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 I.AFCADIO HEARN 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 By 
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 1912 
 
•J'S 
 
 1^ 
 
 T^ 
 
 BUTLER & Tanner, 
 
 The selwood printing Works» 
 
 frome, and london. 
 
 
THE BARD GWILI 
 
, ABBREVIATIONS 
 
 B, I. and II. . Vol. I. and II. of Miss Bisland's 
 Lafcadio Hearn. Life and Let- 
 ters (Houghton Mifflin and 
 Constable). 
 
 B. III. . . Miss Bisland's Lafcadio Hearn : 
 Japanese Letters (Houghton 
 Mifflin and Constable). 
 
 N Mr. Yone Noguchi's Lafcadio 
 
 Hearn in Japan (Elkin Ma- 
 thews). 
 
 G.M.G, . . Dr. G. M. Gould's Concerning 
 Lafcadio Hearn (G. W. Jacobs 
 and Fisher Unwin). 
 
 T.J, , . . Professor Basil Hall Chamber- 
 lain's Things Japanese (John 
 Murray). 
 
 L.B. . . . Letters from the Raven (Brent&no's 
 and Constable). 
 
 CO. . . . Some Chinese Ghosts (Little 
 Brown and Kegan Paul) . 
 
 C.N. . . . One of Cleopatra's Nights (Bren- 
 tano's). 
 
 C Chita (Harpers). 
 
 F.Wtl, . . Two Years in the French West 
 Indies (Harpers). 
 
 O Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan 
 
 (Houghton Mifflin and Kegan 
 Paul). 
 
 7 
 
ABBREVIATIONS 
 
 O Out of the East (Houghton 
 
 Mifflin and Kegan Paul). 
 K Kohoro (Houghton Mifflin and 
 
 Kegan Paul). 
 B.F. ... Gleanings in Buddha Fields 
 
 (Houghton Mifflin and Kegan 
 
 Paul). 
 E, and R, . . Exotics and Retrospectives (Little 
 
 Brown and Kegan Paul). 
 O.J. , . . In Ghostly Japan (Little Brown 
 
 and Kegan Paul). 
 S. . m . . Shadowings (Little Brown and 
 
 Kegan Paul). 
 J.M. , . » A Japanese Miscellany (Little 
 
 Brown and Kegan Paul). 
 Kot. . . . Kotto (MacmiUan Co.). 
 Kw. . . . Kwaidan (Houghton Mifflin 'and 
 
 Kegan Paul). 
 J. . . . • Japan : an attempt at Interpre- 
 tation (MacmiUan Co.). 
 M.W. . . . The Milky Way (Houghton 
 
 Mifflin and Constable). 
 
 Note. — I thank the publishers of these books for 
 their permission to make the quotations from them 
 which are indicated in the text. 
 
In one of his last essays Lafcadio Hearn 
 said that he would like to be buried in the 
 old Buddhist graveyard behind his garden. 
 He liked the place for its beauty and anti- 
 quity, and for its great bell. This bell had 
 " a quaintness of tone which wakens feel- 
 ings, so strangely far away from all the 
 nineteenth century part of me, that the 
 faint blind stirrings of them, make one 
 afraid — deliciously afraid " : ^ it caused " a 
 striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part 
 of my ghost — a sensation as of memories 
 struggling to reach the light beyond the 
 obscuration of a million million deaths and 
 births." It is a thought easily to be paral- 
 leled in any of his books. More than any 
 other man he appears to have been unable 
 to forget " the dark backward and abyss " 
 of his own immemorial past. " Is not 
 every action indeed the work of the Dead 
 
 1 Kw. 212. 
 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 who dwell within us ? " " is a sentence which 
 shows what governed his thinking. He 
 himself knew less of his immediate ancestors 
 than most men, but though he would not 
 have expected any great illumination from 
 a far fuller knowledge he was fond of dwel- 
 ling upon his childhood and origin. How 
 much he knew of them is uncertain. What 
 he has said and what others have unearthed 
 amounts to little — a suggestive and sur- 
 prising little, though not enough to satisfy 
 the man who was so impressed by the con- 
 tinual resurrection of the past, that he 
 found the worship of ancestors " an 
 extremely righteous thing." ^ The Hearns 
 are said to have been a Dorsetshire family 
 with " a tradition of gipsy blood," * but 
 settled since the end of the seventeenth 
 century in Ireland. The head of the family 
 was then Dean of Cashel. He had eight 
 sons who were soldiers, and of these one 
 was Hearn's grandfather. His father was 
 Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, who 
 fell in love with a Greek girl, Rosa Cerigote, 
 while he was in garrison, carried her off 
 and married her. Lafcadio, named from 
 
 » G. 396. * B. II. 28. « B. I. 5. 
 
 10 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 the island of his birth, Lefcada, was the 
 second, but first surviving, child, born on 
 June 27, 1850 : his infant speech was 
 Romaic and Italian. Surgeon-Major Hearn 
 took his family to Ireland six » years later, 
 and soon afterwards his wife ran away from 
 him or Ireland, never to return. He 
 married again and Lafcadio, being adopted 
 by a great-aunt, never saw father or mother 
 after the age of seven. He remembered 
 that his mother was small, black-haired and 
 black-eyed, and that only once did he feel 
 glad with his father. He favoured his 
 mother, and sometimes thought there was 
 nothing in him, physical or mental, of his 
 father ; but Miss Bisland says that the 
 children of his father's second wife were 
 much like Lafcadio,* with "dark skins, 
 delicate aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in 
 arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit 
 figures." 5 He himself said that he got his 
 impatience, sensitiveness and affection from 
 his mother, and what pride and persistence 
 he had from his father. 
 
 The great-aunt who adopted Hearn was 
 a Mrs. Brenan, " widow of a wealthy Irish- 
 
 5 B. I. 11. 
 II 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 man, by whom she had been converted to 
 Romanism." Hearn himself is the only 
 authority for what we learn of his life with 
 her, in Wales and Ireland, and what he has 
 said is often in a heightened tone which 
 suggests a considerable developing process, 
 conscious or not. He says that he was 
 " brought up in a rich home, surrounded 
 with every luxury." He has recalled, in 
 Kwaidan, the witchcraft of a Welsh or gypsy 
 harper playing and singing to him ; and 
 in " My Guardian Angel " ^ how when he 
 was " nearly six " a cousin made him 
 " unhappy in a new and irreparable way," ' 
 by teaching him about Hell ; in " Night- 
 mare-touch " how his fear of darkness was 
 cruelly overridden ; ^ and in " Idolatry " 
 how he got to know the Greek mythology, 
 and had an intuition " that the gods had 
 been belied because they were beautiful," 
 and how they made his world glow again and 
 so absorbed him that his elders excised the 
 breasts of the nude female figures and 
 concealed some lines with cross-strokes of 
 the pen, and others with bathing drawers. 
 These autobiographical voluntaries are in 
 
 6 B. I. 16. ' B. I. 27, » S. 238. 
 
 12 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 keeping Avith Hearn's belief that he was 
 " Of a meridional race ... a Greek," who 
 felt rather with the Latin than the Anglo- 
 Saxon. He boasted also of being, as a small 
 boy, very mischievous and fond of kissing 
 beautiful girls, and later of desiring the love 
 of succubi. 
 
 In " Nightmare Touch " he speaks of 
 being at a " children's boarding school,"~ 
 of which we know nothing more. He says 
 that he " passed some years in Catholic 
 colleges " ^ but was not a Catholic. He 
 may have been at a " Jesuit college in the 
 north of France," and was certainly at 
 Ushaw, a Roman Catholic school at Dur- 
 ham. Here he is remembered to have 
 " announced his disbelief in the Bible," 
 and is described as a boy with a taste for 
 drawing, fond of poetry and books of travel 
 and adventure, " very much in earnest," 
 sensitive, and " a very lovable character, 
 extremely sympathetic and sincere." He 
 speaks himself of having a " religious 
 tutor," and though he told his brother he 
 was not a Catholic he told the unknown of 
 his " Letters to a Lady " that he " was once 
 
 9 B. I. 33. 
 13 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 a Catholic — at least, my guardians tried to 
 make me so. . . ." Evidently he liked 
 to dwell upon his sufferings and rebellions. 
 In " Gothic Horror " ^° he describes his 
 ghostly fear in an old church ; in a letter 
 to Professor Chamberlain ^^ his fear of 
 ghosts and his crying loudly at the sound 
 of a tune played " in the midst of a fashion- 
 able gathering." Whether it is due or not 
 to unconscious literary influence, his recol- 
 lections of childhood remind us of De 
 Quincey's autobiography, as some of his 
 later recollections recall the " Confes- 
 sions." 
 
 He is supposed to have left Ushaw after 
 and in consequence of an accident which 
 blinded one eye. He was already " very 
 near-sighted " and when he was only eight, 
 says Dr. Gould, the right eyeball so con- 
 spicuous in his portraits was " about as 
 large and protruding as in later life." ^^ it 
 is not known what happened to him during 
 the next three years. He says that his rich 
 relatives refused to pay anything to help 
 him to finish his education, that he had to 
 become a servant, and that he spent two 
 
 " S. 213. " B. III. 212. '2 B I 37, 
 
 14 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 years of sickness in bed. A schoolfellow 
 has said that Hearn suffered extreme 
 poverty in London, and in a fragment 
 called " Stars " he has described himself 
 sleeping in a hayloft for the sake of heat 
 from the breath of horses below. On the 
 other hand he told his friend, Mr. Watkin, 
 that he had " dissipated ten years in Latin 
 and Greek, and stuff." ^^ 
 
 When he was nineteen it is certain that 
 he was penniless in New York, and in the 
 same year, 1869, working in Cincinnati for 
 a Syrian pedlar, then as a typesetter and 
 proof-reader. He earned the name of 
 " Old Semicolon " by his exceptional care 
 for what seemed to him right in printing. 
 In 1874 he was a general reporter on the 
 Inquirer at Cincinnati.^* He advanced 
 from market reports to descriptions of a 
 murder and of Cincinnati as seen from the 
 top of St. Peter's Cathedral spire, where 
 he was hauled by a steeple- jack. He was 
 hardworking and sat for hours at his table, 
 " his great bulbous eyes resting as close to 
 the paper as his nose would permit." 
 Sometimes there were fourteen or fifteen 
 
 " L. R. 108. 1* B. I. 50, 83. 
 
 16 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 pages by him in one number of the Inquirer. 
 He also worked for the Commercial, but 
 is said to have been discharged because he 
 sought a licence for an open marriage with 
 a coloured woman. He haunted dark 
 corners of the city and knew the plegroes. 
 He also made friends with a musical critic, 
 an artist, and a printer. The printer, Mr. 
 Watkin, called him the Raven on account 
 of his black hair and his love of gloom, 
 horror, and Edgar Allan Poe. Little of his 
 writing belonging to this period is known. 
 He edited and for the most part wrote a 
 comic and satiric Sunday paper, called Ye 
 Giglampz. Here he was writing on subjects 
 and in a tone so unsuitable that he is said 
 to have done nothing worth reading. He 
 has, however, been praised for the descrip- 
 tion in the Commercial of a murdered and 
 burnt corpse. Such description awakens 
 chiefly surprise that a man who pushed his 
 finger into a boiled human brain to learn its 
 consistency should have troubled the same 
 hand with a pen. It is imcertain whether 
 the adventure was due to natural curiosity 
 or to a literary pursuit of the unusual and of 
 words to suit it. In the small hoxu-s " after 
 16 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 the rough work of the police rounds "!*• 
 he was translating Gautier, and One of 
 Cleopatra's Nights, published in 1882, is 
 said to belong to this period. 
 
