HIS FUNERAL
"If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong,
as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange
possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal
records in the Universal life,--every thought of good or ill
or aspiration,--and the Buddhistic Karma would be a
scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the
thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds
would be forever acting invisibly on us."
Perhaps of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with
Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than
his funeral.
It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a
Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no
religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the
last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions"
in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any
boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all
fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were
swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious
palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space.
Yet--Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien
to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his
latter years--at his death his body was taken possession of by priests,
who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over,
and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of
Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple!
A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss
Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration
for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him
lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama
paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession
would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on
September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in
Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held.
It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired
the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the
pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a
"ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and
hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little
children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of
shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under
the relentless light of the afternoon sun.
He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and
unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest
ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper
_gohei_; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge
bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas
carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the
grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne,
palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office
it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing
what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination of
good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn.
While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed
into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two
groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little
daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while
the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son,
Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university
professors, went to the right.
Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial
service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments
chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo.
After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and
led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse,
touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of
incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife,
when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven,
in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped
some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the
brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the
ceremony ended and the congregation left the church.
Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body
would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of
cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students
were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of
the day was at an end.
CHAPTER X
VISIT TO JAPAN
"Every dwelling in which a thinker lives certainly acquires a
sort of soul. There are Lares and Penates more subtle than
those of the antique world; these make the peace and rest of
a home."
On the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss
Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening.
Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law,
announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi
Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the
red tape--the bales of red tape--that surround social as well as
official transactions in Japan.
Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of
introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's
coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the
Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club
library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had
recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for
delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter.
To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and,
though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system
leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters;
in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do
with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason also reminded us that Mrs.
Koizumi did not understand a word of English; she must have recourse to
an interpreter before communicating with her Irish sister-in-law, but,
above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs. Atkinson had addressed her
letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by which no properly constituted
Japanese postman would find himself justified in recognising Hearn's
widow. By nationalising himself a Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as
his occidental inheritance went, had vanished forever. He and his wife
were only known at Tokyo as Mr. and Mrs. Koizumi.
Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about
Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been
extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the
friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in
consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on
sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on
Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses
from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that
his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to
Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami
was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her,
and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs,
and insisted on his visitors doing the same.
The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is
"another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese;
it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything
unexpected--all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised
country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a
Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately
in a jinrikisha to see her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have
fallen into one another's arms, and a close intimacy would have been
begun. Not so in Japan.
[Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).]
"Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr.
Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful
sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a
letter will turn up."
Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in
consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's
advice.
I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first
pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's
interview with the old Buddhist priest.
Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where,
embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of
pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine.
From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a
pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I
experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression,
common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a
dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a
special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic
light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering
eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to
the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range
of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through
the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its
familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese
picture-books--the sacred, the matchless mountain--Fuji-no-yama.
There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned from out
the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision of the
old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three hundred
volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the interpreter
Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise between them,
while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat, and the song of
the _uguisu_ from the plum-tree grove, we heard the murmur of their
voices.
"That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been....
Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best
painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any
action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits
outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such
progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach
such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force
also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves
increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last
that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation
have no existence."
Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while
seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures
pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady,
dressed in the national Japanese costume--a kimono of dark iron-grey
silk--the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed
also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his
feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of
the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance.
Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese
half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but
the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles.
Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas,
good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced,
Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik,
of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished
dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her
person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible
honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and
elaborate coiffure--the usual erection worn by her country-women--she
might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large
English establishment.
The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a
shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried,
instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally
used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and
indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of
memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it
had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and
from the Imperial University.
After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision,
leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He
was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the
background.
At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he
laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another
race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic
changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he
was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton
Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and
near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered
his father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown
hair and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a
queer little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to
learn by heart."
Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary
likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese
expression--a mask of reserve as it were--fell like a curtain over his
face,--he was Japanese again.
He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible;
his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a
sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic
in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative
understand what he wished to say.
It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have
been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the
Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely
forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason,
who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves
considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly
possessed--that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had
been so sensitive--a soft and musical voice.
Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England,
and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's
father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain
round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her
bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then
told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese
woman to wear any article of jewellery.
[Illustration: CARLETON ATKINSON.]
Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable
time--Japanese visits usually do--Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for
the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised
that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this
invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save
Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next
day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo.
The Metropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the
hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where
Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn,"
describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making
for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of
Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room.
Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi
Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the
Spring Equinox (_Shunki Korei-sai_). There is an autumn and a spring
equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating
population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren,
into the streets. The ladies were in their best _kimonos_, their hair
elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them
bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler
hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying
American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features
that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and
woman. A pretty _musume's_ ivory-coloured oval face against the
cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a
delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically
picturesque than a Tokyo street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry
of rain when hundreds of these ineffective shelters with their quaint
designs of chrysanthemums, cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly
opened. Alas! in ten years' time, like many other quaint and beautiful
Japanese productions, these oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away
into the region of faintly-remembered things.
The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of
the men had a little too much _sake_ on board, their tipsiness was only
betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes,
indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple
walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling
of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of _sake_, smells of seaweed soup,
smells of _daikon_ (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a
sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows
behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky
arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of
sunshine.
Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams,
and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an
interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges,
down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams,
we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with
babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their
mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of
Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male
children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was
there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen.
Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas,
and still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed _kuruma_ men,
did our journey last, through the quarter of the foreign legations,
past government offices and military stations, beside the moat
surrounding the mikado's palace, with its grass slopes and pine-clad
fosse, down declivities and up others, through endless lanes, bordered
by one-storeyed houses standing in shrubberies behind bamboo fences.
At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose _kuruma_ led the way, halted before a
small gateway, surmounted by a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we
understood afterwards, with Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs.
Passing through, we found ourselves opposite the entrance of a
lightly-built two-story house, rather resembling a suburban bungalow
in England. Directly we entered we were transported into a different
era. Here no modern Japan was visible. On the threshold, waiting to
receive us, was an "august residence maid," kneeling, palms extended
on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head touching the matting, and
wondered if it belonged to Hana, the unsympathetic Hana who had let
the grass-lark die. Beside her was Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child,
in a brilliantly-coloured _kimono_, while on the step above stood
Professor Tanabe, who had been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an
intimate friend of the Koizumi family, living near by, and acting
occasionally as interpreter for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture--as an
eastern philosopher, for instance--he would have made for Moroni or
Velasquez, with the delicate grey and cream background of the Japanese
_tatami_ and paper _shoji_. He had the clear olive complexion and
intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and
thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood
above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to
his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he
receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us
welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of
his own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a
presence, and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was
trying; for the little girl had raised her forehead from the matting,
and, with hands on knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us
sideways like a bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential
liftings of the eyes and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals
from a row that stood close by, helped us to take off our boots and put
on the sandals. We then remarked that she was not at all
unsympathetic-looking, but a nice, chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We
hoped devoutly we had no holes in our stockings, and after a
considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got through the ordeal in time
to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who appeared beside Professor Tanabe
on the step above us, softly inviting us to "honourably deign to enter
her unworthy abode."
The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so
arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the
_engawa_ (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been
Hearn's study. The _fusima_ or paper screens separating the two rooms
were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and
stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it
was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus
flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase,
but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the _Butsudan_, or
family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner.
Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the
spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped.
At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and
sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an
Interpretation," and so many other wonderful books, and I felt as I
looked at that room of Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive
than the quick. The walls--or rather the paper panels and wood laths
that did duty for walls--were haunted with memories.
I pictured the odd little figure--dressed in the _kimono_ given him by
Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems--"Surely just the
kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"--with the
prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in
the ancient, patient manner" on his _zabuton_--smoking his _kiseru_, or
standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets
and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning
over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's
Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk.
There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a
sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie
stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and
clamour of the city outside--it gave an impression of restfulness, of
calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless
matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the
Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels
that, like the _fusima_, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room.
I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study
and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for
paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before
that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese
houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had
occupied the corner where now stands the _Butsudan_, contaminating that
wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent,
crystalline atmosphere" unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke.
These hardy folk told us that they were always catching coughs and colds
when they had the stove and glass windows, so they took both out, and
put back the paper _shoji_ and the charcoal brazier.
It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which
Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his
study. The _andon_--tallow-candle--stuck in a paper shade--national
means of lighting a room--had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's
reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little
table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber
tube.
Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single _kakemono_, or
piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making
room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought
and life--that Hearn blended so deftly in his work--joined hands. Round
the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were
placed, filled with books, English most of them--De Quincey, Herbert
Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against
the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the
_Butsudan_ rested volumes of Browning and Kipling.
