LAFCADIO HEARN.*
THERE are numerous instances of men who have exchanged one civilisation for another, but few have told the result. Still fewer have maintained in all the excitement of change a keenly critical mind, and have regarded their new life with eyes undimmed by the fervour of a convert. Lafcadio Hearn has come nearer than any other Occidental to understanding the heart of Japan. He went to the country at its crucial moment, when the new spirit was in its birth-throes, and he lived to see his adopted land take its place among the chief Powers of the world. He did the thing very thoroughly, for he became naturalised, took a. Japanese wife and a Japanese name, and lived exactly like his neighbours. Moreover, he seemed well fitted by nature to understand the Japanese character. He was utterly out of sympathy with the com- plexity, and what seemed to him the shallowness, of American life, and lie longed for clear air and sunshine and quiet. The book is the record ef a great experiment, honestly and boldly carried out, and, at the same time, of a great failure. Hearn, as he said, learned only .enough of Japan to know that he knew nothing. The why and wherefore of this failure may be like a proof by negations in logic, and give us some glimpse of the people by whom Hearn was so attracted and perplexed.
He bad Southern blood in him, for he was born in the Ionian Islands, the son of an Irish Surgeon-Major and a Greek mother. Left an orphan very young, he was brought up by a Roman Catholic aunt in Wales, and his childhood was clouded with the gloom of a fanatical household. His aunt died, and he was left without a penny to fight his way in a world of which he knew nothing. The horror of his early manhood was deeper than anything endured by Poe. For a time he was in the alums of London, then he drifted to the slums of New York, and presently we find him an obscure reporter on a Cincinnati paper. Delicate and half blind as he was, he had managed.to educate himself, and to acquire an English style. For a little he was strongly under the influence of French literature. "In the small hours of the morning," writes a friend, quoted by Miss Bisland, "into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of columns he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating from Gautier." In time he migrated to New Orleans, where he was happier, for he had the tropics in his blood, and be was always homesick for sun and colour. He began to make some reputation as a writer of mellifluous and picturesque prose, and forsook his French stylists for Bodo- logical speculations based on Herbert Spencer,—nn author whom be worshipped to the end, and interpreted in a fashion which would have greatly surprised that staid philosopher. Then came an offer from a firm of publishers to go to Japan to write a book; and Hearn went and never returned. He was the right man, and he had arrived at the right hour,— when the fourteenth century was turning swiftly into the twentieth. He could reach out bands to the old Japan, and yet appreciate all that the new Japan was doing. Ile saw the extraordinary interest of the crisis, and because he alone of Western observers presided at that wonderful rebirth he has secured a kind of immortality in his art. But be saw early in his stay there that the Japanese civilisation could not wholly satisfy him. There was too much of the Latin in his blood. So he writes
Pretty to talk of my 'pen of fire.' I've lost it. Well, the fact is, it is of no use here. It is all soft, dreamy, quiet, pale, faint, gentle, hazy, vapoury, visionary,—a land where lotus is a common article of diet,—and where there is scarcely any real summer. Even the seasons are feeble, ghostly things. Don't please imagine there are any tropics here. Alt! the tropics—they still pull at my heart-strings. • Goodness.! my real field was there —in the.Latin countries, in the West Indies and Spanish America; my dream was to haunt the old crumbling Portuguese and Spanish cities, and steam up 'the Amazon and the Orinoco, and get romance no one else,could find." Japan exacted a penalty for this divided homage by remain.' ing mysterious. At first he seemed to have found the fairy world of his dreams. "The sense of existence here is like Ti, Dife and Letters of lofirtcho Morn By Ilizaboth Distend. 2 tols. London', A. Constable and Co. L2se. nesi that of escaping from an almost unbearable atmospheric pressure into a rarefied, highly oxygenated medium." But soon the regrets came. "Never a fine inspiration, a deep emotion, a profound joy, or a profound pain." It was all a world of half-tones, of pale skies and gentle colours, of soft Voices and courteous manners ; but there was iron behind it :— "In the house of any rich family the guest is likely to be shown
some of the heirlooms A pretty little box, perhaps, will be set before you. Opening it you will see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with a silk running-cord decked with tiny tassels. Very soft and choice the silk is, and elaborately figured. What marvel can be hidden under such a covering? You open the bag, and see within another bag, of a different quality of silk, but very line. Open that, and lo ! a third, which contains a fourth, which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth, which contains a seventh bag, which contains the strangest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay that you ever beheld."
This was to Hearn an allegory of the Japanese character. He admired it, wondered at it, but after the first enthusiasm did not love it. "He realised," says his biographer, that " Japan, with its gentleness and altruism, had attained to its noble ideal of duty by tremendous coercion of the will of the individual by the will of the rest, with a resultant absence of personal freedom that was to the individualism of the Westerner as strangling as the stern Socialism of bees and ants." He does homage again and again to this race-spirit, prophesies its conquest of all things, exalts it above Western ideals ; but be is too much the pupil of Herbert Spencer to be quite at home with it. He feels that he has no part in the Japanese heritage. The Japanese child is close to him, but the more the child's mind is cultivated the further he draws apart. His own children were partly of a blood which contained secrets for ever hid from him, and his last fragment called "Illusion." which Miss Bisland prints, is the heart-cry of the eternal alien.
There have been few better letter-writers, and we would not miss one of the pages in the delightful second volume. He kept up a full correspondence with his scholars, and showed an admirable common-sense and tenderness in dealing With the troubles of youth. We commend especially one letter in which he—no Christian—gives an account of Christianity to meet the difficulties of a young Japanese who had been repelled by the doings of some of its professors. In spite of ill-health, poverty, and the most nervous thinness of skin, he had much happiness, and in all his letters there is the gentle fortitude and the unconquerable optimism of the dreamer. These letters are full of acute reflections and many wonderful pieces of description in that simple and exquisite prose of his, of which the cadences are so haunting and the struature so perfect. But most attractive is the revelation of the author himself, who passes through many phases from the early days when he worshipped Gautier and Loti. From being a perfervid devotee of the coloured side of things be passed, under the influence of his adopted land, to an austere simplicity of life and thought, and we leave him peering courageously and hopefully into the dark with something of tbe Siimurai spirit. No weakling would have dared thus to write his own epitaph :— My dear friend, the first necessity for success in life is to be a good animal. As an animal you don't work well at all. Furthermore, you are out of harmony mentally and morally with the life of society ; you represent broken-down tissue. There is some good in the ghostly part of you, but it would never have been developed under comfortable circumstances. Hard knocks and intellectual starvation have brought your miserable little animula into some sort of shape. It will never have full oppor- tunity to express itself, doubtless ; but perhaps that is better. It might otherwise make too many mistakes ; and it has not sufficient original force to more the sea of human mind to any storm of aspiration. Perhaps in some future state —."
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