INTRODUCTORY SKETCH
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD
Lafcadio Hearn was born on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1850. He was a native of the Ionian Isles, the place of his birth being the Island of Santa Maura, which is commonly called in modern Greek Levkas, or Lefcada, a corruption of the name of the old Leucadia, which was famous as the place of Sappho’s self-destruction. This island is separated from the western coast of Greece by a narrow strait; the neck of land which joined it to the mainland having been cut through by the Corinthians seven centuries before Christ. To this day it remains deeply wooded, and scantily populated, with sparse vineyards and olive groves clinging to the steep sides of the mountains overlooking the blue Ionian sea. The child Lafcadio may have played in his early years among the high-set, half-obliterated ruins of the Temple of Apollo, from whence offenders were cast down with multitudes of birds tied to their limbs, that perchance the beating of a thousand wings might break the violence of the fall, and so rescue them from the last penalty of expiation.
In this place of old tragedies and romance the child was born into a life always to be shadowed by tragedy and romance to an extent almost fantastic in our modern workaday world. This wild, bold background, swimming in the half-tropical blue of Greek sea and sky, against which the boy first discerned the vague outlines of his conscious life, seems to have silhouetted itself behind all his later memories and prepossessions, and through whatever dark or squalid scenes his wanderings led, his heart was always filled by dreams and longings for soaring outlines, and the blue, “which is the colour of the idea of the divine, the colour pantheistic, the colour ethical.”
Long years afterward, in the “Dream of a Summer Day,” he says:—
“I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before, I cannot tell, but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world—almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer.... The sea was alive and used to talk—and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived among the peaks, I have dreamed for a moment the same wind was blowing—but it was only a remembrance.
“Also in that place the clouds were wonderful and of colours for which there are no names at all,—colours that used to make me hungry and thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer than these days,—and every day there were new pleasures and new wonders for me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done, and there fell the great hush of light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.”
A strange mingling of events and of race-forces had brought the boy into being.
Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, of the 76th Foot, came of an old Dorsetshire family in which there was a tradition of gipsy blood—a tradition too dim and ancient now to be verified, though Hearn is an old Romany name in the west of England, and the boy Lafcadio bore in his hand all his life that curious “thumb-print” upon the palm, which is said to be the invariable mark of Romany descent. The first of the Hearns to pass over into Ireland went as private chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant in 1693, and being later appointed Dean of Cashel, settled permanently in West Meath. From the ecclesiastical loins there appears to have sprung a numerous race of soldiers, for Dr. Hearn’s father and seven uncles served under Wellington in Spain. The grandfather of Lafcadio rose during the Peninsula Campaign to the position of lieutenant-colonel of the 43d regiment, and commanded his regiment in the battle of Vittoria. Later he married Elizabeth Holmes, a kinswoman of Sir Robert Holmes, and of Edmund Holmes the poet, another member of her family being Rice Holmes, the historian of the Indian Mutiny. Dr. Charles Hearn, the father of Lafcadio, was her eldest son, and another son was Richard, who was one of the Barbizon painters and an intimate friend of Jean François Millet.
It was in the late ’40’s, when England still held the Ionian Isles, that the 76th Foot was ordered to Greece, and Surgeon-Major Hearn accompanied his regiment to do garrison duty on the island of Cerigo. Apparently not long after his arrival he made the acquaintance of Rosa Cerigote, whose family is said to have been of old and honourable Greek descent. Photographs of the young surgeon represent him as a handsome man, with the flowing side-whiskers so valued at that period, and with a bold profile and delicate waist. A passionate love affair ensued between the beautiful Greek girl and the handsome Irishman, but the connection was violently opposed by the girl’s brothers, the native bitterness toward the English garrison being as intense as was the sentiment in the South against the Northern army of occupation immediately after the American Civil War. The legend goes that the Cerigote men—there was hot blood in the family veins—waylaid and stabbed the Irishman, leaving him for dead. The girl, it is said, with the aid of a servant, concealed him in a barn and nursed him back to life, and after his recovery eloped with her grateful lover and married him by the Greek rites in Santa Maura. The first child died immediately after birth, and the boy, Lafcadio, was the second child; taking his name from the Greek name of the island, Lefcada. Another son, James, three years later in Cephalonia, was the fruit of this marriage, so romantically begun and destined to end so tragically.
When England ceded the Ionian Isles to Greece Dr. Hearn returned with his family to Dublin, pausing, perhaps, for a while at Malta, for in a letter written during the last years of his life Lafcadio says: “I am almost sure of having been in Malta as a child. My father told me queer things about the old palaces of the knights, and a story of a monk who on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railing with green paint.”