I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old
prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had
been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a
Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as
hanging on the ceiling?
It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a
depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay _godong_ given to
the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all
valuable and artistic objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing
of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from
fire, earthquakes and floods.
Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the
ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate
grey ground.
On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a _kakemono_ or scroll-picture
representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs
clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese
ideographs in the corner--by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present
from Kazuo to his father.
Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard,
was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were
Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl.
Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour
had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one.
Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the
hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance
of some sort.
Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to
go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo
that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's
study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond
measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They
own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like
our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a
climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as
crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful
circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves
uncomfortable in what seemed to me such an irritating and futile way.
That any sane people should eat a succession of horrible concoctions
made up of raw fish, lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted
of Pears' soap, whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an
afterthought, eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed
on Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at
least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a
courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy.
The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain
dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage
stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of
the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our
trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins
it was an omen of death.
I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when
I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use
knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a
story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the
professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet
under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him,
could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position
intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing
into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch
your legs and be comfortable."
After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell
athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a
bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the
right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was
a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the
bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a
mass of snowy white bloom.
But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the
cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and
within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs.
Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that
Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them.
Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to
his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's
life.
Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies,"
daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to
smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the
daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough
Corrib.
"Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas,
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these,
Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land--
Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO
"Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the
magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It
lingers now in patches only, and bands,--like those long
bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of
Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour
you still can find Horai--but not elsewhere.... Remember that
Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,--the
Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,--never
again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...."
Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi--through the medium of
Professor Tanabe--asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on
Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had
died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks
and the lamp were lighted before the _Butsudan_ and a repast laid out in
honour of the dead.
That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya
Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the
flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted,
and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to
spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to
the Metropole Hotel.
The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they
went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility
was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit
one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a
europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any
other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of
a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No
sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was
connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked
upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.
The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us
in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as
encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally
different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions
of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their
charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an
expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me,
reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts
of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by
European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic
meaning. A _Shirabyoshi_ lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara
quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district
of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of
their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead
kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the
streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered
in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese
maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread,
instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there,
seated on _zabutons_ in a little shop, as large--or rather as small--as
life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little
_musumes_, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I
passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising
_otherness_ of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary
land of Nippon.
I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese
houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who
had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.
Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her
"Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn
had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I
thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and
any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow
and children.
A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and
cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens,
and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a
_zabuton_ (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense
silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at
intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance
of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys
and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a
manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of
irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the
tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The
moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was
as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too
courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a
dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what
communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and
left a will--Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his
contemptible abode to smoke a pipe--further than that he knew nothing.
The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku),
where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the
heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received
also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was
distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct
me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's
favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste
exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about
the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any
sort of favour by his colleagues.
In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent
their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided
between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the
temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were
provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an
extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the
northern coast.
A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with
these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering
up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the
dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible
lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures
of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the
heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into
insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai
Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by
the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image
that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian
had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister
legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both.
Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and
people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this
Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire
destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus,
contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable
smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of
this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but
here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of
time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a
master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the
great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image
of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to
incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and
vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of
centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite
base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea
round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still
as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal
truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will
pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the
only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human
life--infinite calm, infinite rest.
"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on
Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound
and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he
attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented,
with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he
had hitherto subscribed?
It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the
shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its _shoji_ was comforting
after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come
prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning
among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August
One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows,
genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit,
while on the upper step of the _genkan_ (entrance-room) with extended
hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first,
when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove
occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was
moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom
she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels
in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present
always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even
though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely."
Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to
hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us,
when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and
pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental
widows when referring to the departed.
The doors of the _Butsudan_ were set wide open, and on the _kamidan_, or
shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and
burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast
of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were
placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a
bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that
had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was
Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to
Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third
had been buried with the writer of _Japan_, beneath his tombstone in the
Zoshigaya Cemetery.
As we stood in the study opposite the _Butsudan_ the ghostly charm, the
emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded
the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of
children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection,
crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.
Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo,
describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as
though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without
saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that
hangs in the study.
Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste,
subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit.
Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that
gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy
the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling
down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out
a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had
belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter
Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and
curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one
representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the
donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment--a donkey
being an unknown animal in Japan--when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another
represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and
groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple
people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.
