PERHAPS I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt Japan
had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during the
stay with me. Beyond question, Mr. Lowell's volume had a profound
influence in turning his attention to Japan and greatly aided me in my
insistent urging him to go there. In sending the book Hearn wrote me
this letter:
Gooley!--I have found a marvellous book,--a book of
books!--a colossal, splendid, godlike book. You must read
every line of it. Tell me how I can send it. For heaven's
sake don't skip a word of it. The book is called "The Soul
of the Far East," but its title is smaller than its
imprint.
HEARNEYBOY.
P.S.--Let something else go to H--, and read this book
instead. May God eternally bless and infinitely personalize
the man who wrote this book! Please don't skip one solitary
line of it, and don't delay reading it,--because something,
much! is going to go out of this book into your heart and
life and stay there! I have just finished this book and feel
like John in Patmos,--only a d----d sight better. He who
shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off
and his name blotted out of the Book of Life.[13]
[13] Mr. Percival Lowell's book soon reached me
containing the inscription: "To George M. Gould,
with best love of his spiritual pupil, L. H." I
have intentionally retained colloquialisms in
these excerpts, the indications of our familiarity,
etc., to give a glimpse into the heart of the
affectionate and sweet-natured man.
There is not much to say about the Japanese period. The splendid books
speak for themselves. There is little in the almost valueless letters
that interest the literature-lover and give him concern about the
literature-maker. There is one short page[14] which is worth the
remainder of the book. The development of inborn characteristics goes
on, despite the grafted soul, almost as fatalistically as Hearn would
have wished, and in this instance in accordance with his theory of the
unalterability of character. But this period is of surpassing interest
solely because of the beautiful books and articles written. To analyze
them is both impossible and undesirable. They are for our enjoyment, and
after us generations will be delighted by them.
[14] _Life and Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 337 and 338.
Hearn's views and practices as regards love and the feminine are not of
sympathetic interest to those who think that monogamy is good and
advisable. He hopes his son will not follow in his father's footsteps as
regards every damozel in his path, and in this respect become the
"disgraceful person he [the father] used to be." He "half suspects" the
Oriental husband is right in loving his wife least of all others related
to or dependent upon him, and quotes approvingly unquotable things about
the laws of (sexual) nature, managing, _more suo_, to make beautiful the
pursuit of beauty "in vain." Than the other, the woman-beauty of soul is
the lesser. "It doesn't make a man any happier to have an intellectual
wife. The less intellectual the more lovable,--for intellectual converse
a man _can't_ have with women." When contemplating legal marriage with
"his wife" in 1892, he calculates shrewdly the advantages of the plan.
He arrived in Japan in 1890 and in less than two years "my little wife
and I have saved nearly 2,000 Japanese dollars between us." When he has
made her independent he will quit teaching, and "wander about awhile and
write 'sketches' at $10.00 per page." In 1893 he found difficulties in
registering the birth of his son. Hearn was still a British subject. If
the boy should be a Japanese citizen, the registry must be in the
mother's name; if in the father's name, he would become a foreigner. To
become a Japanese citizen would mean for Hearn a great reduction in his
salary as a teacher under Government pay. "Why was I so foolish as to
have a son?" "Really _I_ don't know." In 1895 he "cuts the puzzle" by
becoming a Japanese citizen, "losing all chance of Government employment
at a living salary." Immediately Hearn "hopes to see a United Orient yet
bound into one strong alliance against our cruel Western Civilization,"
"against what is called Society and what is called Civilization."
For those who boasted of being his friends, it seems an astonishing
thing that they should make Hearn portray his vices, his moral
nakedness, so publicly. Of course he did not dream of the _expose_. It
is to his merit, however, that he would place the truth boldly and
baldly before his friends. He confesses that the scandalous parts of a
book are what he likes best, that he is "a Fraud," "a vile Latin,"
etc.,--"_Vive le monde antique!_" He is "_not respectable_."
"Carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churches! how I hate
them!! Would I had been born savage; the curse of civilized cities is
upon me." He admits that he "cannot understand the moral side, of
course," and urges that "the most serious necessity of life is not to
take the moral side of it seriously. We must play with it, as with an
_hetaira_." It is needless to add that in this composition and resolve
lay Hearn's weakness, his tragedy, and his missing of "greatness." A man
so willed must finally see that it is the source of pitiful
instabilities and waywardness. "I have been at heart everything by
turns." He learns the old trick of blaming "Fate" and "the other
fellow;" he is hard-pushed, ignored, starved, morally humiliated:--"the
less a man has to do with his fellow-men the better;" "it becomes plain
why men cannot be good to one another;" character may not be bettered or
changed; "no line exists between life and not-life;" "likes and dislikes
never depart;" if Spanish, Italian, or French (instead of English,
German, or American) he "can be at home with a villain," etc. Finally
there comes that burst of frankness:--"I have more smallness in me than
you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat
for twenty or twenty-five years, he must have acquired something of the
disposition peculiar to house-rodents,--mustn't he?" Then increase the
complaints of "treachery," the wish for "justice," the desire to go
away, somewhere, anywhere; and the limit of the amazing is reached in
praising _The Conservator_ and _The Whim_ for bravery and goodness, and
in hating Virchow thoroughly. Was Virchow so loathsome because this
great scientist found an impassable demarcation between life and the
not-life?--"all cells are derived from cells." Is it surprising that his
old imagined enemies, the Jesuits, are believed to be hidden in every
place, lurking to thwart every ambition or success, even to kill
him?[15]
[15] Those who care may see how this suspicion obfuscates his
mind in an article against some of Hearn's statements, by
Henry Thurston, in _The Messenger_, January 1906.
No man is wholly bad who loves children, none wholly good who does not
love them. In a nation of child-lovers, as Hearn's Japanese writings
bear witness, he began to catch glimpses of truth hitherto unrecognized.
Concerning his eldest son (a fourth child was expected in 1903) Hearn
wrote: "No man can possibly know what life means until he has a child
and loves it. And then the whole Universe changes,--and nothing will
ever again seem exactly as it seemed before." Naturally he was drawn to
the rich child-lore and fairy tales of Japan. With great difficulty I
have secured copies of a number of fairy stories edited by him and
published in Japan by T. Hasegawa, Tokyo, in a style beautiful and
dainty beyond superlatives. As mine are probably the only ones in our
country, I have ventured to copy herewith two of the tales:--
THE OLD WOMAN WHO LOST HER DUMPLING
Long, long ago, there was a funny old woman, who liked to
laugh and to make dumplings of rice-flour.
One day, while she was preparing some dumplings for dinner,
she let one fall; and it rolled into a hole in the earthen
floor of her little kitchen and disappeared. The old woman
tried to reach it by putting her hand down the hole, and
all at once the earth gave way, and the old woman fell in.
She fell quite a distance, but was not a bit hurt; and when
she got up on her feet again, she saw that she was standing
on a road, just like the road before her house. It was quite
light down there; and she could see plenty of rice-fields,
but no one in them. How all this happened, I cannot tell
you. But it seems that the old woman had fallen into another
country.
The road she had fallen upon sloped very much; so, after
having looked for her dumpling in vain, she thought it must
have rolled farther away down the slope. She ran down the
road to look, crying:
"My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?"
After a little while she saw a stone Jizo standing by the
roadside, and she said:
"O Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"
Jizo answered:
"Yes, I saw your dumpling rolling by me down the road. But
you had better not go any farther, because there is a wicked
Oni living down there, who eats people."
But the old woman only laughed, and ran on farther down the
road, crying: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that
dumpling of mine?" And she came to another statue of Jizo,
and asked it:
"O kind Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"
And Jizo said:
"Yes, I saw your dumpling go by a little while ago. But you
must not run any farther, because there is a wicked Oni down
there, who eats people."
