Lafcadio Hearn, known to Nippon as Yakumo Koizumi, was born in
Leucadia in the Ionian Islands, June 27, 1850. His father was an Irish
surgeon in the British Army; his mother was a Greek. Both parents died
while Hearn was still a child, and he was adopted by a great-aunt,
and educated for the priesthood. To this training he owed his
Latin scholarship and, doubtless, something of the subtlety of
his intelligence. He soon found, however, that the prospect of an
ecclesiastical career was alien from his inquiring mind and vivid
temperament, and at the age of nineteen he came to America to seek
his fortune. After working for a time as a proof-reader, he obtained
employment as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati. Soon he rose to
be an editorial writer, and went in the course of a few years to New
Orleans to join the editorial staff of the "Times-Democrat." Here he
lived until 1887, writing odd fantasies and arabesques for his paper,
contributing articles and sketches to the magazines, and publishing
several curious little books, among them his "Stray Leaves from
Strange Literature," and his translations from Gautier. In the winter
of 1887 he began his pilgrimages to exotic countries, being, as
he wrote to a friend, "a small literary bee in search of inspiring
honey." After a couple of years, spent chiefly in the French West
Indies, with periods of literary work in New York, he went in 1890
to Japan to prepare a series of articles for a magazine. Here through
some deep affinity of mood with the marvelous people of that country
he seems suddenly to have felt himself at last at home. He married a
Japanese woman; he acquired Japanese citizenship in order to preserve
the succession of his property to his family there; he became a
lecturer in the Imperial University at T[=o]ky[=o]; and in a series
of remarkable books he made himself the interpreter to the Western
World of the very spirit of Japanese life and art. He died there of
paralysis of the heart on the 26th of September, 1904.
* * * * *
With the exception of a body of familiar letters now in process of
collection, the present volume contains all of Hearn's writing that
he left uncollected in the magazines or in manuscript of a sufficient
ripeness for publication. It is worth noting, however, that perfect as
is the writing of "Ultimate Questions," and complete as the essay is
in itself, the author regarded it as unfinished, and, had he lived,
would have revised and amplified some portions of it.
But if this volume lacks the incomparably exquisite touch of its
author in its arrangement and revision, it does, nevertheless, present
him in all of his most characteristic veins, and it is in respect both
to style and to substance perhaps the most mature and significant of
his works.
In his first days as a writer Hearn had conceived an ideal of his art
as specific as it was ambitious. Early in the eighties he wrote from
New Orleans in an unpublished letter to the Rev. Wayland D. Ball
of Washington: "The lovers of antique loveliness are proving to me
the future possibilities of a long cherished dream,--the English
realization of a Latin style, modeled upon foreign masters, and
rendered even more forcible by that element of _strength_ which
is the characteristic of Northern tongues. This no man can hope
to accomplish, but even a translator may carry his stones to the
master-masons of a new architecture of language." In the realization
of his ideal Hearn took unremitting pains. He gave a minute and
analytical study to the writings of such masters of style as Flaubert
and Gautier, and he chose his miscellaneous reading with a peculiar
care. He wrote again to the same friend: "I never read a book which
does not powerfully impress the imagination; but whatever contains
novel, curious, potent imagery I always read, no matter what
the subject. When the soil of fancy is really well enriched
with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow
spontaneously." Finally, to the hard study of technique, to vast
but judicious reading, he added a long, creative brooding time. To
a Japanese friend, Nobushige Amenomori, he wrote in a passage
which contains by implication a deep theory not only of literary
composition, but of all art:--
"Now with regard to your own sketch or story. If you are quite
dissatisfied with it, I think this is probably due _not_ to what you
suppose,--imperfection of expression,--but rather to the fact that
some _latent_ thought or emotion has not yet defined itself in your
mind with sufficient sharpness. You feel something and have not been
able to express the feeling--only because you do not yet quite know
what it is. We feel without understanding feeling; and our most
powerful emotions are the most undefinable. This must be so, because
they are inherited accumulations of feeling, and the multiplicity of
them--superimposed one over another--blurs them, and makes them dim,
even though enormously increasing their strength.... _Unconscious_
brain work is the best to develop such latent feeling or thought. By
quietly writing the thing over and over again, I find that the emotion
or idea often _develops itself_ in the process,--unconsciously. Again,
it is often worth while to _try_ to analyze the feeling that remains
dim. The effort of trying to understand exactly what it is that moves
us sometimes proves successful.... If you have any feeling--no matter
what--strongly latent in the mind (even only a haunting sadness or a
mysterious joy), you may be sure that it is expressible. Some feelings
are, of course, very difficult to develop. I shall show you one
of these days, when we see each other, a page that I worked at for
_months_ before the idea came clearly.... When the best result
comes, it ought to surprise you, for our best work is out of the
Unconscious."
Through this study, reading, and brooding Lafcadio Hearn's prose
ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In mere workmanship the
present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened
passages, like the final paragraph of "The Romance of the Milky Way,"
the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily
matched from any but the very greatest English prose.
In substance the volume is equally significant. In 1884 he wrote to
one of the closest of his friends that he had at last found his
feet intellectually through the reading of Herbert Spencer which
had dispelled all "isms" from his mind and left him "the vague
but omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt." And in "Ultimate
Questions," which strikes, so to say, the dominant chord of this
volume, we have an almost lyrical expression of the meaning for him of
the Spencerian philosophy and psychology. In it is his characteristic
mingling of Buddhist and Shinto thought with English and French
psychology, strains which in his work "do not simply mix well," as
he says in one of his letters, but "absolutely unite, like chemical
elements--rush together with a shock;"--and in it he strikes his
deepest note. In his steady envisagement of the horror that envelops
the stupendous universe of science, in his power to evoke and revive
old myths and superstitions, and by their glamour to cast a ghostly
light of vanished suns over the darkness of the abyss, he was the most
Lucretian of modern writers.
* * * * *
In outward appearance Hearn, the man, was in no way prepossessing. In
the sharply lined picture of him drawn by one of his Japanese comrades
in the "Atlantic" for October, 1905, he appears, "slightly corpulent
in later years, short in stature, hardly five feet high, of somewhat
stooping gait. A little brownish in complexion, and of rather hairy
skin. A thin, sharp, aquiline nose, large protruding eyes, of which
the left was blind and the right very near-sighted."
The same writer, Nobushige Amenomori, has set down a reminiscence, not
of Hearn the man, but of Hearn the genius, wherewith this introduction
to the last of his writings may fitly conclude: "I shall ever retain
the vivid remembrance of the sight I had when I stayed over night at
his house for the first time. Being used myself also to sit up late, I
read in bed that night. The clock struck one in the morning, but there
was a light in Hearn's study. I heard some low, hoarse coughing. I was
afraid my friend might be ill; so I stepped out of my room and went to
his study. Not wanting, however, to disturb him, if he was at work,
I cautiously opened the door just a little, and peeped in. I saw
my friend intent in writing at his high desk, with his nose almost
touching the paper. Leaf after leaf he wrote on. In a while he held
up his head, and what did I see! It was not the Hearn I was familiar
with; it was another Hearn. His face was mysteriously white; his
large eye gleamed. He appeared like one in touch with some unearthly
presence.
"Within that homely looking man there burned something pure as the
vestal fire, and in that flame dwelt a mind that called forth life and
poetry out of dust, and grasped the highest themes of human thought."