In time he came to know better than any other Occidental has ever known all those smooth layers of the Japanese nature, and to understand and admire that rough hard clay within—old and wonderful and precious. Again he says:—
“For no little time these fairy folk can give you all the softness of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream—never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, into a world that is not, and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century, over spaces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into a vanished age, back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal; the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence.”
For in time he realized that feudal Japan, with its gentleness and altruism, had attained to its noble ideal of duty by tremendous coercion of the will of the individual by the will of the rest, with a resultant absence of personal freedom that was to the individualism of the Westerner as strangling as the stern socialism of bees and ants.
These, however, were the subtler difficulties arising to confront him as the expatriation stretched into years. The immediate concern was to find means to live. His original purpose of remaining only long enough to prepare a series of illustrated articles for Harper’s Magazine—to be later collected in book form—was almost immediately subverted by a dispute with the publishers. The discovery, during the voyage, that the artist who accompanied him was to receive more than double the pay allowed for the text, angered him beyond measure, and this, added to other matters in which he considered himself unjustly treated, caused him to sever abruptly all his contracts.
It was an example of his incapacity to look at business arrangements from the ordinary point of view that he declined even to receive his royalties from the books already in print, and the publishers could discharge their obligations to him only by turning over the money to a friend, who after some years and by roundabout methods succeeded in inducing him to accept it. That his indignation at what he considered an injustice left him without resources or prospects in remote exile caused him not a moment’s hesitation in following this course. Fortunately a letter of introduction carried him within the orbit of Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, a young officer of the American navy stationed in Yokohama. Between these two very dissimilar natures there at once sprang up a warm friendship, from which Hearn derived benefits so delicately and wisely tendered that even his fierce pride and sensitiveness could accept them; and this friendship, which lasted until the close of his life, proved to be a beautiful and helpful legacy for his children. The letters to Paymaster McDonald included in Volume II have a special character of gaiety and good fellowship—with him he forgot in great measure the prepossessions of his life, and became merely the man-of-the-world, delighting in the memories of good dinners, good wine and cigars, enjoyed together; long evenings of gay talk and reminiscences of a naval officer’s polyglot experiences; long days of sea and sunshine; but agreeable as were these cheerful experiences—so foreign to his ordinary course of existence—he was continually driving from him, in comic terror, the man who drew him now and again to forget the seriousness of his task.
Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, already famous for his studies of Japanese life and literature, also became interested in the wanderer,—and through his potent influence Hearn received an appointment to the Jinjō-chūgakkō or Ordinary Middle School at Matsue, in the province Izumo, in Shimane Ken, to which he went in August of 1890.
LAFCADIO HEARN AND MITCHELL McDONALD