MATSUE
"Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions
and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty
spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its
impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which
the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of
heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith
have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive."
The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue--birth-place of the
rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion--was one of the
happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career.
His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as
finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years
afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read
about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"--then he howled and
wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was
only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be
kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however,
though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of
enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always
make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work,
the one which is most read and by which he is best known.
Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the
odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue
was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick
warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living
force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still
an animating power.
How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day
and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the
first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled
echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most
pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the
pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the
hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people
saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant
vendors, the sellers of _daikon_ and other strange vegetables ... and
the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of
kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.
Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long
nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral
sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an
exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the
sun's yellow rim came into sight.
From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was
packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old
city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country
round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples.
One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at
night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the
feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint
imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some
communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the
world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls,
that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish
little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day
of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all
waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant
Land."
Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy
precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the
spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their
ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary
urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family
to which Hearn's future wife belonged.
To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living
centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing
in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past--that religion that
lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The
magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him,
working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion
of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary
mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the
very heart and soul of ancient Japan.
If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was
called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this
strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could
create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had
selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy
cycle of its eternal utterance.
The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in
which the real development of his genius lay; the loose, quivering
needle of thought, that had moved hither and thither, was now set in one
direction. The stage he was treading, though at first he did not realise
it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a drama with eternal and
immutable forces as scene-shifters and curtain-raisers. The qualities
that had enabled Japan to conquer China, and had placed her practically
in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to analyse
and explain; to interpret the curious myths of this great people of
little men, who, shut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of
years, had, out of their own inner consciousness, built up a code of
discipline and behaviour that, in its self-abnegation, its sense of
cohesion, and fidelity to law, throws our much-vaunted western
civilisation into the shade. Hearn brought to bear upon the
interpretation a rare power of using words, sympathetic insight, an
earnest and vivid imagination that enabled him to comprehend the
strongly accentuated characteristics of a race living close to the
origins of life; barbaric, yet highly refined; superstitious, yet
capable of adapting themselves to modern thought; playful as children,
yet astounding in their heroic gallantry and patriotism. His genius
enabled him to catch a glimpse of the indisputable truth that legend and
tradition are a science in themselves, that, however grotesque, however
fantastic primeval myths and allegories may be, they are indicative of
the gradual evolution of the heart and mind of generations as they arise
and pass away.
An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of
superstition, as compared with the utility of religion. In consequence
of his having elected to live the everyday life, and enter into the
ordinary interests and occupations of this strange people, as no
occidental ever had before, he was enabled to see that many Japanese
superstitions had a sort of shorthand value in explaining eternal and
valuable things. When it would have been useless to preach to people
vaguely about morality or cleanliness or ordinary rules of health, a
superstition, a belief that certain infringement of moral law will bring
direct corporal punishment, that maligned spirits will visit a room that
is left unswept, that the gods will chastise over-excess in eating or
drinking, are related to the most inexorable and highest moral laws, and
it is easy to understand how invaluable is the study of their
superstitions in analysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the
Japanese.
"Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated Japanese think nothing,"
said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation.
Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated Japanese
must you go to understand the vitality of heart and intelligence which
through centuries of the Elder Life has evolved so remarkable a
nationality. To set forth the power that has moulded the character of
this far eastern people, material must be culled from the
unsophisticated hearts of the peasants and the common folk. "The people
make the gods, and the gods the people make are the best." Hearn did not
attempt, therefore, a mechanical repetition of social and religious
tenets; but in the mythological beliefs, in the legendary lore that has
slumbered for generations in simple minds he caught the suggestion of
obedience and fidelity to authority, the strenuous industry and
self-denial that endowed these quaint superstitions with a potency far
beyond the religion and meaning, or the primitive idea that caused their
inception. Merely accurate and erudite students would call the
impressions that he collected here, in this unfamiliar Japan, trifling
and fantastic, but he is able to prove that the details of ordinary
intercourse, however trifling, the way in which men marry and bring up
their children, the very manner in which they earn their daily bread,
above all, the rules they impose, and the punishment and rewards they
invoke to have them obeyed, reveal more of the manner by which the
religion, the art, the heroism of this far eastern people have been
developed, than hundreds of essays treating of dynasties, treaties and
ceremonials.
Aided by that very quality which some may look upon as a mental defect,
Hearn's tendency to over-emphasise an impressive moment at the expense
of accuracy stood him now in good stead. Physical myopia, he maintained,
was an aid to artistic work from one aspect: "The keener the view, the
less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of
attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like
the eye of a hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of
every leaf." So mental myopia united with the shaping power of
imagination was more helpful in enabling him to catch a glimpse of the
trend of thought and characteristics of the folk whose country he
adopted than the piercing judgment that saw faults and intellectual
short-comings.
Many people, even the Japanese themselves, have said that Hearn's view
in his first book of things in their country was too roseate. Others
have declared that he must have been a hypocrite to write of Japan in so
enthusiastic a strain when in private letters, such as those to
Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik, he expresses so great a detestation for
the people and their methods. Those who say so do not know the nature of
the man whom they are discussing; compromise with those in office was
entirely antagonistic to his mode of thought. His life was composed of
passing illusions and disillusions. That he, with his artistic
perception, should have been carried off his balance by the quaintness
and mysticism that he encountered in the outlying portions of the
country was but natural. Go into the highlands of Japan amongst the
simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where the ancient
gods are still believed to haunt the ancient shrines, where the glamour
and the grace of bygone civilisation still lingers, you will yield to
the same charm, and, as Hearn himself says, better the sympathetic than
the critical attitude. Perhaps the man who comes to Japan full of hate
for all things oriental may get nearer the truth at once, but he will
make a kindred mistake to him who views it all, as I did at first,
almost with the eyes of a lover.