 Apparently the negress was not the only 
 subject of difference between him and 
 Cincinnati, and in 1877 he left it for New 
 Orleans. On the way he spent some time 
 at Memphis, staying in " a great big 
 dreary room," of a " great dreary house," ^* 
 which he describes so as to create an impres- 
 sion like that of the house in Greek Street 
 where De Quincey lodged. The dead bells 
 had been ringing for a general's funeral, 
 and he cried " a good deal of nights," he 
 says, as he did when " a college boy returned 
 from vacation." 
 
 Arriving at New Orleans he was very poor, 
 but he seems for the first time to have been 
 at home in a city which was " the paradise 
 of the South " — ^he said, " I never beheld 
 anything so beautiful and so sad." He felt 
 that he could never leave it for the North, 
 so much did he feel its age, its forsaken state- 
 liness, and its quiet. That he would not stay 
 in it for ever was clear from his heart " like a 
 
 16 B. I. 61. 16 L.R. 36. 
 
 17 B 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrat- 
 ing season." He would like to be a swal- 
 low with " a summer nest in the ear of an 
 Egyptian colossus or a broken capital of 
 the Parthenon." He still contributed to 
 the Commercial, chiefly letters that were 
 unprofitably picturesque : they are to be 
 found in Letters from the Raven over the 
 signature of " Ozias Midwinter." He tried 
 to make money by setting up a five-cent 
 eating house. At one time he thought of 
 going to Japan — " splendid field in Japan." 
 But he found journalistic work on the 
 Daily Item, reading proofs, writing edi- 
 torials and occasionally a translation or 
 original sketch. In 1881 the Times-Demo- 
 crat of New Orleans gave him work and a new 
 opportunity, by printing week after week 
 his translations from Gautier, Maupassant, 
 Pierre Loti. About two hundred of these 
 translations appeared. He contributed 
 also other translations and many studies 
 and stories. His three books. One of 
 Cleopatra's Nights, Stray Leaves from Strange 
 Literature, and Some Chinese Ghosts, were 
 all collected from the Times-Democrat. 
 He was getting older, " less despondent but 
 18 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 less hopeful . . . more systematic and per- 
 haps a good deal more selfish. Not strictly 
 economical, but coming to it steadily, and 
 in leisure hours studying the theories of 
 the East, the poetry of antique India," 
 About 1884 he was to meet the First Prin- 
 ciples of Herbert Spencer, which gave him 
 " unspeakable comfort " and an " eternal 
 reopening of the Great Doubt," made 
 pessimism " ridiculous " and taught " a 
 new reverence for all kinds of faith." 
 
 New Orleans was the first step towards 
 Japan. The second was the West Indies. 
 In 1884 he visited Grande Isle in the Gulf 
 of Mexico, a tropical island which inspired 
 his romance called Chita, and made him 
 say that " One lives here. In New Orleans 
 one only exists." The chapters of this 
 book as they appeared in the Times- 
 Democrat, helped him to a commission 
 from Messrs. Harper which took him in 
 1887 to the Windward Islands and to 
 British Guiana. His travel-sketches ap- 
 peared in Harper^s Magazine. After an 
 interval of only two months he returned to 
 St. Pierre in Martinique. His love for the 
 tropics was so strong that he wrote from 
 19 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 Japan in 1890 expressing a hope that in a 
 year or two he could earn enough to 
 " reahze his dream of a home in the West 
 Indies." ^^ He thought that his real field 
 was in the Latin countries, and his dream 
 was " to haunt the old crumbling Portuguese 
 and Spanish cities, and steam up the 
 Amazon or Orinoco, and get romances no- 
 body else could find." ^^ The dream is elo- 
 quently expressed in his Two Years in the 
 French West Indies and his letters. In 
 1887 he half believed that he was returning 
 to the tropics for ever. He was weary of 
 the whole Anglo-Saxon system of life and 
 civilization. When he was back in New 
 York in 1889 he wanted to get back " among 
 the monkeys and the parrots, under a 
 violet sky among green peaks and an eter- 
 nally lilac and luke-warm sea — where cloth- 
 ing is superfluous and reading too much 
 of an exertion — ^where everybody sleeps 
 14 hours out of the 24," as in Japan he 
 envied a friend " the rich, divine, moist, life- 
 sapping and life-giving heat of the tropics " ; 
 and this, in spite of " the development of 
 morbid nervous sensibility to material 
 
 ^'' L, R. 93. 18 B. I. 105. 
 
 20 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 impressions, and absolute loss of thinking 
 power, accompanied by numbing and cloud- 
 ing of memory." He declared that white 
 faces became " ghostly terrible " ^* to him, 
 and he felt the " black man's terror of the 
 white." In New York he was working at 
 his translation of Le Crime de Sylvestre 
 Bonnard for purposes of immediate gain. 
 Then he accepted an offer to go to Japan 
 and write articles on his journey for Messrs. 
 Harper. He left on May 8, 1890. He threw over 
 his journalistic work and became a school- 
 master, teaching English thenceforward with 
 a short interval, until the year before his 
 death. In less than nine months after 
 leaving New York he had married a Japan- 
 ese vnie. By her he had two sons, and he 
 enjoyed a home life of great sweetness and 
 tranquillity. Among Japanese he could 
 pass as only ''a curious-looking" Japanese 
 from some remote part of the empire ; and 
 he soon learned to squat instead of sitting. 
 In 1896 he became a Japanese citizen. 
 Now and then he thought of journeys to far 
 countries, and just before his death he was 
 thinking of going to the United States to 
 
 " B. III. 271. 
 21 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 lecture. But except that he was forced 
 by the cold climate to leave a congenial 
 place, Matsue, he suffered only the troubles 
 of every author who is not an exemplary 
 pachyderm : "At home," he said, " every- 
 thing is sweet " ; and again : " It is a very 
 gentle world. It is only happy when I am 
 happy." He was not a born schoolmaster, 
 nor continuously cheerful at the work, but 
 he won affection, and his difficulties were 
 noble and created by his own high standards. 
 This work did not rob him of spirit to plan 
 or strength to execute, and it gave him not 
 only a sufficient wage, but opportunities. 
 He saw many things which the professional 
 author might have missed, and his students 
 gave him direct help as well as indirect. 
 His home life made him younger by taking 
 away the youthful consciousness of age. 
 When he sang a child's song, says Mrs. 
 Hearn, " he looked as if he never knew the 
 existence of the worries of the world." ^° 
 Though getting grey at forty-three, he was 
 much stronger than at thirty. He had 
 begun by wishing to be reincarnated as a 
 Japanese baby, had passed through a period 
 
 20 N. 57. 
 22 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 when Japan gave him no thrill and he 
 knew it, and had reached a deep studious 
 and domestic ease. His Japanese books 
 and letters are the sole and sufficient 
 authority for these years from 1890 until 
 his death in 1904. Hitherto he had been 
 experimenting and choosing his material 
 quite consciously and elaborating it quite 
 consciously. Now his material began to 
 be so abundant and insistent that he might 
 seem to be doing nothing but arrange it. 
 
 23 
 
II 
 
 Hearn was forty when he reached Japan. 
 He had been drifting about the world, 
 rather more obviously a pawn of circum- 
 stances than other men. Nothing could 
 stop him except sickness or poverty. He 
 had made some friends and acquired some 
 books, but there can have been few less 
 substantial men than he. In his unfriendly 
 way, due to his having heard that while 
 Hearn was writing to him in love and trust 
 he was speaking of him " with bitterness 
 and malevolent injustice," Dr. Gould says 
 that except in " the pursuit of literary 
 excellence, Hearn had no character. His 
 was the most unresisting, most echo-like 
 mind I have ever known. He was a perfect 
 chameleon ; he took for the time the colour 
 of his surroundings." ^ This probably 
 means little more than that Hearn was 
 abashed before Dr. Gould, and was dimly 
 
 1 G. M. G. 
 24 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 aware of what the doctor thought of him. 
 It was to Dr. Gould that Hearn said : 
 " You have given me a soul " : it was of 
 Dr. Gould that Hearn inquired, eagerly 
 humbling himself : " If a man lives like a 
 rat for twenty or twenty-five years he must 
 have acquired something of the disposition 
 peculiar to rodents, mustn't he " ? Yet 
 even Dr. Gould, sadly compelled to accuse 
 Hearn of having had " no romance, no 
 love, no happiness, no interesting personal 
 data upon which he could draw to give his 
 imagination play, vividness, actuality, or 
 even the semblance of reality," even Dr. 
 Gould who lamented : " How often is the 
 pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving 
 way to foolish, needless and degrading in- 
 herited instincts at the expense of the higher 
 life and usefulness," even Dr. Gould calls 
 Hearn an " affectionate and sweet-natured 
 man." This is the natural man in Dr. 
 Gould confessing that Hearn had got char- 
 acter. Along with this confession should 
 be used Miss Bisland's statement that his 
 physical cleanliness was like that of " un- 
 contaminated savages and wild animals, 
 which has the air of being so essential and 
 25 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 innate as to make the best-groomed men 
 and domesticated beasts almost frowzy by- 
 contrast." 2 She calls him about five foot 
 three in height, and unusually broad and 
 powerful, but graceful and light in move- 
 ment : others speak of his silent feline step. 
 He calls himself a swarthy, very short, 
 square- set fellow of about 140 pounds 
 when in good health ; 36 1 inches round the 
 chest : he afterwards became corpulent 
 and stooped. He was shy, but composed 
 and dignified, presumably when he was 
 surrounded. He shrank from meetings 
 and sometimes fled from them. He walked 
 about as he talked, a habit which his elder son 
 also had, " touching softly the furnishings 
 of the room or the flowers of the garden," 
 and he poured out " a stream of brilliant talk 
 in a soft, half-apologetic tone, with con- 
 stant deference to the opinions of his com- 
 panions." . . . His head was " bold and 
 delicate " in profile, though some thought 
 the chin weak ; his brow " was square and 
 full above the eyes," his complexion " a 
 clear, smooth olive," or " a little brownish," 
 and his skin " rather hairy." His large 
 
 » B. I. 77. 
 26 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 seeing eye was brown and heavily lashed ; 
 the other was filmed or pearled, and was 
 often concealed by his hand during con- 
 versation. He was afraid that women 
 were repelled by this eye, but though shy 
 .with them was one who took " a foolish 
 fancy to every damozel in his path." He 
 used a handglass for near things and a tele- 
 scope for distant ; otherwise, says Dr. 
 Gould, " the world beyond a few feet was 
 not a three dimensioned one ; it was 
 coloured . . . but it was formless and flat, 
 without much thickness or solidity, and 
 almost without perspective." Dr. Gould 
 believes that the result of this was " what 
 it was," i.e. that in so far as what he saw 
 was different from what other men saw it 
 was due to the difference between his sight 
 and other men's. Dr. Gould says nothing 
 to explain Hearn's own statement : that 
 " a landscape necessarily suggests less to 
 the keen-sighted man than to the myope. 
 The keener the view the less depth in the 
 impression produced." It is true that 
 Hearn dwelt much in his books upon 
 physical appearances, but that was due in 
 a large part to the literary influence of 
 27 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 Gautier and others, and his power in this 
 department is not so great as to suggest any 
 useful peculiarity of vision. If anything, 
 it has sometimes a bad effect, that of undue 
 emphasis upon detail, which may have been 
 due to seeing a thing or a group bit by bit 
 instead of as a proportioned and related 
 whole. Heat, he said, was good for his 
 sight, and his sight thus chose his landscape. 
 It also unfitted him for many forms of 
 physical exercise. But he was a good 
 swimmer and loved the water, and one of 
 his best pictures of himself is in " At 
 Yaidzu," ^ where he swims out at night 
 to the fleet of tiny lighted ghost-ships after 
 the Festival of the Dead, watching and 
 questioning : 
 
 " Are not we ourselves as lanterns 
 launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, 
 and ever separating further and further one 
 from another as we drift to the inevitable 
 dissolution . . . ? " 
 
 He liked going to Yaidzu for his summer 
 vacation, to swim and " rough it " among 
 the fishermen. " He smoked incessantly," 
 says Mrs. Hearn, " and he could not leave 
 