It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for
a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the
brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not
perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur
attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon
the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of
difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some
sort--everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good
or bad omen.
Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because
her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson
was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same
respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys,
were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance
recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the
subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he
had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to
the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of
the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese,
declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in
mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many
others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted
by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine
race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially,
indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and
intelligent.
What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_
and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish
smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of
their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English
books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese _kakemonos_ and ideographs.
Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely
have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up.
The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days
"freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone
down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."
I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of
unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a
household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her
knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for
Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient,
indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the
_Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern
education as a material weakness?
"The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says
Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and
naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the
further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As
the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right,
the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the
opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."
After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of
"tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)--his Papa San's
favourite cake, Kazuo told us--had been handed round and partaken of,
jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery.
As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight
fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove,
stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was
the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo
parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were
going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh
ponies--along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by
evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean
inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an
unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind
whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the
horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but
little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of
exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather
distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots,
enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the
impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by
government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was
volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking
along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last
reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same
shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the
top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo
garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the
stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two
smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On
either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab
was the inscription--
"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"--"Believing Man Similar to
Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in
Mansion of Right Enlightenment."
The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside
the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the
background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the
thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the
cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness
characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin
coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the
plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in
front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn
wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand,
as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman,
Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the
moment, buried--an alien amongst aliens--in a Buddhist grave, under a
Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own
people.
CONCLUSION
LAFCADIO HEARN'S was a personality and genius which people will always
judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary
common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an
odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and
rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised
the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human
morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi,
or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of
his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who
consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow
his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst
the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme
prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages";
while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in
locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament.
If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the
worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities
behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature,
would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology"
that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may
have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of
a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the
whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that
he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically
proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could
recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to
cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap
wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we
patch up things."
Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal,
will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on
which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary
interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's
work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute.
He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of
absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it.
Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more,
discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the
ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries:
oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more
elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and
self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in
exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many
a day by cultured readers and thinkers.
Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique
place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and
because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the
eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of
enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does
in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques
Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of
the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social
and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own
day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never
entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental
horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and
pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his
deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of
occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so
because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so,
and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared
to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it
out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was
quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own,
and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the
spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another,
he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform
himself of details before discussing them.
As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely
conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the
modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in
the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of
Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature
in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan
was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan
rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive
sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of
all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that
"he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents
inventions shall be killed!"
Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his
political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever
camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again
whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival
Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a
season.
It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in
his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the
banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He
dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the
Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than
Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous
interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison
between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque
whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the
dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when
he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty,
the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes
hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones
bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for
a shadow and lost it."
Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to
the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower
stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness
found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of
such experience--from a literary point of view--is proved by the force
of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are
remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with
its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness,
breathes the very essence of Romanticism.
Literary brother to Loti and Renan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their
sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic
longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with
longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on
the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to
return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the
slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had
quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to
long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he
regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and
towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the
sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his
acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the
appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the
memory of his Japanese home--the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan
and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might
catch a butterfly.
Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited,
without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes,
he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the
borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for
the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this
strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that
is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very
strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it
made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting
dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories.
His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a
literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that
awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"...
The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in
the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought
nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking
exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work
is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of
his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental
hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical
narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that
flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art
was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental
wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain
healthy habit of thought and life.
It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his
capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true,
he had forfeited his birthright to produce a _Pecheur d'Islande_; but on
most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed.
He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain
he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were
apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a
certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he
found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and
tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and
epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The
Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The
subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken
from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue,"
probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of
small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own
characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul
of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he
went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses
of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet
Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on Japan, afterwards published
in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by
Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling.
As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously
exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to
admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori,
all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession
of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper
significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He
endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the
emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his
genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations
and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at
times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk
surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain
coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms,
and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the
wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the
talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent
circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the
cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism.
Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that
they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of
the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his
outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too pronounced to please the
matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in
the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes
impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without
finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic
phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his
picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic
episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a
country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing
the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and
visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality
and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie
in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the
enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal
mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure
of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands
would be needed to mould the figure--an unpractical and extravagant
sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than
merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul
of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it
feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion;
then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about
the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on
their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into
their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these
memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display
in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We
human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and
the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the
faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with
that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he
interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a
susceptible people.
