“When writing the story of ‘Miminashi Hōïchi,’ he was forgetful of the approach of evening. In the darkness of the evening twilight he was sitting on the cushion in deep thought. Outside of the paper-screens of his room, I for a trial called with a low voice, ‘Hōïchi! Hōïchi!’ ‘Yes, I am a blind man. Who are you?’ he replied from within; he had been imagining as if he himself were H?ïchi with a biwa in his hand. Whenever he writes he is entirely absorbed with the subject. On those days I one day went to the city and bought a little doll of blind priest with a biwa. I put it secretly upon his desk. As he found it he was overjoyed with it and seemed as if he met an expecting friend. When a rustling noise of fallen leaves in the garden woods he said seriously: ‘Listen! the Heike are fallen. They are the sounds of waves at Dan-no-ura.’ And he listened attentively. Indeed sometimes I thought he was mad, because he seemed too frequently he saw things that were not and heard things that were not.”
His life outside of the university and of his own home he narrowed down to a point where the public began to create legends about him, so seldom was he seen. The only person ever able to draw him forth was his friend Mitchell McDonald, whose sympathy and hospitality he constantly fled from and constantly yielded to. To Mrs. Fenollosa he wrote:
“My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter—with infinite subtlety—spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go ... and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them. They help me to maintain the isolation absolutely essential to thinking.... Blessed be my enemies, and forever honoured all them that hate me!
“But my friends!—ah! my friends! They speak so beautifully of my work; they say they want more of it,—and yet they would destroy it! They do not know what it costs, and they would break the wings and scatter the feather-dust, even as the child that only wanted to caress the butterfly. And they speak of converse and sympathy.... And they say,—only a day—just an afternoon—but each of them says this thing. And the sum of the days is a week of work dropped forever into the Abyss.... I must not even think about people’s kind words and faces, but work, work, work, while the Scythe is sharpening within vision.”
Under the strain of constant work his eyesight again began to fail, and in 1902 he wrote to friends in America asking for aid to find work there, desiring to consult a specialist, and to bring for instruction in English his beloved Kazuo—from whom he would never be parted for a day. He was entitled to his sabbatical year of vacation from the university, and while he took advantage of it he wished to form other connections, as intrigues among those inimical to him made him fear for the tenure of his position. His family had increased by the birth of another son, and his responsibilities—with weakening lungs and eyesight—began to weigh heavily on his mind. An arrangement was made for him to lecture for a season in Cornell University at a salary of $2500, and these lectures he at once began to prepare. When, however, he applied for leave it was refused him, and an incident occurring at this juncture, of the intrusion of an English traveller into his classroom during one of his lectures—an incident which had its origin in mere curiosity,—seemed to his exacerbated imagination to have a significance out of all proportion to its real meaning; and convinced that it was intended as a slight by the authorities in their purpose to be rid of him, he resigned. The students—aware that influences were at work to rob him of his place—made some demonstrations of resentment, but finally abandoned them at his personal request.
He plunged more deeply, at once, into the preparation of his work for the American lectures, but shortly before he was to have sailed for America the authorities at Cornell withdrew from their contract on the plea that the epidemic of typhoid at Ithaca the previous summer had depleted the funds at their command.
Vigorous efforts were at once undertaken by his friends in America to repair this breach of contract by finding him employment elsewhere, with but partial success, but all these efforts were rendered useless by a sudden and violent illness, attended by bleeding from the lungs, and brought on by strain and anxiety. After his recovery the lectures prepared for Cornell were recast to form a book, but the work proved a desperate strain upon already weakened forces.
Mrs. Hearn says this:—