Lafcadio Hearn

by Nina H. Kennard

Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.

After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic material?

Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling, as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance, that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. Analysing the feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising; for our best work is often out of the unconscious."

Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which was possible to a man of his temperament.

"All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all, his own genius.

"Well, you too have had your revelations,—which means deep pains. One must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making."

Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings, strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum, where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain? Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good and true.'"

We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the white-winged ships, "swift Hermæ of traffic—ghosts of the infinite ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day destined to become the interpreter.

We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were the sheets—destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical stuff—that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.

"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two little words—'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain—pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and dead suns.