The two boys were at this time aged six and three. It was inevitable, no doubt, that the young wife, who had never mastered the English tongue, though she spoke, as did the children, Italian and Romaic, should have regretted the change from her sunlit island to the dripping Irish skies and grey streets of Dublin, nor can it be wondered at that, an exile among aliens in race, speech, and faith, there should have soon grown up misunderstandings and disputes. The unhappy details have died into silence with the passage of time, but the wife seems to have believed herself repudiated and betrayed, and the marriage being eventually annulled, she fled to Smyrna with a Greek cousin who had come at her call, leaving the two children with the father. This cousin she afterwards married and her children knew her no more. The father also married again, and the boy Lafcadio being adopted by Dr. Hearn’s aunt, a Mrs. Brenane, and removing with her to Wales, never again saw either his father or his brother.[1]
The emotions are not hard to guess at of a passionate, sensitive boy of seven, suddenly flung by the stormy emotions of his elders out of the small warm circle of his narrow sphere. To a young child the relations of its parents and the circle of the home seem as fundamental and eternal as the globe itself, and the sudden ravishment of all the bases of his life make his footing amid the ties and affections of the world forever after timid and uncertain.
A boy of less sensitive fibre might in time have forgotten these shocks, but the eldest son of Charles Hearn and Rosa Cerigote was destined to suffer always because of the violent rending of their ties. From this period seems to have dated his strange distrusts, his unconquerable terror of the potentialities which he suspected as lurking beneath the frankest exterior, and his constant, morbid dread of betrayal and abandonment by even his closest friends.
Whatever of fault there may have been on his mother’s part, his vague memories of her were always tender and full of yearning affection.
To the brother he never saw he wrote, when he was a man, “And you do not remember that dark and beautiful face—with large, brown eyes like a wild deer’s—that used to bend above your cradle? You do not remember the voice which told you each night to cross your fingers after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words—Ἔν τὸ ὄνομα τοὺ Πατρὸς καὶ τοὺ Υιοῦ καὶ τοῦ Ἀγίου Πνεύματος, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’? She made, or had made, three little wounds upon you when a baby—to place you, according to her childish faith, under the protection of those three powers, but specially that of Him for whom alone the Nineteenth Century still feels some reverence—the Lord and Giver of Life.... We were all very dark as children, very passionate, very odd-looking, and wore gold rings in our ears. Have you not the marks yet?...
“When I saw your photograph I felt all my blood stir,—and I thought, ‘Here is this unknown being, in whom the soul of my mother lives,—who must have known the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as I! Will he tell me of them?’ There was another Self,—would that Self interpret This?
“For This has always been mysterious. Were I to use the word ‘Soul’ in its limited and superannuated sense as the spirit of the individual instead of the ghost of a race,—I should say it had always seemed to me as if I had two souls: each pulling in different ways. One of these represented the spirit of mutiny—impatience of all restraint, hatred of all control, weariness of everything methodical and regular, impulses to love or hate without a thought of consequences. The other represented pride and persistence;—it had little power to use the reins before I was thirty.... Whatever there is of good in me came from that dark race-soul of which we know so little. My love of right, my hate of wrong;—my admiration for what is beautiful or true;—my capacity for faith in man or woman;—my sensitiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever little success I have,—even that language-power whose physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us,—came from Her.... It is the mother who makes us,—makes at least all that makes the nobler man: not his strength or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to love. And I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”
Mrs. Brenane, into whose hands the child thus passed, was the widow of a wealthy Irishman, by whom she had been converted to Romanism, and like all converts she was “more loyal than the King.” The divorce and remarriage of her nephew incurred her bitterest resentment; she not only insisted upon a complete separation from the child, but did not hesitate to speak her mind fully to the boy, who always retained the impressions thus early instilled. In one of his letters he speaks of his father’s “rigid face, and steel-steady eyes,” and says: “I can remember seeing father only five times. He was rather taciturn, I think. I remember he wrote me a long letter from India—all about serpents and tigers and elephants—printed in Roman letters with a pen, so that I could read it easily.... I remember my father taking me up on horseback when coming into the town with his regiment. I remember being at a dinner with a number of men in red coats, and crawling about under the table among their legs.” And elsewhere he declares, “I think there is nothing of him in me, either physically or mentally.” A mistake of prejudice this; the Hearns of the second marriage bearing the most striking likeness to the elder half-brother, having the same dark skins, delicate, aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit figures. The family type is unusual and distinctive, with some racial alignment not easy to define except by the indefinite term “exotic;” showing no trace of either its English origin or Irish residence.