 » G. J. 232. 
 28 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 his cigar behind even while swimming " : * 
 when he touched the shore by a paper 
 lantern put to mark a landing spot " he was 
 the happiest man alive." Mrs. Hearn saw 
 in his smoking a religious act, and says : 
 " I always wondered when I saw him 
 smoking, what heavenly delight he felt with 
 his pipe." ^ He began by living as a good 
 appetite proposed, but became of necessity 
 regular and careful, with very rare " de- 
 baucheries of beefsteak, whiskey and lemon- 
 ade, gin, ginger ale and beer." His letters 
 express a somewhat unusual liveliness of 
 delight in the company of men whom he 
 was at ease with. " Loving thanks for 
 yesterday's extraordinary enjoyableness 
 and for all things," he writes to a friend in 
 1898, and again : " I shall not thank you 
 for my happy two days, and all the beau- 
 tiful things that you ' so beautifully did.' 
 But I felt as if the sky had become 
 more blue . . . than could really be the 
 case," and the phrases suggest a boyish 
 love of being " treated." To the same 
 friend he writes about " the most precious 
 photographs," asks for " the one with the 
 
 * N. 82. 5 N. 38, 
 
 20 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 full dress hat on," and says : "I just love 
 it. " ^ Twenty years before he had de- 
 scribed himself in a letter to Mr. Watkin 
 as feeling " a little blue and accordingly 
 affectionate. ... I write extremely often 
 because I feel alone and extremely alone. 
 By and by, if I get well, I shall write only 
 by weeks ; and with time perhaps only by 
 months ; and when at last comes the rush 
 of business . . . only by years — until the 
 times and places of old friendship are for- 
 gotten." ' It is certain that he did forget 
 friends and probable that he did not make 
 the customary efforts not to do so, being 
 affectionate, quick and with no morbid or 
 diffused sense of responsibility except to 
 his family, himself and his work. Pro- 
 fessor Chamberlain attributes his abrupt 
 way of dropping friends to idealism : 
 " Friends when he fkst made them were 
 for him more than mortal men," and he 
 " poured out at their feet all the passionate 
 emotionalism of his Greek nature," but 
 discovering feet of clay and resenting a 
 difference from his philosophical opinions 
 he turned away ; and he himself " was a 
 
 6 B. II. 368, 375. ? l. R. 39. 
 
 30 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 greater sufferer from all this than any one 
 else ; for he possessed the affectionate 
 disposition of a child." ^ 
 
 Bound up with this quick passionateness 
 was his sensitiveness, though sometimes 
 his style exaggerates this, as when he says 
 that the contemplation of the big book 
 which might be written of incense is " terri- 
 fying." He was, says his wife, " too 
 enthusiastic for beauty, for which he wept, 
 and for which he rejoiced, and for which 
 he was angry." ^ His eyes wore " a look 
 of fearful enthusiasm " as she told him ghost 
 stories. The howling of a dog made him 
 " indefinably, superstitiously afraid." ^" 
 Sometimes his wife thought him mad, 
 " because he saw things that were not and 
 heard things that were not." ^^ As a child 
 he had seen and felt " shadowy dark-robed 
 figures, capable of atrocious self-distor- 
 tion " ^2 and of thrilling him, with a " sort 
 of abominable electricity." He sorrowed 
 for the cutting down of trees. He was very 
 tender with animals, particularly cats, and 
 one cat was so delightful to him that he 
 
 8 B. I. 59. 9 B. I. 145. lo Q. J. 135. 
 
 " B. I. 153. 12 s. 14 
 
 31 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 forgot the fleas of his lodging ; but he had 
 no unusual sympathy with animals, or he 
 would never have written of the " great 
 fun " ^^ of feeding kites with " dead rats 
 or mice which have been caught in traps 
 over night and subsequently drowned." 
 
 He had evidently been made to feel him- 
 self an exceptional being. In 1892 he 
 imagines his conscience saying to him, on 
 the subject of a woman in a story : " Your 
 ancestors were not religious people : you 
 lack constitutional morality. That's why 
 you are poor, and unsuccessful, and void 
 of mental balance, and an exile in Japan. 
 You know you cannot be happy in an 
 English moral community. You are a 
 fraud — a vile Latin — a vicious French- 
 hearted scalawag ; " 14 and he cries : " Vive 
 le monde antique.'^ Four years later he 
 is saying that with an emotional nature a 
 man is happier among Latins : "I confess 
 that I can only bear the uncommon types 
 of Englishmen, Germans and Americans — 
 the conventional types simply drive me 
 wild. On the other hand I can feel at 
 home with even a villain, if he be Spaniard, 
 
 13 G. 379. 1* B. II, 85. 
 
 32 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 Italian, or French." ^^ He said that the 
 English were " mere sucking babes in the 
 knowledge of art as compared mth the 
 Latins." ^^ He was often " hungry for a 
 sensation," from a picture, a flower, a 
 temple, or from a book which kept him 
 from talking because he " wanted to enjoy 
 the pleasure of the ghostly pain." ^' He 
 was rather fond of describing himself as 
 one of the " small people without great 
 wills and great energies." But he suffered 
 from melancholy and even from remorse. 
 When he saw his wife suffering before the 
 birth of the first child, he often begged her 
 forgiveness for her suffering and said that 
 he would " atone with his writing." ^^ 
 He had sobered down, it may be, chiefly 
 by the help of an instinctive feeling that 
 his power must be concentrated upon his 
 work, as that work became more clear to 
 him. But he did not turn round upon 
 himself. He thought in 1888, and con- 
 tinued to think, that " what we term the 
 finer moral susceptibilities signify a more 
 complex and perfect evolution of purely 
 
 15 B. II. 300. 13 B. III. 393. 
 
 17 B. III. 60. 18 N.51. 
 
 33 q 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 physical sensitiveness." In 1893 he wrote : 
 " All this woman- worship and sex- worship 
 is tending to develop to a high degree cer- 
 tain moral qualities. As the pleasure of 
 colour has been developed out of percep- 
 tions created by appetite, so out of vague 
 sense of physical charm a sense of spiritual 
 charm is being evolved." ^^ He asked if a 
 work of art ought not " to make us feel 
 that there are things which it were beau- 
 tiful to die for," but it must, he said, 
 stir in us " the sensuous life . . . the life 
 of desire." ^o jj^ thought sensualism good 
 " because it softens," but also because it 
 exists ; for he came more and more to see 
 with equanimity the orchestration of all 
 things to an infinite music, " every school 
 contributing some tone, some colour — else 
 unobtainable — ^to that mighty future scale 
 of emotional harmonies of which the depths 
 and the heights are still but faintly guessed 
 at by us." ^i He told his Japanese pupils 
 simply that the man of genius was one 
 " in whom brain has been developed at the 
 cost of body^n whom the nervous system 
 
 19 B. ni. 80. 20 B. ni. xliv. 
 
 21 B. III. 98. 
 
 34 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 has a delicacy and a sensitiveness far beyond 
 the average person. ... It is much more 
 difficult^or him to control his feelings than 
 it is for the average man, because his feelings 
 are much stronger and because the control- 
 ling machinery of will is less developed in 
 him." 2^ This is the man who loved the 
 tropics although, or because, they develop 
 " morbid sensibility to material impres- 
 sions and absolute lack of thinking power." 
 Great heat made him feel young, and in 
 1894 he said : " If I could be where it is 
 always hot I think I should live to dry up 
 and blow away." ^^ When a friend was 
 suffering from depression and lassitude he 
 sent him words of serious advice : "I 
 would indulge myself if I were you ... I 
 would give that digestion plenty of work 
 with claret and beef and puddings and pies 
 and liqueurs. And I would smoke cigars ; 
 and I would drink brandy." Vive le 
 monde antique ! It is not to be doubted 
 that he reached middle age soon after Her- 
 bert Spencer dissipated " that positive 
 scepticism that imposes itself upon an 
 undisciplined mind," ^^ and having said 
 22 N. 23 B. in. 24 B. I 365. 
 
 35 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 that he believes " the mass of humanity is 
 good," he adds that " every man must so 
 think who has suffered much and reached 
 middle life." He came, by himself, to the 
 conclusion that " there is no divine love 
 save the love of man for man ; that we 
 have no All-Father, no Saviour, no angel 
 guardians ; that we have no possible refuge 
 but in ourselves." ^^ 
 
 25 0. 180. 
 
 36 
 
Ill 
 
 Hearn was a natural and prolific letter 
 writer, and his letters from the beginning 
 show him as an artist in his tastes and in 
 his power to express and his desire to im- 
 prove his power. It is not known how soon 
 be began to think of himself as a writer. If 
 he wrote verse as a boy it has disappeared, 
 and his later verses prove that he had no 
 gift. But as soon as his writing began to 
 be printed and read it drew attention, be- 
 cause it was the work of one who by natural 
 feeling, as well as imitation, had developed 
 his own standards, different from the 
 common standards accepted by journalists 
 at Cincinnati as everywhere else. He is 
 said to have read poetry as a boy, and he 
 continued to admire Longfellow and Tenny- 
 son, and to think Swinburne " as to form," 
 as he quaintly puts it, " the greatest nine- 
 teenth century poet of England." He said 
 that he liked, not Whitman, but what Whit- 
 37 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN I 
 
 man felt and failed in expressing. As for 
 Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, he pre- 
 ferred " Dobson, and Watson and Lang." 
 But his remarks on poetry are almost 
 enough to prove that English poetry meant 
 little to him. He liked the foreign and the 
 fantastic and the sensuous. He read 
 Flaubert, Pierre Loti, Balzac's Contes Dro- 
 laiiques, " Gautier's most pre-Raphael and 
 wickedest work," ^ Swinburne, Poe, Rabe- 
 lais, Aldrich, and " other odd books," 
 — " an agglomeration of exotics and eccen- 
 trics." 2 He wanted to get away from the 
 life of everyday for stories : "I would give 
 anything," he said in 1883, " to be a literary 
 Columbus — to discover a Romantic America 
 in some West Indian or North African or 
 Oriental region. ... If I could only be- 
 come a Consul at Bagdad, Algiers, Ispahan, 
 Benares, Samarkand, Nippo, Bangkok, 
 Ninh-Binh — or any part of the world 
 where ordinary Christians do not like to 
 go ! " ^ At one time he made up his mind 
 to write once a month " the queerest and 
 most outlandish fancy I can get up," in 
 not more than two hundred words. In a 
 
 1 L. R. 134. 2 B. I. 350. 3 B. I. 294. 
 38 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 jest he proposed to his musical friend^ 
 Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, books on the battle 
 cries of all nations, on the manifestation of 
 climatic influence in popular melody, on 
 the music of nomad races, on the peculiar 
 characteristic of erotic music in all countries, 
 etc. He read the Indian epics. He must 
 at one time have read and re-read De 
 Quincey, but that writer apparently came 
 to stand for something in his youth which 
 he disliked, and by 1893 " De Quincey 's 
 charm has for ever vanished " — Whittier's 
 had increased, and Hearn was persuaded by 
 him to a sympathy with religious emotions : 
 "It is like hearing a great congregation 
 singing, ' Nearer, my God, to thee.' " 
 
 It is evident that Hearn began with the 
 aim of saying strange things in an exquisite 
 manner. This exquisite manner was to be f 
 hunted and delved for. That it did not 
 come by nature may be seen from phrases 
 like " The liver had been simply roasted 
 and the kidneys fairly fried," * or " If it 
 be agreeable to you I will call upon you at 
 1 p.m. on Sunday as per invitation." " 
 This is from one of the " Letters to a Lady," 
 
 * G. M. G. s L, E. 128. 
 
