Produced by David Clarke, Ernest Schaal and the Online

                             LAFCADIO HEARN

      The Hearn crest is "on
      a mount vert a heron
      arg.," and the motto
      "Ardua petit ardea."

[Illustration: Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.]

                             LAFCADIO HEARN

                                   BY
                            NINA H. KENNARD

              _CONTAINING SOME LETTERS FROM LAFCADIO HEARN
                   TO HIS HALF-SISTER, MRS. ATKINSON_

                                NEW YORK
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                                 MCMXII

                          Copyright, 1912, by
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

                              REMEMBRANCE

          No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the
          thread,--softer than moonshine, thinner than
          fragrance, stronger than death,--the Gleipnir-chain
          of the Greater Memory.

                                PREFACE

When Death has set his seal on an eminent man's career, there is a not
unnatural curiosity to know something of his life, as revealed by
himself, particularly in letters to intimate friends. "All biography
ought, as much as possible, to be autobiography," says Stevenson, and of
all autobiographical material, letters are the most satisfactory.
Generally written on the impulse of the moment, with no idea of
subsequent publication, they come, as it were, like butter fresh from
the churning with the impress of the mind of the writer stamped
distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's written to Flaubert,
or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend Stilling, is worth
pages of embellished reminiscences.

The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a
particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he
himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon
with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate
sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of
his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek
an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence
the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs.
Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to
Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary
period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years
of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting,
giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and
passionately enthusiastic nature.

During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to Chamberlain
were written, he initiated a correspondence with his half-sister, Mrs.
Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His erratic nature, tamed
and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo, turned with yearning
towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years, and these Atkinson
letters, though not boasting the high intellectual level of those to
Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate playfulness, and
in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under a new and
delightful aspect.

There has been a certain amount of friction with his American editress,
owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use these
letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to criticisms
and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual outspoken
fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original form, to allow
them to pass into the hands of any one but a person intimately connected
with the Hearn family; but I can assure Mrs. Wetmore and Captain
Mitchell McDonald--those kind friends who have done so much for the sake
of Hearn's children and widow--that Mrs. Koizumi, financially, suffers
nothing from the fact of the letters not having crossed the Atlantic.

Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to make
extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss
Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also
to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests' House, Ferbane, for having put me
in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to
Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently
Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to
give me much information concerning his college career.

I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan, to Mr. W. B.
Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter
and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who
gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the
period of his engagement as sub-editor to the _Kobe Chronicle and Japan
Mail_.

But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of
Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and
"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co.,
Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In
Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs.
Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper
for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French West Indies"; and,
above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote
from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's "Letters," for without
quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to
write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn.

What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn
became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a
Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached
England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound
of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was
animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the
Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will
be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in
England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great
deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere."

How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed
amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he
looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in
that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually
growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day
stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be
studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the
subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in
exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and
interest--the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold
undisputed sway in the Far East.

    _Southmead_,
        _Farnham Royal_, 1911.

                            CONTENTS

    CHAP.                                                   PAGE

       I EARLY YEARS                                           1

      II BOYHOOD                                              23

     III TRAMORE                                              33

      IV USHAW                                                40

       V LONDON                                               52

      VI CINCINNATI                                           65

     VII VAGABONDAGE                                          81

    VIII MEMPHIS                                              88

      IX NEW ORLEANS                                          93

       X WIDER HORIZON                                       102

      XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS                111

     XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS                          124

    XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE                                137

     XIV WEST INDIES                                         148

      XV JAPAN                                               160

     XVI MATSUE                                              172

    XVII MARRIAGE                                            179

   XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI                                 187

     XIX KUMAMOTO                                            199

      XX OUT OF THE EAST                                     231

     XXI KOBE                                                238

    XXII TOKYO                                               260

   XXIII USHIGOME                                            274

    XXIV NISHI OKUBO                                         286

     XXV HIS DEATH                                           299

    XXVI HIS FUNERAL                                         310

   XXVII VISIT TO JAPAN                                      313

  XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO                         328

         CONCLUSION                                          339

         INDEX                                               351

                LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                          FACING
                                                            PAGE

    LAFCADIO HEARN AND HIS WIFE.               _Frontispiece_

    MAJOR CHARLES BUSH HEARN (HEARN'S FATHER).                16

    MRS. ATKINSON (HEARN'S HALF-SISTER).                     204

    KAZUO (HEARN'S SON) AND HIS NURSE.                       220

    KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).                  228

    DOROTHY ATKINSON.                                        232

    KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).              314

    CARLETON ATKINSON.                                       318

                             LAFCADIO HEARN

                               CHAPTER I
                              EARLY YEARS

     "Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other
     microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more,
     indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless
     ultimates--imaging sky, and land, and life--filled with
     perpetual mysterious shudderings--and responding in some wise
     to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In
     each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences
     infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in
     every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn
     from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal
     peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a
     dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that
     appears to be is but the thrilling of it--sun, moon, and
     stars--earth, sky, and sea--and mind and man, and space and
     time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the
     Shadow-maker shapes for ever."