But she only laughed, and ran on, still crying out: "My
dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And
she came to a third Jizo, and asked it:
"O dear Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"
But Jizo said:
"Don't talk about your dumpling now. Here is the Oni coming.
Squat down here behind my sleeve, and don't make any noise."
Presently the Oni came very close, and stopped and bowed to
Jizo, and said:
"Good-day, Jizo San!"
Jizo said good-day, too, very politely.
Then the Oni suddenly snuffed the air two or three times in
a suspicious way, and cried out: "Jizo San, Jizo San! I
smell a smell of mankind somewhere--don't you?"
"Oh!" said Jizo, "perhaps you are mistaken."
"No, no!" said the Oni, after snuffing the air again, "I
smell a smell of mankind."
Then the old woman could not help laughing, "Te-he-he!"--and
the Oni immediately reached down his big hairy hand behind
Jizo's sleeve, and pulled her out,--still laughing,
"Te-he-he!"
"Ah! ha!" cried the Oni.
Then Jizo said:
"What are you going to do with that good old woman? You must
not hurt her."
"I won't," said the Oni. "But I will take her home with me
to cook for us."
"Very well," said Jizo; "but you must really be kind to her.
If you are not I shall be very angry."
"I won't hurt her at all," promised the Oni; "and she will
only have to do a little work for us every day. Good-bye,
Jizo San."
Then the Oni took the old woman far down the road, till they
came to a wide deep river, where there was a boat, and took
her across the river to his house. It was a very large
house. He led her at once into the kitchen, and told her to
cook some dinner for himself and the other Oni who lived
with him. And he gave her a small wooden rice-paddle, and
said:
"You must always put only one grain of rice into the pot,
and when you stir that one grain of rice in the water with
this paddle, the grain will multiply until the pot is full."
So the old woman put just one rice-grain into the pot, as
the Oni told her, and began to stir it with the paddle; and,
as she stirred, the one grain became two,--then four,--then
eight,--then sixteen,--thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on.
Every time she moved the paddle the rice increased in
quantity; and in a few minutes the great pot was full.
After that, the funny old woman stayed a long time in the
house of the Oni, and every day cooked food for him and for
all his friends. The Oni never hurt or frightened her, and
her work was made quite easy by the magic paddle--although
she had to cook a very, very great quantity of rice, because
an Oni eats much more than any human being eats.
But she felt lonely, and always wished very much to go back
to her own little house, and make her dumplings. And one
day, when the Oni were all out somewhere, she thought she
would try to run away.
She first took the magic paddle, and slipped it under her
girdle; and then she went down to the river. No one saw her;
and the boat was there. She got into it, and pushed off; and
as she could row very well, she was soon far away from the
shore.
But the river was very wide; and she had not rowed more than
one-fourth of the way across, when the Oni, all of them,
came back to the house.
They found that their cook was gone, and the magic paddle
too. They ran down to the river at once, and saw the old
woman rowing away very fast.
Perhaps they could not swim: at all events they had no boat;
and they thought the only way they could catch the funny old
woman would be to drink up all the water of the river before
she got to the other bank. So they knelt down, and began to
drink so fast that before the old woman was half way over,
the water had become quite low.
But the old woman kept on rowing until the water had got so
shallow that the Oni stopped drinking, and began to wade
across. Then she dropped her oar, took the magic paddle from
her girdle, and shook it at the Oni, and made such funny
faces that the Oni all burst out laughing.
But the moment they laughed, they could not help throwing up
all the water they had drunk, and so the river became full
again. The Oni could not cross; and the funny old woman got
safely over to the other side, and ran away up the road as
fast as she could.
She never stopped running until she found herself at home
again. After that she was very happy; for she could make
dumplings whenever she pleased. Besides, she had the magic
paddle to make rice for her. She sold her dumplings to her
neighbours and passengers, and in quite a short time she
became rich.
THE BOY WHO DREW CATS
A long, long time ago, in a small country-village in Japan,
there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good
people. They had a number of children, and found it very
hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when
only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little
girls learned to help their mother almost as soon as they
could walk.