 39 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 I 
 
 wi'itten when he was twenty-five. He had 
 then " not visited out since he was sixteen 
 . . . had led a very hard and extra- 
 ordinary Hfe previous to his connexion with 
 the press — ^became a species of clumsy 
 barbarian — and in short for various reasons 
 considered myself ostracized, tabooed, out- 
 lawed." ^ This was to explain that he 
 was not used to " the cultivated class of 
 people at all." His ^vriting, then, was 
 likely to be founded entirely on books, and 
 he would revolt as far as possible from the 
 influence of the colloquial language to 
 which he was used. Under the influence 
 of Gautier and his " perfection of melody, 
 warmth of word-colouring, voluptuous deli- 
 cacy," "^ his " engraved gem-work of words," 
 this became certain. In most of his letters 
 to Mr. Watkin he was free from any such 
 influence, but used only the words and 
 phrases which were likely to come readily to 
 his pen and made a style which was practi- 
 cally Avritten speech, and slangy speech. 
 In 1882 he begins a letter with : " Your 
 letter lies before me here like a white tablet 
 
 6 L. R. 129. 7 B. I. 269. 
 
 40 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 of stone bearing a dead name ; and in my 
 mind there is just such a silence as one feels 
 standing before a tomb — so that I can press 
 your hand only and say nothing." This 
 is nothing like speech. He was then writing 
 for the Times-Democrat of New Orleans 
 translations from Maupassant, Jules Le- 
 maitre, Pierre Loti, Flaubert, Hector Malot, 
 Camille Flammarion, Dostoievsky, Sien- 
 kiewicz, Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Matilde 
 Serao, Tolstoy, Zola, Maxime du Camp, 
 Coppee, Daudet, Baudelaire, and writing 
 articles on Loti, on Arabian women, on 
 the Roar of a Great City, etc. : he allowed 
 a sentence of his deliberate style to enter a 
 letter. His letters to Mr. Krehbiel had 
 been a compromise or mixture of friendly 
 speech and of writing elaborated for 
 the benefit of a public in whom sympathy 
 has to be created. It is a very attractive 
 compromise, as in the description of his 
 lodging in St. Louis Street, an old Creole 
 house. ^ 
 
 Sometimes he is not ashamed to forget 
 his friend and imagine a public, which he 
 harangues about " that religion of the 
 
 8 B. I. 173. 
 41 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 wilderness which flies to solitude, and hath 
 no other temple than the vault of Heaven 
 itself, painted with the frescoes of the 
 clouds, and illuminated by the trembling 
 tapers of God's everlasting altar, the stars 
 of the firmament," ^ or he concludes with : 
 " So I draw my chair closer to the fire, light 
 up my pipe de terre Gambiere, and in the 
 flickering glow weave fancies of palm trees 
 and ghostly reefs and tepid winds, and a 
 Voice from the far tropics calls to me across 
 the darkness." ^° He wrote on musical 
 instruments, on luxury and art in the time 
 of Elegabalus ; he held it to be his 
 " artistic duty " to let himself be " absorbed 
 into the life " of the Latin city, to " study 
 its form and colour and passion." There 
 were, he said in 1882, months when he could 
 not write ; when he could it was to " write 
 a rough sketch and labour it over and over 
 again for half a year, at intervals of ten 
 minutes' leisure — sometimes I get a day 
 or two." 1^ He foretold that he would 
 always be " more or less Arabesque — cover- 
 ing his whole edifice with intricate designs, 
 
 8 B. I. 191. " B. I. 267. " B. I. 239. 
 42 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 serrating his arches, and engraving mysti- 
 cisms above the portals." 
 
 It was in 1882 that he pubhshed, in a book 
 which took its title from the first story, 
 translations of Gautier's One of Cleopatra^s 
 Nights, Clarimonde, Arria Mareella, The 
 Mummifs Foot, Omphale, and King Can- 
 daules. Three of these, he said, " rank 
 among the most remarkable literary pro- 
 ductions of the century." He wrote a 
 warm-hearted dedication " to the lovers of 
 the loveliness of the antique world, the 
 lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth, 
 of the charm of youthful dreams and young 
 passion in its blossoming, of poetic ambi- 
 tions and the sweet pantheism that finds 
 all Nature vitalized by the spirit of the 
 beautiful." A better translation is not 
 likely to be made, because a man capable 
 of doing it better would probably leave it 
 alone and do original work. To those 
 who already know the stories the transla- 
 tions are interesting as Hearn's early prose, 
 a cumbrous English stiffened with beauties 
 which do not make it beautiful. It is un- 
 wieldy but not massive, hard without being 
 firm, and it is not alive. It is not Gautier 
 43 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 and not Hearn, yet the more imposing parts 
 of it became parts of Hearn, and he was to 
 wi'ite many a sentence like : " She wore a 
 robe of orange-red velvet, and from her 
 wide ermine-lined sleeves there peeped forth 
 patrician hands of infinite delicacy, and so 
 ideally transparent that, like the fingers of 
 Aurora, they permitted the sun to shine 
 through them." ^- His next book, the 
 Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures of 
 1884, consisted of stories which were " re- 
 constructions of what impressed me as most 
 fantastically beautiful in the most exotic 
 literature v/hich I was able to obtain," 
 from the East and the West, but chiefly 
 from the East. In the next year he pub- 
 lished Ghomho Zhebes, a " Dictionary of 
 Creole proverbs, selected from six Creole 
 dialects, translated into French and Eng- 
 lish with notes, complete index to subjects 
 and some brief remarks upon the Creole 
 idioms of Louisiana." 
 
 In 1887 came Some Chinese Ghosts. 
 Hearn calls them black lilies or phosphoric 
 roses, and chose them for their " weird 
 beauty." In several cases ten lines of an 
 
 12 C. iV. 88. 
 44 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 old unadorned legend was the origin of a 
 tale of twenty pages. The Chinese outline 
 was probably in every case a remarkable 
 one, and such it is in Hearn. " The story 
 of Ming-Y," for example, is of an immortal 
 beauty. It is of a young tutor who met a 
 beautiful woman in the woods and loved 
 her and used to visit her beautiful palace 
 instead of going home as he pretended. At 
 last he was forced to confess. He showed 
 his elders some of the gifts of his mistress 
 and told them of her palace. The gifts 
 seemed to have " lain buried in the earth for 
 centuries " : as to the palace, there was no 
 house in the place which he described, and 
 the woman was unknown to them. They 
 went to see and found only a tomb. Then 
 they remembered the famous courtesan who 
 was buried there long ago, and the city of 
 her poet lover who gave her the gifts which 
 she had given to the young man, and were 
 all that he ever again saw of her, the lion 
 of yellow jade, the brush case of carven 
 agate, and the music. These stories are 
 good enough to keep alive the book which 
 contains them. But they are experiments, 
 not master's work. Each story cost 
 45 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 " months of hard work and study," as he 
 has told us, and it can be believed ; for he 
 adopted a style for them which had to be 
 deliberately maintained. The style appar- 
 ently did not grow out of his speech or his 
 letters, but was a loftier ceremonious me- 
 dium which became a second or a third 
 nature. It cannot be analysed here suffi- 
 ciently. But a few isolated points should 
 be noticed and considered. Thus on page 
 31 he speaks of " savage flowers," where he 
 means " wild flowers " ; but " wild " was 
 too familiar and he did not see, in his unreal 
 tower of composition, that " savage " was 
 a mere synonym and an unsuitable one. 
 So on page 65 he calls the autumn light 
 " aureate " for no better reason. In every 
 story description abounds, and it is of such 
 a kind that the words call attention to 
 themselves, and are possibly admired, but 
 ultimately fail to produce any effect beyond 
 themselves. For example, in " the great 
 citron-light of the sunset faded out," either 
 the mind will think only of citrons, or it 
 will painfully discover for itself a resem- 
 blance between one of the sunset colours 
 and the colour of a citron, leaving the words 
 46 
 
 I 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 of the writer a merely accurate statement 
 incapable of producing a pure impression 
 related to its context. This is far too often 
 the reader's fortune. When he reads about 
 an ear and a cheek in this style : " Othe jewel 
 in her ear ! What lotus bud more dainty 
 than the folded flower of flesh, with its 
 dripping of diamond fire ! Again he saw 
 it, and the curve of the cheek beyond, 
 luscious to look upon as beautiful brown 
 fruit," ^3 he finds it hard to think of human 
 beauty, so confused is he by words and by 
 flowers and fruit. The utmost reward of 
 such writing is an admiration near akin to 
 fatigue, and more often we feel that the 
 writer has forgotten the woman and lost 
 any possible power to suggest her by the 
 time he has decided upon the sentence : 
 " All suddenly he felt glide about his necl^ 
 the tepid smoothness of a woman's arm." 
 Such writing fails because it is dictated by 
 an ideal that is not deep enough in the 
 writer's spirit, the ideal of " one thing, one 
 word " — one word chosen deliberately as if it 
 were dead and still and powerless to re- 
 taliate and live alone. Much of Hearn's 
 
 " G, G. 122. 
 47 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 care must have gone to make the eloquence 
 of his opening and dosing sentences, like : 
 " Thrice had spring perfumed the breast 
 of the land with flowers, and thrice had 
 been celebrated that festival of the dead 
 which is called Siu-fan-ti, and thrice had 
 Tong swept and garnished his father's tomb 
 and presented his five-fold offerings of fruits 
 and meats." ^* The pity of it is that such 
 eloquence rarely has any natural sweet 
 cadence, and Hearn's has not. When he 
 wrote a letter about something he cared for 
 and understood, his words had a flow which 
 was inseparable from their sense ; but in 
 this entirely self-conscious writing the spirit 
 is never free to make music, or if one good 
 cadence emerges the next will clash with 
 it. Where this curious writing is most 
 successful is in catalogues, such as this 
 from the " Tale of the Porcelain God " : 
 " The vases with orifices belled like the cups 
 of flowers, or cleft like the bills of birds, 
 or fanged like the jaws of serpents, or 
 pink-lipped as the mouth of a girl ; the 
 vases flesh-coloured and purple-veined and 
 dimpled, with ears and with ear-rings ; the 
 
 " G. a. 81. 
 
 48 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 vases in likeness of mushrooms, of lotus- 
 flowers, of lizards, of horse-footed dragons 
 woman-faced ; the vases strangely trans- 
 lucid, that simulate the white glimmering 
 of grains of prepared rice, that counterfeit 
 the vapory lace-work of frost, that imitate 
 the efflorescences of coral." ^^ Life is not 
 expected in a catalogue ; connexion is 
 unnecessary ; and blind attention to iso- 
 lated detail can work no harm. Hearn 
 knew this : his books are full of such cata- 
 logues and they were sometimes useful 
 receptacles for the products of his games of 
 skill with words. 
 
 The effect of Chinese Ghosts is therefore 
 a mixed one : the story and the treatment 
 are always separable. Hearn's contribu- 
 tion is decoration. He overlays the simple 
 and beautiful outline though without con- 
 cealing it. According to the reader's power 
 of enjoying words that are without a spirit 
 will be his enjoyment of the tales as a whole. 
 He will be continually in the neighbour- 
 hood of the spirit of beauty, as in " The 
 Story of Ming-Y," but he will be aware that 
 Hearn who found the beauty also caged it, 
 
 16 C. O. 153. 
 
 49 D 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 I 
 
 with words pretending to be equivalent to 
 things as well as more than names. 
 