On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his
grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio,
Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura."

The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink
faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or
mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the
appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and
remarkable figures of the end of the last century.

Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin
of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or
curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.

On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock--mixture of
Saxon and Celt--which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal
lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United
Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's
grandfather--as has been stated--came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke
of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The
Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace,
and about the same time--as recognition for services done, we
conclude--became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of
Westmeath.

A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County
Waterford--has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside
place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers
at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev.
Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman
Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present
cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of
the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is
through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship
with the County Westmeath portion of the family.

As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an
impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records
certainly of several Daniel Hearns--it is the Christian name that
furnishes the clue--occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire
and Somersetshire.

In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of
Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty
years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally
"cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the
Herons--pronounced Hearn--to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a
well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's
"Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of
Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights."

Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his
name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'--heron with wings
down--for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at
the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the
place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries,
are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the
various modifications of the word--namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern,
Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic
languages it is _irren_, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. _Hirn_,
the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin _errare_
and Frankish _errant_, with the Celtic _err_ names are related, though
the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West
Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in
the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies
of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or
gipsies, is referred to.

I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly
maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their
veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of
gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered
to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her
head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger
said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that
Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons
and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to
show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible
sign of Romany descent.

Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members
of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and
black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his
mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his
second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element--quite
distinct from the Japanese type--is so strong as to have impressed
itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most
remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The
near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft
voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton
Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of
the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies
themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is
not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio
Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may,
on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were
looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India.

On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full
of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to
state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn
belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek;
Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand,
maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the
agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine
Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at
various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his
mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese
census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to
return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands.
The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian,
half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese
origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on
his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes,
migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the
Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original
Venetian Maltese.

"We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite
addition--the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us,
stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an
exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life
all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested
themselves--the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the
revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the
oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited
from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.

From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country
for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel
of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in
the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family
distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she
bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father
Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to
see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.

Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while
quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He
never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by
the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He
was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic
and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew--"Veritable blunderers," as
Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world."

Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some
photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to
represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good
deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have
never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked
something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother.
I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of
soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the
'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my
firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular
directions--guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions
most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong
characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a
resemblance in his children by two different mothers--and I want so much
to find out if the resemblance is also psychological."

Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his
father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army
List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant
surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical
Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849
infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At
Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and
strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English
government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor,
additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they
arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were
quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands.

Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this
half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the
entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many
stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in
their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female
portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes
this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to
join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics
were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not
return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore,
necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep;
the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous
ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.

But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there
is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways.
Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with
equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious
tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for
the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had
never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use.

Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish
country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by
Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County
Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress.
A lock of hair was enclosed:--

                    "Dearest and nearest to my heart,
                     Thou art fairer than the silver moon,
                     And I trust to see thee soon."

There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with
the following:--

          "Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love
           And evermore will beat for thee!!"

"Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power
of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.

Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a
countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and
she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still
smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa
Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they
met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo,
but communication between the islands was frequent.

As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland,
of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in
consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more
than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted
opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary
wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as
in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a
daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she
was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount
of friction.

Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient
Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there
by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island,
excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern
extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock
whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends."
Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled
together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the
altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that
clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the
divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling
down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known
as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a
glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous
haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.

Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been
born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world--the world
that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty--impressed
itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted
shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral
dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with
its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for
instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a
dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court--his mother,
presumably--chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the
celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and
temples of the ancient Leucadia.... Awakening, he heard, in the night,
the moaning of the real sea--the muttering of the Tide of the Returning
Ghosts.

Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military
occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were
withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his
regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight
typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son
should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his
service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta.
How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had
left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.

Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having
been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer
things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a
monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint
the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy
may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have
been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old.
He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of
the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn
proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard.
Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the
way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"--indeed, all
his belongings--were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it
was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task
entrusted to him.

Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at
Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred
to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready
pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript;
the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and
punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are
very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous
routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of
social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the
interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a
text from the Gospels and Epistles.

Because of the political and religious animus existing between
Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more
prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England.
All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were
members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious
movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial
functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with
which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a
Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious
observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard
Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation,
thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in
Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate
opinions.

On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard
arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7
o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a
day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless
and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady!
Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition
to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter
from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear,
beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears
of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us."
Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by
our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as
attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an
interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs.
Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the
misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later,
in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a
word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to
perfectly harmless actions and statements.

Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son,
having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves
and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is
easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding
herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the
murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major
portion of the capital of Ireland.

The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests
Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory.
She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and
unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to
cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the
life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of
the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the
impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was
capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe
castigation.

When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in
imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he
imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from
their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them.
In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to
dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.

