can help it, for others would fret more. So I try to keep right."

THE close of Lafcadio Hearn's life was embittered by the loss of his position as professor of English Literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo, and no doubt his days were shortened by the terrible anxieties into which he was thus thrown. His state was never so bad as it appeared to his sensitive imagination, to his boding spirit hopelessly clouded by the misfortunes of his youth; and a remedy was found, alas! too late. His letters about this time are not cheerful reading, but they are of the most painful interest and they will ever call forth love and pity for the struggling and afflicted man of genius who in life had known too little of these qualities. I quote from one letter written in this sad and anxious time to Mrs. Wetmore ; it is especially poignant, but the burden is that of others.

"You will be glad to hear that I am almost strong again, but I fear that I shall never be strong enough to lecture before a general public. . . . The great and devouring anxiety is for some regular employ—something that will assure me the means to live. . . . I am worried about my boy—how to save him out of this strange world of cruelty and intrigue. And I dream of old ugly things—things that happened long ago. I am alone in an American city, and I have only ten cents in my pocket, —and to send off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for the day's food!"

Lafcadio Hearn died on September 26th, 1904, in the fifty-fourth year of his age. The story of his last illness and death, as told by his faithful Japanese wife, is most quaint and pathetic and marked by little touches that re-veal the spiritual nobility of the man. True to his life-long revolt against the religion of gloom and sorrow, he bade her not to weep for him, but to buy for his coffin a little earthen flower pot, and to bury him in the yard of a small temple in some lonesome quarter. (In death as in life the man shrank from the world.) Then she was to play cards with their children, and if any people came to ask for him, she was to say that he had died some time before.

Though his physical breakdown was gradual and he had noted in himself many warnings of the Great Change at hand, the end came suddenly. On the eve of his death he dreamed that he had gone on a long and distant journey: the fulfilment came to him with no more pain or struggle than "a little folding of the hands to sleep" . . .

Of him a noble Japanese has written :

"Like a lotus this man was in his heart . . a poet, a thinker, a loving husband and father, and a sincere friend. Within him there burned something pure as the vestal fire, and in that flame dwelt a mind that called forth life and poetry out of the dust, and grasped the highest themes of human thought."

Lafcadio Hearn lies at rest in the far Eastern land of Japan, among the strange people whose life he adopted, who gave him a home and the love of wife and children, whose bravery and virtue, whose national spirit,

whose beautiful legends and folklore, whose ancient and wondrous religion, he interpreted with perfect art and deep divining sympathy, for an alien world; building thereupon his chief title to remembrance. Few writers of our time have achieved a more worthy or left a more lasting fame.