 Two long stories followed in 1889 and 
 1890, Chita and Youma. They belong to 
 the same period of his art as Chinese Ghosts, 
 They are beautiful stories full of beautiful 
 elements, but the treatment is the conspicu- 
 ous thing. There is the story and there is the 
 eloquent description of tropical nature, not 
 exactly separable but not perfectly united 
 by the mind which loved them both. 
 Chita, for example, contains much mere 
 eyesight and unvitalized notes of descrip- 
 tion, sometimes in the favourite form of a 
 catalogue. The writing tends constantly 
 towards a superhuman level of eloquence, 
 such as may be indicated by the passage : 
 " But she saw and heard and felt much of 
 that which, though old as the heavens and 
 the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally 
 young with the holiness of beauty — eter- 
 nally mystical and divine — eternally weird : 
 the unveiled magnificence of Nature's 
 moods — ^the perpetual poem hymned by 
 wind and surge — ^the everlasting splendour 
 of the sky." ^^ It is relevant to ask why 
 
 16 C. 148-9. 
 50 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 he should have dragged the girl Chita into 
 such description of what he admired in 
 nature. But even when he has not the 
 excuse of writing about Nature in her 
 augustness, he makes the same ceremonious 
 approach to his subject, as in " the pro- 
 gressively augmenting v/eariness of lessons 
 in deportment, in dancing, in music, in the 
 impossible art of keeping her dresses un- 
 ruffled and unsoiled." He translates " On 
 with the dance " into " Better to seek 
 solace in choregraphic harmonies, in the 
 rhythm of gracious motion and of perfect 
 melody." ^^ Much of the description of 
 beautiful things is nearly as good as possible 
 of its kind, and the rhapsodies are likely to 
 interest and charm students of the elo- 
 quence of Browne, De Quincey or Ruskin. 
 But its power is halved because the writer 
 has not chosen the right opportunity for 
 such exercises, and exercises they remain, 
 instead of essential elements in a work of 
 art. The book is not without humanity, 
 but the attitude towards human things, the 
 most tragic and the most simple, is usually 
 spectatorial He describes, for example, 
 
 " O. 
 51 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 the jetsam of a storm which destroyed an 
 island and all its holiday population : the 
 sheep, casks, billiard tables, pianos, chil- 
 dren's toys, clothes, and dead bodies. The 
 impression given by the passage is that 
 Hearn had never got beyond the point of 
 view that this scene was a good subject for 
 description. He was writing as a detached 
 aesthetic artist and this cold figure is as con- 
 spicuous as the storm and its havoc. In 
 a different key is the description of yellow 
 fever which ends the book. Hearn himself 
 had nearly died of the disease in New 
 Orleans : in Chita it kills a man but it 
 gives some life to the style, because the 
 author is writing of what he knows and has 
 mastered too well to regard it as a subject 
 for decoration, or for felicities like " the 
 stridulous telegraphy of crickets," and *' a 
 soporific murmur made of leaf-speech and 
 the hum of gnats." The whole book was 
 the work of twelve months, and he calls it 
 himself a " philosophic romance " ^^ meant 
 to reach " that something in the reader 
 which they call Soul, God, or the Unknow- 
 able, according as the thought harmonizes 
 
 " B, I. 406. 
 52 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 with Christian, Pantheistic, or Spencerian 
 ideas without conflicting with any." 
 
 His descriptive skill and enthusiasm 
 found a perfect outlet in his Two Years in 
 the French West Indies of 1890. Here it 
 was his business to describe what he saw. 
 The book contains pictures of Nature and 
 of ^egro and Creole life in Martinique, and 
 stories. Of the long " Midsummer Trip 
 to the Tropics " he says that " in spite of 
 sundry justifiable departures from simple 
 note-making, this paper is offered only as an 
 effort to record the visual and emotional 
 impressions of the moment." Sometimes 
 he gives mere notes like : " Sixth day out. 
 Wind tepid and still stronger, but sky very 
 clear. An indigo sea, with beautiful white- 
 caps. The ocean colour is deepening ; it 
 is very rich now, but I think less wonderful 
 than before ; — it is an opulent pansy hue 
 Close by the ship it looks black-blue — the 
 colour that bewitches in certain Celtic 
 eyes." i^ At other times he finishes a little 
 picture in two sentences like : " The 
 steamer's wake is a great broad, seething 
 river of fire — white like strong moonshine : 
 
 '» F. W. I. 
 63 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 the glow is bright enough to read by. At 
 its centre the trail is brightest ; towards 
 either edge it pales off cloudily, curling like 
 smoke of phosphorus." 20 The method is 
 admirably suited to travel sketches written 
 on the spot for a magazine. In the stories 
 he still gives too much space to description, 
 but " Ti Canotie," for example, is not 
 spoilt by a too exalted inanner. He is 
 lively and intelligent in his account of the 
 character of the coloured woman and its 
 development through generations of prosti- 
 tution. He is best of all in expressing the 
 charm of Nature and the people, the love- 
 liness and the languor ending in dread of 
 activity and weakening of memory. " Pa 
 combine, che ! " (" Do not think, dear ! ") 
 is the warning of a coloured girl to a con- 
 valescent European in one of the stories, 
 and it ends : 
 
 " She slipped an arm about his neck. 
 
 " ' Doudoux,' she persisted — and her voice 
 was a dove's coo — ' Si ou ainmein moin, 
 pa combine, — non ! ' 
 
 " And in her strange exotic beauty, her 
 savage grace, her supple caress, the velvet 
 
 2« F. W. 1. 
 54 
 
 i 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 witchery of her eyes — ^it seemed to me that 
 I beheld a something imaged, not of herself, 
 not of the moment only — a something 
 weirdly sensuous ; the spirit of tropic 
 Nature made golden flesh, and murmuring 
 to each lured wanderer : ' If thou wouldst 
 love me, do not think ! ' " 21 
 
 Hearn himself did not weary *' of 
 watching this picturesque life — of studying 
 the costumes, brilliant with butterfly 
 colours — ^and the statuesque semi-nudity of 
 labouring hundreds — and the untaught grace 
 of attitudes — and the simplicity of manners." 
 The necessity of writing more rapidly than 
 usual gave a fluency which was beneficial to 
 his exuberant picturesqueness, in spite of 
 the use of " minuscule " as a synonym for 
 " very small " and the inversion of " changes 
 extraordinary," and similar signs of care. 
 
 Just before going to Japan, and " in sore 
 distress for money," he wrote his translation 
 of Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard in a few 
 weeks. Everything in his first day in 
 Japan was " unspeakably pleasurable and 
 new," and he was not offended by the 
 " shop of American sewing-machines next 
 
 21 F. W. 1. 
 55 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 to the shop of a Buddhist image maker '* 
 in Yokohama. His eyes were delighted, 
 his mind at ease : asked by a temple 
 attendant if he was a Christian he said : 
 "No," and to " Are you a Buddhist ? " 
 replied " Not exactly." 22 He was at the 
 school in Matsue — ^Matsue, the " chief city 
 of the province of the Gods " — in August, 
 1890, after a period of " living in temples 
 and old Buddhist cemeteries, making pil- 
 grimages and sounding enormous bells 
 and worshipping astounding Buddhas," 23 
 and making the acquaintance of Professor 
 Basil Hall Chamberlain, author of Things 
 Japanese. He began writing at once, 
 recording his " First Day in the Orient," 
 contributing essays to the Atlantic Monthly 
 in 1891 and onwards, and publishing his 
 first Japanese book. Glimpses of Unfamiliar 
 Japan, in 1894. 
 
 The change of life was like " escaping 
 from an almost unbearable atmospheric 
 pressure into a rarefied, highly oxygenated 
 medium." 24 He found it partly a gain that 
 " in Japan the law of life is not as with us 
 — that each one strives to expand his own 
 
 "(?. 8. " B. II. 5. 24 B. I. 35. 
 
 56 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 individuality at the expense of his neigh- 
 bour's " ; but partly a loss, because there 
 was " never a fine inspiration, . . . never 
 a thrill." Therefore, he said, literary 
 work was " dry, bony, hard, dead work." ^^ 
 It is more likely that his discomfort was 
 due to the inevitable straining effort to 
 come rapidly to terms with a life so different 
 in detail and in the whole. He came to 
 doubt whether the development of the 
 individuality in a community was a " lofty 
 or desirable " ^^ tendency, but also to 
 suspect that that " depth does not exist in 
 the Japanese soulstream." He felt that 
 he would " never get close to the men." 
 He discovered " how utterly dead Old 
 Japan is, and how ugly New Japan is 
 becoming." *' 
 
 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan consists 
 chiefly of descriptions of visible things — 
 people, customs, dresses, gardens, shrines, 
 and gods, seen at home or on travel. 
 There are also stories outlined or elaborated, 
 and essays like those on lovers' suicides, 
 and the Japanese smile, and extracts direct 
 from his diary as a teacher. His " un- 
 
 2« B. I. 35. " B. I. 40. " B. II 223. 
 57 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 familiar " Japan was that of the mass not 
 yet Europeanized, " the great common 
 people, who represent in Japan, as in all 
 countries, the national virtues, and who 
 still cling to their delightful old customs, 
 their picturesque dresses, their Buddhist 
 images, their household shrines, their beau- 
 tiful and touching worship of ancestors." ^^ 
 His sympathy was extreme. He was one 
 who not merely felt " the divine in all 
 religions," ^9 but thought Christianity far 
 more irrational than Buddhism. He saw 
 in a figure of the god Jizo a dream " more 
 sweet than any imaged Christ," as well as 
 a work of art so charming that he felt " a 
 pain at being obliged to pass it by," that 
 " playfellow of dead children." =^o When 
 a missionary had told one of Hearn's pupils 
 that the Japanese were savages, he an- 
 swered : "I think, my dear lad, that he 
 himself was a savage — a vulgar, ignorant, 
 savage bigot. I think it is your highest 
 social duty to honour your Emperor. . . . 
 I think it is your duty to respect the gods 
 of your fathers, the religion of your coun- 
 try — even if you yourself cannot believe all 
 
 28 G. viii. " Q^ y^ so Q^ 48. 
 
 58 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 that others beheve." If the multitude and 
 strangeness of things at times confused his 
 sense of form, they had also touched his 
 gravity as well as his curiosity, so that the 
 book is incomparably richer than its pre- 
 decessors. He had now to -write to give 
 information and this checked his eloquence. 
 He had little room for rhapsody, even if he 
 had felt sufficiently at ease for it, though 
 he was like his native neighbours in at 
 least one characteristic : that they " make 
 pilgrimages not more for the sake of pleasing 
 the gods than of pleasing themselves by 
 the sight of rare and pretty things." He 
 travelled to Oki, where not even a mis- 
 sionary had been. The light of Japan, as 
 " gentle as the light of dreams," and " the 
 all-temperate world " of men and Nature, 
 sobered him after the garish tropics. He 
 tells us that he came " to understand the 
 unspeakable loveliness of a solitary spray 
 of blossoms arranged as only a Japanese 
 expert knows how to arrange it," ^^ and 
 to admire it far above that " vulgar mur- 
 dering of flowers," the Western bouquet. 
 
 31 G. 345. 
 59 
 
 I 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 " Gentler and kindlier faces " he never 
 saw than among the people who bowed in 
 apology even while gazing at the foreigner. 
 In his own writing moderation, gentle- 
 ness and kindliness are certainly more 
 noticeable than before. Descriptions of 
 new things, by a man who had probably to 
 use everything that he saw and could not 
 afford to pick and choose, could hardly be 
 better done. There are still catalogues, 
 but used with a purpose, not merely to give 
 an excuse for artfully enumerating precious 
 or strange objects. He can be dull — how 
 could he not be at such a task ? Yet 
 aiming as he does at fulness and accuracy, 
 not at impressions and finished pictures, 
 he not only charms us by bringing charming 
 things before us, but by his own modesty 
 and grace. There are some wildernesses 
 of adjectives ; there is a page where he 
 uses " dwarf," " miniature," " microscopic," 
 " tiny " and " lilliputian " in turn ; there 
 are some pomposities like " solemn, pro- 
 found, mighty," " colossal, severe, superb " ; 
 and there is the phrase " mesmeric lentor." 
 There are also a thousand tender, lovely, 
 or grim things described in such a way 
 60 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 that the reader feels himself to have been 
 all but naturalized. 
 