When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the
idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually
became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission
of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He
then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the
sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the
eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another
time, another heaven.

Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he
does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his
cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers,
after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he
felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated,
with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as
his own.

"My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister,
Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this
reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark,
with large black eyes--very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap
it. I slapped it--simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was
immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I
deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in
such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences."

The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered
amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane--"Sally Brenane,"
Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin
Brenane--a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means--and had
adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak,
bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in
common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the
people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted
to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed
for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The
delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime
favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady
was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman
Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and
property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband.

In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn
found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands,
something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent
fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which
the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she
was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for
Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes,
accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in
strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance
as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded
round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them.

Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in
marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was
allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably
laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman,
when she went for her daily drive.

In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's
diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies.
Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles
had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on
August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great
hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the
latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an
entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton."

The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was
apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of
storm!

Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace and
charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the
light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and
unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and
ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about
the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by
chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the
only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free
again, and was living as a widow in Dublin.

What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be
surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary.
"October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking
well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once
more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little
boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we
were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of
Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained
of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we
are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay.

An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We
are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst
stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw
herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now,
whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern
nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person,"
Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we
only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people
on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of
silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that
the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack
was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year
later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea.

Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the
battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and
returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some
little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the
scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this
time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred
feet under the dinner-table.

[Illustration: Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).]

It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew,
or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these
years--the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father
and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his
mother's brain.

In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety,
strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says,
"remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin
soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order
for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy
with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of
brotherhood, I was totally indifferent--especially for the reason that
he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I
followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him
downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What
afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was
scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again."

The following reminiscence requires little comment:--

"I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was
afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds
above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way.
Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and
knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady
came to meet us. She seemed to me tall--but a child cannot judge stature
well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed
to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down
and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I
found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given
me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never
to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I
told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was
frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I
remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not
tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after."

The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's
stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and
Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time
in Dublin.

Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny,
odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult
to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long,
lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent,
myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he
tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from
him.

"Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells
of--the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan
to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the
same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her
hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said
angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly
beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face
hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we
wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down
easily. 'Ah!' she said:--'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my
hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a
large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When
I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I
cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and
rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her
mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and
went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I
think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a
grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was
cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But _how_ I would
love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day--great
huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels.

"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a
little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together
like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then
much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than
now. I rather think I should like to see her."

Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun
was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more
wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at
Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life.

In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from
Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea
is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma,
the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a
magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and
the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love
that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to
be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only
of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles
Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on
Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever
person, beloved by her children and all her family connections,
especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of
stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her
telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light
before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to
sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a
charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would
keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the
years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become
ridiculously old."[1]

[1] "Out of the East," Gay & Hancock.

"The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister,
when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see
me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had
become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his
head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very
angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him
again.

"I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big
beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him
by some tale told her about his life in Paris."

The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's
luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after
her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her
interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no
proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some
members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see
her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa
Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the
vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and
misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the
tablets of her memory.

After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles
Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa
Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the
record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major
Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.

Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded
with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of
Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition
that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith.

Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was
housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that
made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy
at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of
those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his
grand-aunt.

Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard
in Paris.

Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article
written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati
friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked
his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His
father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson,
"printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember
he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote
to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid
you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she
wished me to, and I was lazy."

Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on
his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of
Indian fever, on board the English steamship _Mula_ at Suez, thus ending
a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years.

With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end.
We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined
nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame,
remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's
advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness--that tenderness
generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the
arena of life.

                               CHAPTER II
                                BOYHOOD

     "You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with
     which we look at a thing--half-angered by inability to
     analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think
     the feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says,
     'the doors have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt
     in looking at that tree, was it only your pleasure, no,--many
     who would have loved you, were looking through you and
     remembering happier things. The different ways in which
     different places and things thus make appeal would be partly
     explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences
     reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest.
     But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness
     as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then
     how much dead love lives again, how many ecstasies of the
     childhoods of a hundred years must revive!"

Most of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs. Brenane seems to have been
passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper Leeson Street; at Tramore, a
seaside place on the coast of Waterford in Ireland; at Linkfield Place,
Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry Molyneux, a Roman Catholic
friend of Mrs. Brenane's--destined to play a considerable part in the
boy's life--and in visiting about among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose
name was legion.

Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house,
Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have
records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his
sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio
stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea
was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now.

Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to
have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from
thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous
idea--common to most of Hearn's biographers--has originated from Hearn
himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales,
but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious
genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore
preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere.
Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions
of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's
"Wanderings in Wales."

Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful
dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan,"[2] one of Hearn's last
books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of
which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the
dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in
his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as
any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the
forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his
memory, and calls them "Welsh hills."

[2] The publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who
ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China,
when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the
allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real
Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and
strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his
life for a friend."

