LONDON
"In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to
self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a
little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody
else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of
Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly
abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no
escape, save by an iron ladder.
"As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each
rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had
quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the
least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the
climber."[6]
[6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied
her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at
Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in
London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To
them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly
comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only
ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr.
Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was
cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open,
or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and
plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and
excitable imagination.
The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law.
It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling
against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and
luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne
and chicken mayonnaise on board.
Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a
biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance.
Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping,
was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he
had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he
might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work.
As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take
refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by
his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to
submit to discipline or restraint of any kind.
Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this
period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some
of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to
finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home,
surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in
spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of
his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was
forced to become a servant.
This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of
fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he
arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for
there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in
Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his
destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was
probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr.
Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses.
With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum
given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the
first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio
that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles
away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying
himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all
the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by
official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can
imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during
the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no
dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or
trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going.
At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the
experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to
the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to
the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up.
He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never
possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of
the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness
was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the
psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive
recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that
the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to
spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self,
lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most
efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.
Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then,
as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or
when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of
rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the
body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight
and acute dyspepsia.
Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from
communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he
possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in
silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and
aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.
Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and
misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he
showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and
sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external
influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If
those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him
forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse
himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.
After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in
front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of
achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you
are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic
material?
Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that
literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling,
as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance,
that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that
the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient
sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly
the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until
at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. Analysing the
feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand
exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary
utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for
months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising;
for our best work is often out of the unconscious."
Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other
men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination
which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his
blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of
life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which
was possible to a man of his temperament.
"All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the
right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within
hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within
hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying
through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all,
his own genius.
"Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One
must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson,
recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making."
Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows
and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the
undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of
the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at
Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid
surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the
sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great
metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,
strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea
of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range
of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the
ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of
the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in
imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted
fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum,
where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he
pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of
Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly
at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid
another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation
or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire
some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of
the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain?
Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally
divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft
serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet
give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into
conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I
have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the
immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding
sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good
and true.'"
We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the
white-winged ships, "swift Hermae of traffic--ghosts of the infinite
ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of
which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed
little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day
destined to become the interpreter.
We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were
the sheets--destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical
stuff--that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not
destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the
aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.
"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a
girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two
little words--'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw
her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the
passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a
double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain--pain and pleasure,
doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and
dead suns.
"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be
of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there
never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the
utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the
myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar
even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no
doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of
pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may
revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual
being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of
generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the
darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest
moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7]
[7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock.
It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England
in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the
wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the
future.
Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in
every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and
the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at
Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his
fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his
candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of
art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in
writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in
dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of
October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers,
called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to
lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of
sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The
_Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published
in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of
Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the
intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to
Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first
time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans,
and _kakemonos_ embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his
whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon
marbles."
Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and
evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy
and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single
theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text,
seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature
in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by
Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he
maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been
written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy."
Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to
Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the
creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached
his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have
wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that
came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to
think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been
fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter,"
indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters
contributed to the _Commercial_ from New Orleans. There is a certain
pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and
character of _Midwinter_ made to his imagination. "What had I known of
strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as
hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had
known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in
corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and
cheated and starved."
Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his
lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period
intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain
endeavoured to penetrate.
Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven,"
alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who
had 'run away from a Monastery _in Wales_,' and who still had part of
his monk's garb for clothing."
In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency
to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow,
told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at
the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had
been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His
brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says
that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France,
and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that
Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to
Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has
been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic
colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of
every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of
the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or
destroyed.
Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads
to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and
good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman
Catholic institution of the _Petits Precepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen.
Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he
took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he
went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle
Richard, who was living there at the time.
Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor,
disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort
of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The
church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore,
not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as
far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and
renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.
It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage
of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris,
where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to
express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to
clutch the Unattainable."
A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital
memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.
It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war,
when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and
luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the
world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin,"
while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon
Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists
who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of
their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_,
and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were
inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the
painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, Francois Millet, in
poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing
"The Sowers" and "The Angelus."
Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of
Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle
it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's.
Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however
lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers.
However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty
to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.
It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that
ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the
moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for
itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of
Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of
Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of
his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented
exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit,
which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and
Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He
could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves
of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in
praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the
originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.
It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert
Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands,
Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the
same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about
the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also
frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which
he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"--"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes
later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.
In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who
had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed
to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he
was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's
brother-in-law.
It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to
propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have
well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any
inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.