But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit
for hard work. He was very clever,--cleverer than all his
brothers and sisters; but he was quite weak and small, and
people said he could never grow very big. So his parents
thought it would be better for him to become a priest than
to become a farmer. They took him with them to the
village-temple one day, and asked the good old priest who
lived there, if he would have their little boy for his
acolyte, and teach him all that a priest ought to know.
The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard
questions. So clever were the answers that the priest agreed
to take the little fellow into the temple as an acolyte, and
to educate him for the priesthood.
The boy learned quickly what the old priest taught him, and
was very obedient in most things. But he had one fault. He
liked to draw cats during study-hours, and to draw cats even
when cats ought not to have been drawn at all.
Whenever he found himself alone, he drew cats. He drew them
on the margins of the priest's books, and on all the screens
of the temple, and on the walls, and on the pillars. Several
times the priest told him this was not right; but he did not
stop drawing cats. He drew them because he could not really
help it. He had what is called "the genius of an artist,"
and just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an
acolyte;--a good acolyte should study books.
One day after he had drawn some very clever pictures of cats
upon a paper screen, the old priest said to him severely:
"My boy, you must go away from this temple at once. You will
never make a good priest, but perhaps you will become a
great artist. Now let me give you a last piece of advice,
and be sure you never forget it: 'Avoid large places at
night;--keep to small.'"
The boy did not know what the priest meant by saying, "Avoid
large places,--keep to small." He thought and thought, while
he was tying up his little bundle of clothes to go away; but
he could not understand those words, and he was afraid to
speak to the priest any more, except to say good-bye.
He left the temple very sorrowfully, and began to wonder
what he should do. If he went straight home, he felt sure
his father would punish him for having been disobedient to
the priest: so he was afraid to go home. All at once he
remembered that at the next village, twelve miles away,
there was a very big temple. He had heard there were several
priests at that temple; and he made up his mind to go to
them and ask them to take him for their acolyte.
Now that big temple was closed up, but the boy did not know
this fact. The reason it had been closed up was that a
goblin had frightened the priests away, and had taken
possession of the place. Some brave warriors had afterwards
gone to the temple at night to kill the goblin; but they had
never been seen alive again. Nobody had ever told these
things to the boy; so he walked all the way to the village,
hoping to be kindly treated by the priests.
When he got to the village, it was already dark, and all the
people were in bed; but he saw the big temple on a hill at
the other end of the principal street, and he saw there was
a light in the temple. People who tell the story say the
goblin used to make that light, in order to tempt lonely
travellers to ask for shelter. The boy went at once to the
temple, and knocked. There was no sound inside. He knocked
and knocked again; but still nobody came. At last he pushed
gently at the door, and was quite glad to find that it had
not been fastened. So he went in, and saw a lamp
burning,--but no priest.
He thought some priest would be sure to come very soon, and
he sat down and waited. Then he noticed that everything in
the temple was grey with dust, and thickly spun over with
cobwebs. So he thought to himself that the priests would
certainly like to have an acolyte, to keep the place clean.
He wondered why they had allowed everything to get so dusty.
What most pleased him, however, were some big white screens,
good to paint cats upon. Though he was tired, he looked at
once for a writing-box, and found one, ground some ink, and
began to paint cats.
He painted a great many cats upon the screens; and then he
began to feel very, very sleepy. He was just on the point of
lying down to sleep beside one of the screens, when he
suddenly remembered the words: "Avoid large places;--keep to
small."
The temple was very large; he was all alone; and as he
thought of these words--though he could not quite understand
them--he began to feel for the first time a little afraid;
and he resolved to look for a small place in which to sleep.
He found a little cabinet, with a sliding door, and went
into it, and shut himself up. Then he lay down and fell fast
asleep.
Very late in the night he was awakened by a most terrible
noise,--a noise of fighting and screaming. It was so
dreadful that he was afraid even to look through a chink of
the little cabinet: he lay very still, holding his breath
for fright.