As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by
some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was
drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to
Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing
his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to
those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the
primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint
villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open
ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American
clothes--then and then only will they be able to understand what an
artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation
being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his
opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view,
over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to
accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have
stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially
subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward
vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed,
if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and
appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and
dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in
his expressions of literary and political opinion.
In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to
the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the
tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances
were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most
salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved
him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable
nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his
mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New
Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good
fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen
years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been
swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in
the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless
cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his
means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for
him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was
his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last
years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst
the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness
of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with
his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending
his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest
surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him.
An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His
work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed
by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is,
indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and
persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses
it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach, by the Divine
Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that the more
appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct for art,
the smaller will be his success with the general public. But never was
his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of pecuniary gain.
From the earliest years of his literary career, his delight in
composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity, rather than
delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in the working.
According to him, nothing was less important than worldly prosperity, to
write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most damnable,
infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug.
To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this
short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that
matters, and "the only success in life."
Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life.
To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted.
"One minute's work to thee denied
Stands all Eternity's offence"--
he quotes from Kipling.
This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite
the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange
contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never
was at issue either with himself or destiny.
Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent
of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through
hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning
neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease,
Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one
object, his thoughts fixed on one aim.
In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a
spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of
the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy,
when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable
is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ...
her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life
and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad
generations that have arisen and passed away.
What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap
publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and
invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on
the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing
of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work
aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the
exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that
the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out.
As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the
beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things,
emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and
passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life,
making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were
beautiful to die for."
INDEX
AKIRA, 168, 170, 316.
Alma Tadema, 57.
Amenomori Nobushige, 168, 184, 235, 267.
American criticism, an, 145.
Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, 143, 144, 149.
Ancestral tablet, the, 253.
"Ants," essay on, 293.
Arnold, Matthew, 59.
Arnoux, Leopold, 154.
Asama-Yama, 144.
Atkinson, Mrs., 4, 13, 217, 301, 304, 313;
letters to, 31-48, 56, 67, 68, 86, 100, 112, 204, 221, 252;
visits Japan, 313 _et seq._
Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, 202.
Atkinson, Carleton, 4, 49.
Atkinson, Dorothy, 313, 317.
Avatars, 4.
BAKER, CONSTANCE, 334.
Baker, Page M., 106, 109, 236, 242.
Ball, Sir F., 255.
Bangor, 26.
Baudelaire, 63.
Beale, Mr. James, 256, 257.
Behrens, Mrs., 284.
Berry, Rev. H. F., 43.
Bisland, Miss Elizabeth, 110, 111, 125, 133, 151, 267;
marriage of, 188, 203;
letters to, 158, 180;
joint-editor of _Cosmopolitan_, 130.
Borrow, George, 274.
Boston, 261.
Brenane, Mrs. Justin, 2, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 30.
Bridges, Robert, quoted, 303.
British Museum, image of Buddha in, 57.
Bronner, Milton, 61.
Brown, Mr., 202.
Brownings, the, 59, 324.
Buddha of Enoshima, 331, 332.
Buddhism, 42, 141, 144.
Butcher, Miss, 16.
CALIDAS, 146.
Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 112, 165, 206;
letters to, 116, 169, 177, 191.
"Chinese Ghosts," 109.
"Chita," 35, 36.
Cholera at Kobe, 241.
Cincinnati, 53, 65 _et seq._
Cincinnati Brotherhood, 114.
Civilisation, attack on, 249.
Cockerill, Colonel John, 74.
Collins, Wilkie, 60.
_Commercial, The_, Hearn joins, 86.
"Concerning Lafcadio Hearn" (G. M. Gould), 69.
Conventual Orders, 2.
Corbishly, Monsignor, 41, 42, 44.
Corfu, 6-9.
Correagh, 2, 8.
Crawford, Mrs., 18, 21.
Crescent City, 94.
Crosby, Lieutenant, 133.
Cullinane, Mr. and Mrs., 53, 64.
"DAD." _See_ Watkin.
Dai Batsu of Enoshima, 331.
Dai Batsu of Kamakura, 142.
"Dancing Girl, The," 194.
Darwin, Charles, 59, 60, 140.
Daunt, Mr. Achilles, 46, 48, 52.
Delaney, Catherine, 53, 58.
Dengue fever, 100.
De Quincey, 289.