Of the next twelve years of Lafcadio Hearn’s life there exists but meagre record. The little dark-eyed, dark-faced, passionate boy with the wound in his heart and the gold rings in his ears—speaking English but stammeringly, mingled with Italian and Romaic—seems to have been removed at about his seventh year to Wales, and from this time to have visited Ireland but occasionally. Of his surroundings during the most impressionable period of his life it is impossible to reconstruct other than shadowy outlines. Mrs. Brenane was old; was wealthy; and lived surrounded by eager priests and passionate converts.
In “Kwaidan” there is a little story called “Hi-Mawari,” which seems a glimpse of this period:—
On the wooded hill behind the house Robert and I are looking for fairy-rings. Robert is eight years old, comely, and very wise;—I am a little more than seven,—and I reverence Robert. It is a glowing, glorious August day; and the warm air is filled with sharp, sweet scents of resin.
We do not find any fairy-rings; but we find a great many pine-cones in the high grass.... I tell Robert the old Welsh story of the man who went to sleep, unawares, inside of a fairy-ring, and so disappeared for seven years, and would never eat or speak after his friends had delivered him from the enchantment.
“They eat nothing but the points of needles, you know,” says Robert.
“Who?” I ask.
“Goblins,” Robert answers.
This revelation leaves me dumb with astonishment and awe.... But Robert suddenly cries out:—
“There is a harper!—he is coming to the house!”
And down the hill we run to hear the harper.... But what a harper! Not like the hoary minstrels of the picture-books. A swarthy, sturdy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes under scowling brows. More like a brick-layer than a bard,—and his garments are corduroy!
“Wonder if he is going to sing in Welsh?” murmurs Robert.
I feel too much disappointed to make any remarks. The harper poses his harp—a huge instrument—upon our doorstep, sets all the strings ringing with a sweep of his grimy fingers, clears his throat with a sort of angry growl, and begins,—
“Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ...”
The accent, the attitude, the voice, all fill me with repulsion unutterable,—shock me with a new sensation of formidable vulgarity. I want to cry out loud, “You have no right to sing that song!” for I have heard it sung by the lips of the dearest and fairest being in my little world;—and that this rude, coarse man should dare to sing it vexes me like a mockery,—angers me like an insolence. But only for a moment!... With the utterance of the syllables “to-day,” that deep, grim voice suddenly breaks into a quivering tenderness indescribable; then, marvellously changing, it mellows into tones sonorous and rich as the bass of a great organ,—while a sensation unlike anything ever felt before takes me by the throat.... What witchcraft has he learned—this scowling man of the road?... Oh! is there anybody else in the whole world who can sing like that?... And the form of the singer flickers and dims;—and the house, and the lawn, and all visible shapes of things tremble and swim before me. Yet instinctively I fear that man;—I almost hate him; and I feel myself flushing with anger and shame because of his power to move me thus....
“He made you cry,” Robert compassionately observes, to my further confusion,—as the harper strides away, richer by a gift of sixpence taken without thanks.... “But I think he must be a gipsy. Gipsies are bad people—and they are wizards.... Let us go back to the wood.”
We climb again to the pines, and there squat down upon the sun-flecked grass, and look over town and sea. But we do not play as before: the spell of the wizard is strong upon us both.... “Perhaps he is a goblin,” I venture at last, “or a fairy?” “No,” says Robert—“only a gipsy. But that is nearly as bad. They steal children, you know.”
“What shall we do if he comes up here?” I gasp, in sudden terror at the lonesomeness of our situation.
“Oh, he wouldn’t dare,” answers Robert—“not by daylight, you know.”
[Only yesterday, near the village of Takata, I noticed a flower which the Japanese call by nearly the same name as we do, Himawari, “The Sunward-turning,” and over the space of forty years there thrilled back to me the voice of that wandering harper.... Again I saw the sun-flecked shadows on that far Welsh hill; and Robert for a moment again stood beside me, with his girl’s face and his curls of gold.]
Recorded in this artless story are the most vivid suggestions of the nature of the boy who was to be father of the man Lafcadio Hearn, the minute observation, the quivering sensitiveness to tones, to expressions, to colours and odours; profound passions of tenderness; and—more than all—his nascent interest in the ghostly and the weird. How great a part this latter had already assumed in his young life one gathers from one of the autobiographic papers found after his death—half a dozen fragments of recollection, done exquisitely in his small beautiful handwriting, and enclosed each in fine Japanese envelopes. Characteristically they concern themselves but little with what are called “facts”—though he would have been the last to believe that emotions produced by events were not after all the most salient of human facts.
These records of impressions left upon his nature by the conditions surrounding his early years open a strange tremulous light upon the inner life of the lonely, ardent child, and from the shadows created by that light one can reconstruct perhaps more clearly the shapes about him by which those shadows were cast than would have been possible with more direct vision of them.
The first of the fragments is called