The light that had been in the temple went out; but the
awful sounds continued, and became more awful, and all the
temple shook. After a long time silence came; but the boy
was still afraid to move. He did not move until the light of
the morning sun shone into the cabinet through the chinks of
the little door.
Then he got out of his hiding-place very cautiously, and
looked about. The first thing he saw, lying dead in the
middle of it, an enormous monster rat,--a
goblin-rat,--bigger than a cow!
But who or what could have killed it? There was no man or
other creature to be seen. Suddenly the boy observed that
the mouths of all the cats he had drawn the night before,
were red and wet with blood. Then he knew that the goblin
had been killed by the cats which he had drawn. And then,
also, for the first time, he understood why the wise old
priest had said to him: "Avoid large places at night;--keep
to small."
Afterwards that boy became a very famous artist. Some of the
cats which he drew are still shown to travellers in Japan.
At once upon reaching Japan (it is plain Hearn never forgave me for
compelling him to go) begin the complaints of the downright hard work of
writing, consequent upon the loss of ideals. He breaks with
publishers--an old-time story; he is losing his inspiration, and his
only hope is that it will return to him again; in any Latin country he
could at once, he thinks, get back the much coveted "thrill," or
_frisson_. He would at last even relish the hated United States. From
the beginning he tires of the Japanese character, and grows more and
more tired the longer he stays; it has no depth, this thin soul-stream;
it is incapable of long-sustained effort, prolonged study; he cannot
much longer endure Japanese officialism; and the official "is something
a good deal lower than a savage and meaner than the straight-out Western
rough." He would wish never to write a line again about any Japanese
subjects. Things finally came to such a pass that the only successful
stimulus to work was that some one should do or say something horribly
mean to him, and the force of the hurt could be measured in the months
or years of resultant labour. As none ever did a mean thing to him, one
may suspect that the psychology of his sudden enmities towards others
was that he must perforce _imagine_ that he had been "horribly" treated.
The old _Wanderlust_, never wholly absent, returns strongly upon him; in
less than a year he dreams of leaving Japan and his wife, and of
"wandering about awhile;" he projects "a syndicate" whereby he may go to
Java (rather than Manila, where the Jesuits were), or, "a French
colony,--Tonkin, Noumea, or Pondicherry." A tropical trip is planned for
six months of every year. But the "butterfly-lives" dependent upon him
prevent, of course. He always spoke of returning often. At the last
there is a savage growl that after thirteen years of work for Japan, in
which he had sacrificed everything for her, he was "driven out of the
service and practically banished from the country."
Hearn's nostalgia for the nowhere or the anywhere was only conquered by
death. In 1898 the logic of his life, of his misfortune, and character,
begins to grow plainer, and he "fears being blinded or maimed so as to
prove of no further use." It seems that if he had been able to do what
he tried so often, and longed so fervently to do, he would have run away
into the known or unknown, leaving children, wife, and all the ties that
bound him to any orderly life. His vision had become almost useless; he
had lost his lectureship; more and more it grew impossible to coax or
force out of his mind such beautiful things as in younger days; the
Furies of his atheism, pessimism, and lovelessness were close on his
track; the hope of lectureships in the United States had
failed,--nothing was left, nothing except one thing, which, chosen or
not, came at the age of fifty-four.
Lessing has said that "Raphael would have been the great painter he was
even if he had been born without arms," and Burke has told of a poet
"blind from birth who nevertheless could describe visible objects with a
spirit and justness excelled by few men blessed with sight." What irony
of Fate it is that one almost blind should teach us non-users of our
eyes the wonder and glory of colour; that the irreligious one should
quicken our faith in the immaterial and unseen; that a sensualist should
strengthen our trust in the supersensual; that one whose body and life
were unbeautiful should sing such exquisite songs of silent beauty that
our straining ears can hardly catch the subtle and unearthly harmonies!
For Hearn is another of many splendid illustrations of the old truth
that a man's spirit may be more philosophic than his philosophy, more
scientific than his science, more religious than his creed, more divine
than his divinity.