 In Out of the East, which followed in 
 1895, the disturbance of initiation had 
 ceased, and the first delight. There is very- 
 little description and less rhapsody. Hearn 
 thinks more and uses the note book less. 
 He is observing principles and tendencies, 
 beginning to generalize and compare. The 
 sub-title of the book is : " Reveries and 
 Studies in New Japan." The " beautiful 
 illusion " of Japan had faded out in five 
 years and he " had learned to see the Far 
 East without its glamour," ^2 but with no 
 loss of admiration. He had seen Japan 
 holding her own against the world in the 
 war with China, the enthusiasm of the 
 nation concentrated and silent ; and he 
 had come to the conclusion that the day of 
 Western influence was over. Whatever 
 " the limitations of personal individuality 
 among the Japanese," it is his belief that " as 
 a nation Japan possesses an individuality- 
 much stronger than our own." He tells 
 the story of the girl Yuko who offered up 
 her life that the sorrow of the Emperor 
 
 »2 0. 326. 
 
 61 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 might cease, on the occasion of the attack 
 on the Czarevitch. She cut her throat 
 after binding her girdle tightly above her 
 knees, because " the daughter of a Samurai 
 must be found in death with limbs decently 
 composed " ; and the Ministers whispered : 
 " All else will change ; but the heart of 
 the nation will not change." ^^ What he 
 calls " the vague but immeasurable emotion 
 of Shinto " has grasped him, and he 
 embodies it in the character of one of his 
 pupils departing for the war, who told him 
 of a military excursion in his last year at 
 school : " We marched to a shrine in the 
 district of lu, where the spirits of heroes 
 are worshipped. It is a beautiful lonesome 
 place, among hills ; and the temple is 
 shadowed by very high trees. It is always 
 dim and cool and silent there. We drew 
 up before the shrine in military order ; 
 nobody spoke. Then the bugle sounded 
 through the holy grove, like a call to 
 battle ; and we all presented arms ; and the 
 tears came to my eyes — I do not know 
 why." 34 . . . He concluded that only half- 
 education could tempt this people to 
 
 " 0. 341. "4 o. 298. 
 62 
 
 i 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 " servile imitation of Western ways." He 
 made some slips, as when he said that the 
 typical woman in Japanese romance never 
 appears as " a sentimental maiden, dying, 
 or making others die, for love " ; 35 ^ slip 
 which he corrected by several stories in 
 later books. But as a rule he spoke with 
 great accuracy and weight. He showed 
 that the religion, the morality, and the art 
 of the Japanese were " evolved out of 
 ancestral habits, customs, ethics, beliefs, 
 directly the opposite of our own in some 
 cases, and in all cases strangely different," 
 and not to be molested without damage to 
 one party or to both. He went farther, 
 and in the matter of art, for example, 
 expressed the opinion that the Japanese 
 art would, in an appreciative and un- 
 prejudiced mind, modify " almost every 
 pre-existing sentiment in relation to the 
 beautiful." After school hours he used to 
 go up into an old village cemetery and look 
 at the stone Buddha smiling " the smile 
 of one who has received an injury not to be 
 resented," 3* and the contrast between this 
 and the utilitarian modern college'^ below 
 " 0. 92. 3 6 Q^ 53^ 
 
 63 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 set up a dialogue in his mind between East 
 and West. Science speaks for the West 
 of the Cosmos, resolved into a nebula, 
 recondensing to form another swarm of 
 worlds on which reappears the same pea- 
 sant and his ox and plough as before. 
 Buddhism replies that this same peasant 
 in Japan knows and has long known what 
 the East has " mathematically discovered," 
 and has been taught something of his 
 " innumerable faiths, and of the apparition 
 and disparition of universes and of the 
 unity of life." 3' The West speaks of the per- 
 petual record of " the least of human 
 thoughts." The East knows more, and 
 the man has been taught " that the thoughts 
 and acts of each being projected beyond the 
 individual existence, shape other lives 
 unborn," and taught " to control his most 
 secret wishes, because of their immeasurable 
 inherent potentialities " ; and Hearn tells 
 a story of a dead woman who haunted a 
 place and was blamed, even by those who 
 pitied her, because " she should have 
 known that anger, secretly indulged, can 
 have ghostly consequences." ^s Having 
 
 »» O. 168. " 0. 176, 
 64 
 
 1 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 spoken of his own conclusion that " we 
 have no possible refuge but in ourselves," 
 he quotes the revelation of Buddha : "Be 
 ye lamps unto yourselves ; be ye a refuge 
 unto yourselves. . . . Look not for refuge 
 to any beside yourselves." ^^ 
 
 Kokoro belongs to 1896, and is of the 
 same substance as Out of the East. Shinto- 
 ism and the religious emotion which is one 
 with patriotism and family piety fasci- 
 nate him. He compares with the Western 
 man, insensible to the past, the Japanese 
 uttering the Shinto prayer : " Ye fore- 
 fathers of the generations, and of our fami- 
 lies, and of our kindred — ^unto you, the 
 founders of our houses, we utter the glad- 
 ness of our thanks." But it must be re- 
 membered that Hearn knew far more about 
 the domestic life of Japan than of England 
 or the United States. His comparisons 
 are sometimes rash and seldom necessary : 
 his fine expressions of Japanese ideals and 
 realities are effective without comparisons. 
 In " Japanese Civilization " he dwells upon 
 the lightness and mobility of Japanese life, 
 the impermanence of things, the lack of 
 3» o. 181. 
 
 65 E 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 encumbrances and of " egotistical indi- 
 vidualism." Shinto has taught the indi- 
 vidual to think of Emperor and country 
 before family and self : Buddhism, " to i 
 master regret, to endure pain, and to accept 
 as eternal law the vanishing of things loved 
 and the tyranny of things hated." ^^ He 
 tells how he saw by accident the relaxed 
 face of a male servant who had long seemed ; 
 happy : " Hard lines of pain and anger 
 appeared in it, making it some twenty years ; 
 older " ; but at a warning cough the man 
 was rejuvenated. It is no wonder that in 
 " A Glimpse of Tendencies " he declares that 
 the barriers between East and West " of ' 
 racial feeling, of emotional differentiation, 
 of language, of manners and beliefs, are 
 likely to remain unsurmountable for cen- 
 turies." Nevertheless, he imagines an 
 approaching of East and West, producing 
 a Western religion which should combine 
 synthetic philosophy and Buddhism, and 
 ** differing from Buddhism mainly in the 
 greater exactness of its conceptions " : ^ 
 and again : "A Buddhism strongly fortified 
 by Western science will meet the future needs 
 
 " K. 36. "i K. 244. 
 
 66 
 
 i 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 of the race." ^'^ He, at least, like Maeterlinck, 
 does not dread the disintegration of the 
 Ego after death on which Buddhism and 
 science insist : " Rather than an end to be 
 feared," he says, " the dissolution of self 
 is the one object of all objects to which 
 our efforts should be turned." He repeats 
 that " the soft serenity " and " passionless 
 tenderness " ^^ of the face of Ruddha might 
 yet give peace of soul to the West. The 
 Shinto idea that " the world of the living is 
 directly governed by the world of the 
 dead " ^^ was beginning to haunt him. 
 Spencer had helped him to it, as may be 
 seen in "From a Travelling Diary,"*^ where 
 he quotes from Spencer that first love is 
 " absolutely antecedent to all relative ex- 
 perience." It was to become a literary 
 obsession to Hearn, if not what it was to 
 the Japanese with whom " the constant 
 presence of the dead has been a matter of 
 conviction for thousands of years/' This 
 book is not all philosophical, though it is 
 more so than Out of the East. Even the 
 stories in it are directly useful as illustra- 
 
 « K. 193, 
 «" K, 221. ** K, 268. « K. 59, 
 
 67 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 tions of Japanese ideas. Such is the story 
 of a boy of seven who saved his father from i 
 a tyrant by showing a severed head which i 
 he pretended to be his father's, and after : 
 saluting it reverently, cut out his own i 
 bowels in grief to make the deception com- 
 plete. There is no longer much question 
 of style. He writes with lucidity, preci- 
 sion and flow, now and then returning to ; 
 his old ways and writing : " These things i 
 make appeal extraordinary to emotional I 
 life," or " there is a cavernous world tre- 
 mendous,^^ *^ or " a limpid magnificence of (; 
 light indescribable.^^ These were temporary! 
 indulgences of a sober man who was too ; 
 busy to try to write better than he was born i 
 to do. This mature style was not one:i 
 which he would have been proud of tenii 
 years before, for it owed much of its indi- 
 viduality to these occasional slips ; but it 
 was sufficient and without pretension. 
 
 Gleanings from Buddha Fields, published 
 in 1897 but ^vritten before he came to 
 Tokyo, is continued from its two prede- 
 cessors. He returns in " Nirvana " to his ^ 
 opinion that because Buddhism in many»| 
 
 " K. 16 n, 
 68 
 
LAFCADiO HEARN 
 
 ways appeals to Western reason it offers us 
 " larger religious possibilities — the sugges- 
 tions of a universal scientific creed nobler 
 than any which has ever existed," ^7 Light,he 
 says, is " offered from the East." In " Notes 
 of a Trip to Kyoto," however, he finds 
 one source of " the contentment and simple 
 happiness of Japanese common life " in 
 the cheapness of pleasure, " creating 
 the beautiful out of nothing," ^ really 
 enjoying landscapes and the sight of ani- 
 mals, insects, and flowers : in the essay 
 " In Osaka " he finds another reason for it 
 in the Japanese " birthright " of taste. 
 His chief business is still with description 
 and exposition of what he has learnt about 
 Japanese life, art, and religion, in essays on 
 the city of Osaka, on " Buddhist Allusions in 
 Japanese Folk-song," and so on. Except in 
 language he is often hardly English at all, 
 so transparent a medium does he make 
 of himself for the visible and invisible 
 Japanese world. It is true that to the end 
 he could not read a Japanese newspaper 
 and could only just write a letter home,** 
 but as Professor Chamberlain says : " Laf' 
 
 *' B. F. 265. " B. F. 60. " B. II. 486, 
 69 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 cadio Hearn understands contemporary 
 Japan better and makes us understand it 
 better, than any other writer, because he 
 loves it better " ; so and Mr. Noguchi states 
 that in all his books there is not one mis- 
 spelling of a Japanese word. ^^ He is most 
 individual when he submits to his favourite 
 obsession, that of the infinite ancestry of 
 every soul and every act. In " Dust " 
 it is the inspiration of a thin rapture of the 
 intellect. " We are," he says, " each and 
 all, infinite compounds of fragments of 
 anterior lives." ^2 His mind is not " a king- 
 dom " but " a fantastical republic, daily 
 troubled by more revolutions than ever 
 occurred in South America," and he ex- 
 claims : " I, an individual ; an individual 
 soul ! Nay, I am a population — a popula- 
 tion unthinkable for multitude, even by 
 groups of a thousand millions ! Genera- 
 tions of generations I am, seons of aeons ! 
 Countless times the concourse now making 
 me has been scattered, and mixed with 
 other scatterings. Of what concern, then, 
 the next disintegration ? Perhaps, after 
 trillions of ages of burning in different 
 
 «« T. J. 65. 5' N. V. " B. F. 92. 
 
 70 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 dynasties, the very best of me may come 
 together again." 
 