"Dragon Flies," 285.
"Dream of a Summer's Day," 24.
Dublin, 5, 10, _et seq._
Du Maurier, 63.
"Dust," Hearn's essay on, 49.
ELWOOD, FRANK, 25.
Elwood, Mrs., 24.
Elwood, Robert, 24, 25.
Emerson, Miss Margaret, 311.
_Enquirer, The_, Hearn on staff of, 74-79.
"Eternal Feminine," article on, 281.
"Exotics and Retrospectives," 282, 283, 294.
"FANTASTICS," 126.
"First Principles," Spencer's, 141.
Flaubert, Gustave, 43.
Foley, Althea, 81, 83, 180.
Ford Castle, 3.
Formosa, 200.
Forrest, General, funeral of, 90.
Foxwell, Professor, 120, 278.
Franco-Prussian War, 62.
Froude, James, 153.
Fuji, first sight of, 162.
Fuji-no-Yama, 144, 311.
Fujisaki, Captain, 286.
"GARDEN FOLK LORE," 189.
Gautier, Theophile, 62.
"Ghostly Japan," 283, 284.
"Gleanings in Buddha Fields," 273, 280.
"Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 163, 172, 268, 329.
Gould, Dr. George Milbury, 69, 149, 158.
Greek culture, 342.
Gulf winds, 35.
HALL, H. H., 282.
Halstead, Mr., 88.
Hamamura, cemetery of, 9.
Hana, 297.
_Harper's Weekly_, 137.
Harrison, Frederic, 143.
Hawkins, Armand, 104.
Hearn, Lafcadio, birth, 1, 9;
Hibernian ancestors, 2;
English origin, 2;
the interpreter of Buddhism, 4;
maternal lineage, 4, 5;
Hellenic associations of birthplace, 9;
memories of Malta, 10;
reminiscences of childhood, 17;
separation of his parents, 20;
adopted by Mrs. Brenane, 21;
his defective eyesight, 29, 45, 48;
relations with Mr. Molyneux, 30;
views of ideal beauty, 36;
at Tramore, 37;
at school at Ushaw, 40;
literary tastes at school, 43;
unattractive appearance, 49;
in London, 52 _et seq._;
literary vocation, 55;
Paris, 62;
Cincinnati, 65;
his shyness, 66;
reaches the depths, 68;
servant in boarding-house, 69;
secretaryship, 74;
on staff of _Enquirer_, 74;
ascends Cincinnati church spire, 76;
his translations, 76;
and Althea Foley, 81;
and Marie Levaux, 85;
joins staff of _The Commercial_, 85;
at Memphis, 88;
destitution, 94;
fever, 100;
_Times Democrat_, 105;
method of argument, 112;
intellectual isolation, 112;
intolerance of amateur art, 114;
characteristics, 120;
visits West Indies, 131;
letters, 135;
marriage, 134, 179-186;
arrangement with Harpers, 137;
political opinions, 142;
visits Mr. Watkin, 148;
the Krehbiels, 148, 149;
musical sense, 151;
arrives in Yokohama, 160;
terminates contract with Harpers, 164;
Professor Chamberlain, 165;
philosophical opinions and character, 167;
appointment in Matsue, 168;
Japanese estimate of, 176;
passion for work, 184;
family, 200;
naturalisation, 220;
symptoms of physical failure, 242;
devotion to family, 260;
emotional trances, 288;
love of animals, 292;
death, 299, _et seq._;
his religion, 310;
funeral, 310;
children, 336;
personality, 339;
biassed deductions, 341;
literary judgments, 342;
his romanticism, 343;
quotations from, 346;
his opinion of Japanese, 347;
estimate of his work, 348, 349.
Hearn, Charles Bush, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 22, 202.
Hearn, Mrs. Charles, 4, 10, 12, 14, 21.
Hearn, Mrs., 150;
"Reminiscences" of, 276.
Hearn, Rev. Daniel, 2, 16, 61, 202.
Hearn, Leopold Kazuo, 219.
Hearn, Rev. Thomas, 2.
Hearn, Miss, 3.
Hearn, Miss Lillah, 202, 203.
Hearn, Richard, 10 _et seq._, 150.
Hearn, Susan, 10 _et seq._
Hearn family in Waterford, 2.
Henderson, Mr. Edmund, 74, 76.
Hendrik, Ellwood, 125, 263;
letters to, 154, 177, 261.
Heron, Francis, 3.
Heron, Sir Hugh de, 3.
