[Letters from The Raven]
Take up any book written by Lafcadio Hearn concerning Japan, and you will find the most delicate interpretation of the life of the people, their religion, their folk-songs, their customs, expressed in English that it is a delight to read. Upon further examination you will notice the calm, the serenity, the self-poise of the writer. It is as though, miraculously finding utterance, he were one of those stone Buddhas erected along the Japanese highways. He seems to have every attribute of a great writer save humor. There is hardly a smile in any of his books on Japan. One would say that the author was a man who never knew what gaiety was. One would judge that his life had lain in quiet places always, without any singular sorrow or suffering, without any struggle for existence. Judged by what Hearn told the world at large, the impression would be a correct one.
He was shy by nature. He did not take the world into his confidence. He was not one to harp on his own troubles and ask the world to sympathize with him. The world had dealt him some very hard blows,—blows which hurt sorely,—and so, while he gave the public his books, he kept himself to himself. He transferred the aroma of Japan to his writings. He did not sell the reader snap-shots of his own personality. To one man only perhaps in the whole world did the little Greek-Irishman reveal his inner thoughts, and he was one who thirty-eight years ago opened his heart and his home to the travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who had run away from a monastery in Wales and who still had part of his monk's garb for clothing when he reached America.
Hearn never discussed his family affairs very extensively, but made it clear that his father was a surgeon in the crack Seventy-sixth Regiment of British Infantry, and his mother a Greek woman of Cherigo in the Ionian Islands. The social circle to which his father belonged frowned on the mesalliance, and when the wife and children arrived in England, after the father's death, the aristocratic relatives soon made the strangers feel that they were anything but welcome.
The young Lafcadio was chosen for the priesthood, and after receiving his education partly in France and partly in England, he was sent to a monastery in Wales. As he related afterwards, he was in bad odor there from the first. Even as a boy he had the skeptical notions about things religious that were to abide with him for long years after and change him to an ardent materialist until he fell under the influence of Buddhism. One day, after a dispute with the priests, and in disgust with the course in life that had been mapped out for him, the boy took what money he could get and made off to America. After sundry adventures, concerning which he was always silent, he arrived in Cincinnati in 1869, hungry, tired, unkempt,—a boy without a trade, without friends, without money. In some way he made the acquaintance of a Scotch printer, and this man in turn introduced him to Henry Watkin, an Englishman, largely self-educated, of broad culture and wide reading, of singular liberality of views, and a lover of his kind. Watkin at this time ran a printing shop.
Left alone with the lad, who had come across the seas to be as far away as possible from his father's people, the man of forty-five surveyed the boy of nineteen and said, "Well, my young man, how do you expect to earn a living?"
"I don't know."
"Have you any trade?"
"No, sir."
"Can you do anything at all?"