 Whether this idea preyed upon him, or 
 whether it was simply his dishke of a great 
 modern city, he was not at ease writing in 
 Tokyo in 1897. He complained that he 
 got " no thrill, no frisson, no sensation," 
 that " the Holy Ghost had departed " 
 from him : or perhaps, he says, " the 
 power to feel thrill dies with the approach 
 of a man's fiftieth year." He felt his work 
 to be poor, though it had improved by 
 re-writing. He was referring to the " Retro- 
 spectives " in Exotics and Retrospectives 
 of 1898. He had got back to himself again, 
 after the long period when the novelty, the 
 charm, and the abundance in Japanese life 
 had taken him out of himself and supported 
 him. His work is now more and more a 
 collection of short sketches, reflections, 
 and stories, quite distinct from one another, 
 not only in Exotics and Retrospectives, but 
 in the successive books, Ghostly Japan 
 (1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese 
 Miscellany (1901), Kotto (1902), Kwaidan 
 (1904), and the posthumous Milky Way 
 (1905). The stories increase in number ; 
 71 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 Kwaidan contains little else. When he 
 writes anything beyond the length of a very 
 short essay or story it is a string of notes 
 and quotations like " Japanese Buddhist 
 Proverbs " in Ghostly Japan, " Japanese 
 Female Names " in Shadowings, " Songs of 
 Japanese Children " in the Miscellany. 
 For many of these he had the valuable help 
 of his pupil, Mr Otani, as collector. It is 
 to be noticed that of all the books published 
 between 1898 and 1904, only three chapters 
 had already appeared in American maga- 
 zines, which had hitherto printed a con- 
 siderable portion of Hearn's essays. As 
 early as 1893 he had said that an inspiration 
 or strong emotion was impossible in Japan : 
 that all his work had to be forced. In 1895 
 he added that writing was the only antidote 
 to " vexation and anger and imaginings 
 and recollections of unpleasant things said 
 or done." He describes how he wrote every- 
 thing at first " hurriedly without care," ^3 
 and then re-wrote four or five times, letting 
 the thought " define and crystallize it- 
 self." The concluding paragraphs of his 
 chapter on dragonflies in Kotto was re- 
 
 " B. III. 42. 
 
 72 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 written seventeen times. He looked back 
 at his early florid writing with shame, and 
 found himself " forced to study simpli- 
 city," 54 though at first he was alarmed at 
 the " lack of colour " in his Japanese 
 writing ; he was forty-three but felt his 
 style " not yet fixed — ^too artificial." This 
 self-criticism is just, though it may be 
 doubted whether it helped or hindered 
 him ; for his writing often suggests that 
 little good save neatness was gained by his 
 labours. But the instinct, or the old habit 
 of his Gautier period, was very strong, and 
 he could not help " polishing up " ^^ passages 
 in his letters. That he had a disturbing 
 consciousness of the character of words 
 would be clear from one sentence in a letter 
 of 1892, speaking of architecture : " Gothic 
 is soul — or better Spirit, using the sharp- 
 angled flame word." He had long kept 
 note books for " every sensation or idea," 
 every " new and strong impression," and 
 classified them. Yet he knew well that 
 " our best work is out of the unconscious." 
 For some writers the unconscious is strong 
 and full in the first and only form of a book 
 
 " B. III. 62. ^' B. III. 291. 
 
 73 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 or chapter ; for others, doubtless, only in 
 the third or tenth revision. There is, 
 however, a danger to those who are over- 
 much impressed by Flaubert's sweating and 
 grunting at literature, that they may think 
 the seventeenth revision in any case better 
 than the sixteenth. It is certain that 
 much of Hearn's elaboration ended in 
 rhetoric which leaves us cold and even with- 
 out admiration. Such is the " Revery " 
 in Kotto. In these later essays he is less 
 mastered by his subjects and has leisure to 
 elaborate very small things. He had time 
 to use words like " pulchritude," and to 
 speak of " the enormity of day " in igno- 
 rance or rash carelessness of the customary 
 meaning of the word " enormity " ; ^^ he still 
 thought Pierre Loti " the world's greatest 
 prose writer." s' In " Incense " he re- 
 turned to his love of precious catalogues. 
 These are little things, but the important 
 point is that the essays and reveries in 
 which they occur, like " Azure Psychology," 
 " Parfum de Jeunesse," " Nightmare 
 Touch," leave us unmoved and therefore 
 free to observe trifles which would be lost 
 
 66 E. and R. 234. " S. 88. 
 
 74 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 in the sweep of a powerful thought or emo- 
 tion. In " Vespertina Cognitio," e.g., there 
 is nothing to bhnd us to the absurdity of 
 " The stealthy step approached, — but 
 with lentor malevolently measured.'''' Is it 
 possible that a word like " lentor " could 
 haunt a man who was born to write well ? 
 The writing has the appearance of being a 
 quite conscious decoration of a subject of 
 which the writer has exaggerated the im- 
 portance to himself. Even the thought of 
 the past living in the present, though it 
 may have genuinely haunted Hearn, is 
 introduced time after time with ineffectual 
 monotony, as at the conclusion of " Fire- 
 flies " in Kotto. It is less a haunting idea 
 than a trick, and it has perhaps become so 
 through being used too deliberately. The 
 childish reminiscences are injured in the 
 same way. The desire to impress is too 
 obvious for the reader to feel the power. 
 
 From the " Retrospectives " in these 
 volumes it is a pleasure to turn to the 
 stories and to the essays of pure informa- 
 tion. Some of the stories he calls " only 
 curios," and they are told definitely to 
 " illustrate some strange beliefs." If he 
 75 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 only fulfilled this purpose they must live 
 long. But he does very much more. He 
 gives us a large number of stories, weird, 
 romantic, heroic, and horrible, all of 
 them with the fascination of strangeness 
 and yet made perfectly intelligible to Eng- 
 lish readers. Some are from books, some 
 from oral sources. It will be long before 
 we know how much of them Hearn contri- 
 buted. To some he may have added little 
 or nothing. His great achievement is 
 harmony of tone ; his additions are not 
 noticeable. To a stranger they seem per- 
 fectly Japanese, though this may only be a 
 way of saying that they are pure Lafcadio 
 Hearn. They read like the most delicate 
 and modest of translations, whether he is 
 translating or not. Thus " Of a Promise 
 Kept," in the Miscellany, seems a good 
 translation of a perfect story, which illus- 
 trates Japanese belief and character in a 
 vivid way. One brother going a long jour- 
 ney promises to be back by a certain day 
 when " the chrysanthemums will be in 
 bloom and we can go together to look at 
 them." When that day arrived, they pre- 
 pared a feast. As the evening grew and 
 76 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 the traveller had not returned, the mother 
 went to bed. The brother kept a look out 
 but was about to re-enter the house for 
 the last time when he saw a tall man — yes ! 
 his brother, Akana. He came in and sat 
 down, but touched neither food nor wine. 
 He explained his lateness. He had been 
 kept back forcibly by a cousin at the com- 
 mand of a tyrannical lord. He had hoped 
 to escape from the castle in time, but 
 " until to-day " he could not find a way. 
 His brother was incredulous, for it was two 
 hundred and fifty miles away. " Yes," 
 he answered, but a soul can go a thousand 
 leagues a day, and he had been allowed to 
 keep his sword. " Thus only was I able to 
 come to you. ... Be good to our mother." 
 Then he disappeared. The brother went 
 to the castle and killed the treacherous 
 cousin in the midst of his family, and es- 
 caped alive because the lord admired the 
 friendship and courage of the two men. 
 The " curios " of Kotto, the " Stories from 
 Strange Books " in Shadowings, the tales 
 scattered through Ghostly Japan and almost 
 filling Kwaidan, certainly make up one of 
 the greatest treasures ever found by a 
 77 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 translator in an utterly foreign land. Their 
 beauty, their splendour, tenderness or 
 horror is not to be denied, whether readers 
 care much or nothing for Japan. Most are 
 told without any interruption from the 
 translator, and exist by themselves, with 
 just that slight something absent which 
 suggests the translation from a remote 
 language. A few, like the " Story of 
 Divination," in Ghostly Japan, are intro- 
 duced by Hearn in person. This story, 
 e.g., was taken from an old fortune-teller 
 whom he knew — a man with " a love of 
 independence as savage as a gypsy's " who 
 would never stay more than two days at a 
 time with Hearn. The story is of a famous 
 fortune-teller living in a mountain hut 
 with a tile for a pillow. One day a rat 
 wakened him and he flung the tile at it and 
 broke it. As he was reproaching himself 
 he saw writing exposed by the fracture in 
 the tile, saying : "In the year of the Hare 
 in the fourth month, on the seventeenth 
 day, at the Hour of the Serpent, this tile, 
 after serving as a pillow, will be thrown at 
 a rat and broken." He discovered the seal 
 and name of the maker, and seeking him 
 78 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 out learnt that an old fortune-teller had 
 written the characters in the clay. He 
 went in search of this man but arrived to 
 hear that he was just dead. The visitor 
 was, however, not unexpected, and at that 
 very hour. A book had been left for him 
 and in it he read about a treasure hidden 
 near his own hut. He found it and became 
 a very wealthy man. As to Hearn's old 
 friend, he was found dead in the snow, 
 standing erect at the foot of a pine upon the 
 mountains ; and Hearn remembered the 
 Japanese saying : " The fortune-teller 
 knows not his own fate." ^^ The style of 
 these stories, translations or not, is never, 
 or practically never, disfigured by signs of 
 uninspired labour like the essays : in them 
 he has learnt to sacrifice the part to the 
 whole. It is a plain, lucid, unnoticeable 
 style, a little stiff and lacking in movement 
 and natural continuity, but for the most 
 part leaving the reader free to listen to 
 speeches and watch events. 
 
 The informing essays are almost equally 
 good of their kind, though they make room 
 occasionally for phrases like that in the 
 
 " Q. J. 49. 
 79 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 description of a street of shops, " full 
 of toys indescribable — dainty puerilities, 
 fragile astonishments, laughter - making 
 oddities." ^^ He is a little stiff in his manner, 
 saying, for example : " Before speaking 
 further of the poetical literature of semi, I 
 must attempt a few remarks about the 
 s6mi themselves." ^° The Miscellany is full 
 of interesting and often charming things, 
 as in the " Songs of Japanese Children," 
 songs relating to weather and sky and ani- 
 mals, play songs, narratives, and lullabies : 
 or as in the " Dragonflies," where he gives 
 many examples of tiny poems suggested by 
 dragonflies, such as that famous one : 
 " Catching dragonflies — I wonder where 
 he has gone to-day " (the words uttered by 
 a mother thinking of a dead child who 
 used to play at catching dragonflies). 
 It is the custom to write poems for a con- 
 solation in trouble, and in Kotto Hearn 
 quotes several by a simple woman of the 
 people, as they occur in a diary of her 
 married life which he is translating. These 
 essays of information, with their notes, 
 touch so many different matters in so many 
 »• E. and R. 40. "o S. 78. 
 80 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 different ways that a knowledge of them 
 would mean a deep knowledge of Japan. 
 The " Japanese Buddhist Proverbs," e.g., 
 are richer in suggestion than some of 
 Hearn's rhapsodical meditations in achieve- 
 ment ; and this is a comparison which can 
 fairly be made, say in the case of the 
 proverb : " Even the touching of sleeves 
 in passing is caused by some relation in a 
 future life." *^ After some of these pro- 
 verbs it is not easy to enjoy his rapture 
 upon the belief that " all being is One. 
 One I felt myself to be with the thrilling 
 of breeze and the racing of wave — ^with 
 every flutter of shadow and flicker of sun — 
 with the azure of sky and sea — ^with the 
 great green bush of the land " ; 62 Q^e with 
 the fire, for he asks : " Have you never, 
 when looking at some great burning, found 
 yourself exulting with remorse in the 
 triumph and glory of fire." ^^ . . . " Beside 
 the Sea " in the Miscellany shows us that 
 in spite of his rapture about the One he 
 could still be very tender over " the poor 
 dead " and could not convince himself 
 " that even the grosser substance of van- 
 
 81 Q. J. 191. «2 Kot. 182. «» E. and R. 180. 
 81 F 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 ished being ever completely dies, however 
 dissolved or scattered — ^fleeting in the gale 
 — floating in the mists," etc. 
 