Hijo, 189.
Hirn, Professor, letter to, 67.
Holmes, Elizabeth, 5.
Hugo, Victor, 62.
Huxley, Professor, 60, 141.
ICHIGAYA, 311.
"Idolatry," 37.
Imperial University, Japanese, 330.
"In Ghostly Japan," 145.
"Insect Studies," 293.
"Intuition," 71.
Ionian Islands, 5.
Izumo, 262.
JAPAN,
discipline of official life in, 54;
spirit of, 229;
old Japan, 347.
"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation," 297.
Japanese character, analysis of, 176.
Japanese constitution promulgated, 158.
Japanese day, a, 206.
Japanese funeral, a, 312.
"Japanese Miscellany, A," 284.
Japanese regimen, 231.
Japanese school classes, 201.
Japanese training of children, 211.
Jefferies, Richard, 289.
Jitom Kobduera Temple, 311.
Jiu-jitsu, 201.
Jizo-Do Temple, 315.
KENTUCKY, 72.
Keogh, Miss Agnes, 50.
Kinegawa, 233.
Kingsley, Charles, 277.
Kinjuro, 189, 191.
Kipling, Rudyard, 233, 271, 324, 345.
Kitinagasa, Dori, 243.
Kobduera, Temple of, 261.
Kobe, 168, 193.
_Kobe Chronicle_, 168, 248.
Koizumi, Mrs. Setsu, 3, 27, 60, 286, 300, 308, 314 _et seq._, 334;
"Reminiscences" of, 122;
letter of, 309.
Koizumi, Idaho, 325.
Koizumi, Iwayo, 325.
Koizumi, Kazuo, 4, 217, 277, 300, 312, 317 _et seq._, 337.
Koizumi, Setsu-ko, 307, 321, 325, 335.
"Kokoro," 65, 109, 249, 251, 266.
Krehbiel, Henry, 5, 26, 74, 78, 79, 104, 112, 114, 152.
Kumamoto, 13, 65, 193, 199.
Kusa-Hibari (grass-lark), 295.
Kusimoki marahige, 240.
"Kwaidan," 24.
Kyoto, 252.
Kyushu, 200.
"LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS" (Miss Bisland), 113, 124-136.
Lamb, Charles, 289.
Levaux, Marie, 85.
"Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn" (Wetmore), 263.
Literary College, Tokyo, 3.
Loti, Pierre, 29, 84.
Lough Corrib, 25, 233.
Louisiana, 92.
Lowell, Percival, 345.
"Luck of Roaring Camp" (Bret Harte), 77.
MALTA, 5, 10.
Martinique, 155.
Mason, Mr. W. B., 122, 143, 287, 313, 315.
Matas, Dr. Rudolf, 102, 152.
Matsue, 142, 168, 172-178.
McDermott, Mr., 73.
McDonald, Capt. Mitchell, 108, 126, 168, 267, 271, 276, 284, 287,
299, 324, 333.
Memphis, 88-92.
"Midwinter, Ozias," 60, 89, 98.
Mifflin, Houghton & Co., 208.
Millet, Francois, 62.
Mionoseki, ironclads at, 341.
Moje, 238.
Molyneux, Henry, and Mrs., 2, 23, 28, 30, 50, 69.
Montreal, 160.
"Moon Desire," 290.
Morris, William, 59.
"Mountain of Skulls," 145.
"My First Romance," 67.
"My Guardian Angel," 29.
Mythen, Kate, 28, 36.
NAGASAKI, 212, 232.
New Orleans, 60, 85, 93-101;
yellow fever at, 100;
Exposition at, 137.
New York, 131.
"Nightmare Touch," 28.
Nishi Okubo, 261, 269, 286 _et seq._
Nishida Sentaro, 168, 181, 184, 265, 345.
OKUMA, COUNT, 307.
Osaka, 238.
O Saki, 308.
Otani, 323.
Otokichi, 280, 308.
"Out of the East," 232, 243, 315.
PAPELLIER, DR., 243, 250, 270.
Pater, Walter, 59, 349.
Philadelphia, 131, 261.
Pre-Raphaelites, aims of, 59.
"Principles of Ethics" (Spencer), cited, 140.
RACHEL, picture of, 71, 72.
"Raven, The," 73.
Redhill, 30, 45.
"Romance of the Milky Way, A," 298.
Rossetti, D. G., 59.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 340.
Ruskin, 59, 288.
SACKVILLE, LIONEL, DUKE OF DORSET, 2.
