He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events, the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding—a plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as Hearn was in Kobe. "The Japanese," he was wont to say, "are a very clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding."
Absence of mind, and inattention to events passing around him, was very noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the identity of the individual with whom he was conversing.
Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in Japanese. At last one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not Japanese." "Oh, really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised the fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English.
Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of the Kobe Chronicle. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's opinions and conclusions, with regard to the Japanese and their religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary qualities. The flint-edged space of the newspaper column cramped and hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but writing for money an impossibility.
Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became nobody again; and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a fool. So he had to sit and wait for the gods. His mind, however, ate itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional, romantic—and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result was an essay that the editor of the Atlantic declared was a veritable illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even he himself.
Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated considerably against his being an effective newspaper correspondent, were his personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must, above all things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did not possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!—why not collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the same doom."
No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,—a wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in Japan.
"For myself," he says in one of the Kobe Chronicle leaders, "I could sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause. Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a destroyer,—and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent the edge,—the acies,—to use the Roman word—of Occidental aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by the 'noble army.'"
Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the life in Old Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every way, with only the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against carpets—pianos—windows—curtains—brass bands—churches! and white shirts! and "yofuku"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan—the only civilised country that existed since Antiquity."
"Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated, from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things, the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,—for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro' (Heart)."