 In 1903 he was writing a series of chap- 
 ters on Japan " from the standpoint of 
 ancestor- worship." At first he thought to 
 use them as lectures in the United States, 
 but in 1904 they were published under the 
 title of " Japan : an attempt at inter- 
 pretation." He was afraid of the " real 
 sociologist's " opinion ; thinking that he 
 ought to stick to " birds and cats, insects 
 and flowers, and queer small things " ; and 
 certainly it needed a superhuman effort for 
 a man who saw the multitudes of little 
 things from close at hand, to try to see the 
 proportioned whole. Fortunately the book 
 is substantial enough not to depend entirely 
 upon breadth of view. For he put into it 
 the main results of his reading of Japanese 
 life and books, and made it probably the 
 best single book, not a work of reference, 
 upon Japan. He begins by recognizing 
 the charm of a land where " every relation 
 appears to be governed by altruism, every 
 action directed by duty, and every object 
 shaped by art," where " for no little time 
 82 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 these fairy folk can give you all the soft 
 bliss of sleep." ^* His business is with the 
 nation which has " entered into the world's 
 political struggle " ; but in " The Higher 
 Buddhism " he again points out that " some 
 Buddhist ideas offer the most startling 
 analogy with the evolutional ideas of our 
 own time," and also that there is no scien- 
 tific counterpart to the belief that thoughts 
 and deeds affect not only the next rebirth 
 but " the nature of worlds yet unevolved, 
 wherein, after innumerable cycles, you 
 may have to live again." He makes also 
 the personal statement that Spencer helped 
 him to see in Buddhist philosophy more 
 than a romantic interest.^s jje is, however, 
 more often concerned with Shinto. He 
 shows us the development of the well-con- 
 ducted family where the daily life " repre- 
 sents religion in the best and purest sense," 
 united under the blessed shadow of an- 
 cestors, " the makers and teachers of the 
 present." He suggests that three thou- 
 sand years ago life in a Greek city was 
 severe and cheerful, much like this Japanese 
 life. And the family piety extends and 
 
 «* J, 18. «6 J. 232. 
 83 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 by a natural process becomes " the loyalty 
 that prays for seven successive lives to lay 
 down on behalf of the sovereign." ^^ In 
 obedience to an imperial order the nation 
 offered itself up to a reconstruction which 
 has made it within thirty years formidable 
 among " modern civilized powers." This 
 power she owed to " the moral habit de- 
 rived from her ancient cult — ^the religion 
 of the ancestors " ^' — a religion which was 
 inseparable from government and tradi- 
 tional ideas. He forecasted that Russia 
 would have to fear this power more than 
 repeating rifles :^^ he also expressed a fear 
 lest success in a struggle with Russia 
 should give Japan confidence to allow ■; 
 right of land tenm'e to foreigners, by means 
 of which foreign capital, he thought, must! 
 triumph, and the country be lost. " Be- 
 hind her military capacity," he explains, 
 " is the disciplined experience of a thousand 
 years ; behind her industrial and com- 
 mercial power, the experience of half a cen- 
 tury." «' This, however, is a purely scientific 
 argument and may well be overthrown by 
 the greater subtlety of facts. He shows at . 
 
 ^^ J. 58. «' J. 412. «« J. 507. «» J. 510. I 
 84 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 what a cost — to Western eyes — this dis- 
 cipHned power has been achieved. For 
 example, a man's house is not " his castle," 
 for to close it would be to insult the com- 
 munity. There is no privacy, and " the 
 slightest divergence from rule," '" is frowned 
 on. But on the other hand the community 
 has a voice in more than daily conduct. 
 For example, the principal of a college 
 " holds his office only on the condition that 
 his rule gives satisfaction to a majority of 
 the students." 'i When Hearn was dis- 
 missed from the University there was an 
 attempted agitation among the students to 
 reinstate him. The same force forbids 
 competition. Even the swift jinrikisha- 
 man may not pass the weak and slow, or if 
 he dares to, the angry appeal to him may be 
 translated, says Hearn : " This is a hard 
 calling ; and our lives would be made 
 harder than they are, if there were no rules 
 to prevent selfish competition." '^ But 
 while admiring this, Hearn sees an impass- 
 able gulf between it and the European 
 civilization with " unlimited individual 
 right " to starve or purchase a peerage. 
 
 '« J. 112. " J. 437. " J. 440. 
 85 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 Hearn saw the horrors of this free society, 
 but dreaded Socialism, which he called a 
 " reversion toward the primitive conditions 
 of human society." '^ He foresaw centuries 
 of effort needed to burst '* the fetters which 
 Socialism now seeks to impose on human 
 society." ^* He foresaw " a democracy 
 more brutal than any Spartan oligarchy " ; '^ 
 within twenty years (of 1904) a man would 
 only write what he was told : '* and this he 
 confused with Socialism. As for Japan he 
 held it to be obvious that " any society 
 where ethical traditions forbid the indi- 
 vidual to profit at the cost of his fellow* 
 men will be placed at an enormous dis- 
 advantage when faced with the industrial 
 struggle for existence against communities 
 whose self-government permits of the widest 
 possible freedom, and the widest range of 
 competitive enterprise." ''' In this he is 
 supported by a letter from Spencer (quoted 
 in an appendix) offering to a Japanese 
 statesman the advice to keep Americans 
 and Europeans " as much as possible at 
 arm's length," to forbid, for example, the 
 
 " J. 279. '* B. II. 184. 
 
 " B. II. 205. •« B. II. 512. " J. 279. 
 
 86 
 
Si 
 
 r 
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 intermarriage of foreigners and Japanese, 
 and this on the ground that " the result is 
 inevitably a bad one in the long run." 
 Hearn follows with a concluding comment 
 saying that " in another generation Japan 
 will be able, without peril, to abandon much 
 of her conservatism ; but, for the time 
 being, her conservatism is her salvation." '^ 
 He just lived to see the sure promise of her 
 triumph over Russia, and to record in one 
 of his last essays " the joyous tone of public 
 confidence " — " the playful confidence " — 
 " the admirably restrained pride of the 
 nation in its victories." '^^ He died on 
 September 28, 1904. The " Interpreta- 
 tion " can only be judged by sociologists 
 and by the greatest of them, Time. It 
 was an extraordinary effort — ^Mrs. Hearn 
 tells us of his long struggles — to express 
 what one man could not possibly grasp, 
 especially one who knew, as he said himself, 
 enough about Japan to know that he laiew 
 nothing. He did violence to himself by 
 the asceticism of subduing for the purpose 
 of this book a great part of himself and of 
 what he had taken to be himself. The 
 
 '» J. 534. '9 M. W. 183. 
 
 87 
 
tAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 most he allows himself is a catalogue now 
 and then and a brief picture of a dance or 
 of a scene from the wOd Old coast — " the 
 naked figure of a young fisherman erect 
 at the prow of his boat, clapping his hands 
 in salutation to the rising sun, whose 
 ruddy glow transformed him into a statue of 
 bronze." ^° There is perhaps not a single 
 example in the book of his characteristic 
 bad writing, though in The Milky' Way 
 he showed himself still capable of using 
 " facile " simply as a synonym for " easy." 
 But the book is more than the marvellous 
 tour de force of a writer about " cats and 
 birds and little things." His other books 
 give scattered impressions, this an abstract 
 of them arranged and extended under the 
 guidance of a scientific spirit ; and it is hard 
 to imagine a better book which is neither 
 a cyclopaedia nor a traveller's bird's-eye 
 view. Hearn knew too much and was too 
 sober for the bird's-eye view and was un- 
 prepared to immolate himself in a cyclo- 
 paedia ; but his compromise, taken with 
 the stories, the studies, the impressions, 
 and the articles of pure information, pre- 
 
 80 J. 152. 
 88 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 sents a marvellously detailed picture which 
 is yet always and everywhere alive. The 
 personality of the writer is in his best work 
 shown by his abnegation of personality, 
 though this was probably due to no con- 
 scious effort : the effort was needed rather 
 to obtrude it. We can perhaps never be 
 sure whether he really had reconciled in his 
 heart, as a French critic has said, the science 
 of the West and the religion of the East ; 
 but his books set them side by side or 
 inextricably mingled in a manner both 
 useful and attractive. No one has done 
 more to " remind Europe of the importance 
 of Eastern civilization." Professor Cham- 
 berlain testified to the " scientific accuracy 
 of detail " and the " tender and exquisite 
 brilliancy of style," in these pictures of 
 " Japanese life, manners, thoughts, aspira- 
 tions, the student-class, the singing girls, 
 the politicians . . . not men only but 
 ghosts and folk-lore fancies, the scenery of 
 remote islands which Hearn alone among 
 Europeans has ever trod," ^^ everything in 
 fact, except " the humorous side of native 
 life " : to expect humour from so solitary 
 
 " T. J. 65. 
 
 89 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 and pitiful a man would be unreasonable. 
 Mr. Yone Noguchi says that the Japanese 
 were " regenerated by his sudden magic, 
 and baptized afresh under his transcen- 
 dental rapture ; in fact, the old romances 
 which we had forgotten ages ago were 
 brought again to quiver in the ear, and the 
 ancient beauty which we buried under the 
 dust rose again with a strange yet new splen- 
 dour ; " 82 an(j ijg foresees that Hearn's 
 books will be an inspiration in Japanese 
 literature. He became, says Mr. Noguchi, 
 a Japanese writer, and I sometimes feel 
 that with Japanese writers he should be 
 compared. The material in which he 
 worked is still so foreign to most of us that 
 it is not easy to say how much is his in the 
 stories, for example, which are his finest 
 work. I have said that they are like 
 choice translations. He has been accused 
 of submitting himself in a passiveness more 
 pure than wise to Japanese influence ; 
 but the blind minnow cannot assume the 
 colour of its environment. Personality of 
 the vivid militant kind is just now wor- 
 shipped, and the silver grey is hidden 
 
 " N. 17. 
 90 
 
LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 from us. Some day it may be discovered 
 that what we think is Japanese in his 
 work is really Hearn, shorn of his French 
 romanticism. Certainly he has either im- 
 posed on us a personal impression of 
 Japanese things not the less deep for its 
 delicacy, or he has made himself a mirror 
 in a manner unapproached by other 
 observers of foreign countries. To impute 
 observation to his maturest work is an 
 insult ; he had become the thing observed : 
 he was a Japanese writer " in perfect accord 
 with the sweet glamour of Old Japan," ^^ 
 to use again the words of Mr. Noguchi, 
 whose fine Japanese mind has not been 
 clouded by the acquisition of a beautiful 
 English style. 
 
 " N. 5. 
 
 Biilier & Tanner, Frome anJ Loudon. 
 
WORKS BY 
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN. 
 
 The Romance of the Milky Way and other Studies 
 
 and Stories. Crown 8vo., 5s. net. 
 
 " The book is full of "prettiness . . . not a page is without its charm 
 and beauty." — Athenaeum. 
 
 Letters from the Raven. The Correspondence of 
 
 Lafcadio Heam with Henry Watkin. Edited with an intro- 
 duction by Milton Bronner. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, 
 5s. net. 
 
 " The book is a pleasant one, attractively commemorative of a highly 
 gifted writer." — Globe. 
 
 " These Letters are rich in sidelights on Eastern civilization. . . . 
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 Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. Edited by Eliza- 
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 " A whoUy delightful book put together just as such a book should 
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 The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. Edited by 
 
 Elizabeth Bisland. Illustrated. Demy 8vo, 12s. net. 
 
 This collection of the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn contains the 
 fullest expression of his temperament, his views on life, methods of 
 work, etc. The volume is fully illustrated, in part from Heam's own 
 sketches of Japanese scenes, and uniform with the " Life and Letters 
 of Lafcadio Heam." 
 
 " The book is a rare feast for readers who are fond of a good letter 
 writer.' ' — Scotsman. 
 
 " The charm and fancy and humour which illumine these admirable 
 letters. Everywhere are fascinating glimpses such as no one else has 
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 becoming merely a great power like the rest of us." — Observer. 
 
 London : CONSTABLE & COMPANY, Ltd. 
 
 91 
 
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