"St. Ronite," 44.
Santa Maura, 1, 9.
Schurmann, J. G., 305, 306.
Seaton, Viscount, 7.
"Serenade, A," 146.
Setsu-ko (Koizumi), 307, 321.
"Shadowings," 284.
Shinto worship, 41, 144, 168.
"Shirabzoshi" or "Dancing Girl," 193.
Shunki Korei-sai, 319.
Spencer, Herbert, cited, 60, 139-143, 168, 324, 335.
Steinmetz, General, 118.
Stevenson, R. L., 28, 63, 289.
"Stray Leaves," 109, 126.
Suruga, 34.
"Sylvestre Bonnard," 43.
TAKATA, 25.
Tanabe, Professor, 312, 321 _et seq._, 328.
Tennyson, 59.
Thomson, Francis, 40.
"Toko, The," 204.
Tokyo, 67, 260 _et seq._, 313.
"Torn Letters," 129.
Toyama, Professor, 254.
Tramore, 2, 20, 28, 31, 33-39.
Treves, Sir Frederick, 153.
"Trilby," 63.
Tunison, Mr. Joseph, 22, 45, 61, 79, 152.
"Two Years in the French West Indies," 108, 152.
Tyndall, 60.
"UJO," 189.
Ume, Professor, 330.
Ushaw, 28, 29, 36, 40-51.
Ushigome, 274-285.
VICKERS, THOMAS, 74.
"Voodoo Queen," 85.
WASEDA UNIVERSITY, 301, 307.
Waterford, 34.
Watkin, Henry ("Dad"), 44, 65, 66, 70, 73, 90, 100, 112, 147, 162,
235, 258.
Watkin, Miss Effie, 258.
Weatherall, Mrs., quoted, 18, 19, 221.
Weldon, Charles, 159.
West Indies, Hearn in, 148 _et seq._
Westmeath, 2, 8.
Wetmore, Mrs. (Miss Bisland q. v.), 273, 282, 299, 305, 307.
Wexford, 36.
Whistler, James, 59, 63.
Wiseman, Cardinal, at Ushaw, 40.
Worthington, Mr., 106.
Wrennal, Father William, 46.
YAIDZU, 34, 279, 290.
"Yakumo," 221.
Yashiki garden, 260.
Yokohama, 270, 313.
Yone Noguchi, 185, 263, 301, 318, 334.
Young, Mr. Robert, 143, 247, 313.
Young, Mrs., 246.
"Yuko," 233.
Yvetot, 61.
ZOSHIGAYA, 278.
Transcriber's Notes.
Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_.
Passages in small caps are replaced by either Title case or ALL CAPS,
depending on how the words were used.
Inconsistent hyphenation preserved as in the original.
The List of Illustrations was changed to match the captions of the
illustrations.
On page 51, the comma after "indirectly does me a right" was replaced
with a period.
On page 52, in the footnote "Lafacadio" was changed to "Lafcadio".
On page 65, the [OE] ligature was replaced with "OE".
On page 71, "acquiline" was changed to "aquiline".
On page 82, "Marysville" was changed to "Maysville".
On page 83, "indigant" was changed to "indignant".
On page 118, the period inside the quote was changed to a comma.
On page 120, "important person that" was changed to "important person
than".
On page 138, "Houkousai" was changed to "Hokusai".
On page 145, "pyschological" was changed to "psychological".
On page 163, "Hokousai" was changed to "Hokusai".
On page 177, "adoped" was changed to "adopted".
On page 202, "Lillian" was changed to "Lilliah".
On page 203, the added spaces were in the original, to indicate missing
words. Those missing spaces have been retained here.
On page 210, "KOIZUME" was changed to "KOIZUMI".
On page 245, "kizeru" was changed to "kiseru".
On page 260, "bad" was changed to "had".
On page 264, "spead" was changed to "spread".
On page 275, "library,." was changed to "library,".
On page 282, "Ultitimately" was changed to "Ultimately".
On page 291, "condi tions" was changed to "conditions".
On page 315, "out" was changed to "our".
On page 334, "portaits" was changed to "portraits".
On page 336, a closing quotation mark was places after "Finis:
sweetness and sympathy."
On page 353, "Theophile" was changed to "Theophile".
On page 355, in the Index, the "Sackville" entry was moved to the "S"
section and was identified with small caps as the first "S" word,
instead of "St. Ronite", and "Shirabzoshi" was replaced with
"Shirabyoshi".