The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes,
under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known
character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if
all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied
her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the
audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong.

Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of
Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent
resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib,
his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper
place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth--

          "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
           Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..."

The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who
was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles
Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for
her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a
coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance
of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke
suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and
everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose
to his eyes.

In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus
alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in
the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a
child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I
forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been
eight or nine years old--I might have been twelve. And that's all."

It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who
could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday.

Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These
visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's
life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered,
spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon
Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience
of the artistic productions of the Far East.

One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a
sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in
every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient
gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence
these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a
lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid
description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the
midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather
beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the
roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the
Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.

By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to
manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it
would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought
to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much
alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was,
moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an
incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same
feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except
when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is
finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only
learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their
opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of
life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so
as a child; I was a perfect imp."

Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his
children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself
was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to
taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild
imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief--traps
arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened,
the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he
selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a
hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and
said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono'
(flatterer) and run away and hide myself."

He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when
she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days
after, she would discover it half-rotten.

Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and
touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the
charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally
Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an
old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a
lap-dog."

But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was
one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore,
and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great
extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison
Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys,
and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that
was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was
staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book
Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he
left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion
with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy,
of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the
transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs.
Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling,
whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled,
for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared
himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion
over the Celtic mind.

Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a
prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled
"Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung
and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy.

He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by
himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had
children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings,
ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried
with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not
forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind
the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier
there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the
greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not
"ghosts."

The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he
maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain,
brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before
the accident at Ushaw.

The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish
glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the
ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from
beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from
eyestrain.

After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen
envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his
small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a
book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre
de la Pitié et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on
his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to
the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen
through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant
incidents made too important.

"Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall
scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial
self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in
me--thus producing obvious incongruities."

"My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish
mind by a certain cousin Jane--apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a
convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow
intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell
fire if he did not believe in God.

When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by
fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later,
dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him
a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It
included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss
Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint
translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human
Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological
book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were
apparently uninfluenced by her religious views.

In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane,
Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its
smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic
churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it
was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business
men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in
England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of
those who wanted to come and go daily to London.

Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically
to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at
various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband
in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street.

When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt--we see his name assigned by the
Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866--the house at Redhill was
given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled
permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to
leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time
had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment.

Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew
of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the
second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the
incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance.

Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction--but was not
sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of
Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on
the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and
called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he
goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was
dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the
property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the
reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just
what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she
was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands
of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was
suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been
brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four
or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt
told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was
soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on
the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in
having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an
annuity of (I think, but am not sure) £500. 'Henry,' who had 'made
himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property
into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own,
as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into
the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards
sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them
in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told
to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon
after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many
things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor,
but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find
out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled
his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a
daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'--at fourteen. I
used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a
year or two....

"Well,--there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any
more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under
pressure of work, I have to say good-bye.

                             "Lovingly ever,
                                "LAFCADIO HEARN."

In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she
told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used
to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't
think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if
accurately known, give revelation about some other matters."

                                TRAMORE

     "If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in
     early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to
     that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if
     you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the
     fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once
     breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean,
     and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers....
     When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars
     dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning
     hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of
     the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long
     intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some
     memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand
     and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'?

     "So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself
     revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles
     away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has
     the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and
     shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant
     of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new,
     is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace
     you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails
     are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the
     gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky
     and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly
     ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a
     delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life
     restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder
     of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your
     eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the
     awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its
     own thick breath.'"

Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end
of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the
picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite
resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light
wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule
supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves
come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break
with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay
presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever
on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.

There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when
impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is
stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's
brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea
listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of
sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent
of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness,
something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse,
raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos,
sometimes of inspiration.

Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so
bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes
unconsciously, memories of these childish days.

At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years
later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there
came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at
something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether
suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo
hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black
beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable
in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly
there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a
coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of
which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....

Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had
listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he
remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world,
the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion
was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries,
the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.

The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a
fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"[3] shows his inspiration at its best.
Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the
_Commercial_, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls
the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the
marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain
has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of
last century.

[3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was
published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.

"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic
production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that
constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then
memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with
sudden light. _Chita_, at the Viosca Chénière, conquering her terror of
the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters
curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the
dawn--like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; _Chita_
learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which,
the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds,
darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in
level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own
childish existence at Tramore.

For him, as for _Chita_, there was no factitious life those days, no
obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb
revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no
cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in
gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter
in the trees without.

When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long
days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his
especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest
for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every
Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian
warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are
to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.

Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he
was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many
additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often
too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered
for his habit of "drawing the long bow."

Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly
during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was
not distinguished by accuracy of statement.

The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those
surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford
fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from
wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world.
While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was
building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light
of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which
none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul
entrenched itself.

Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears
filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he
saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens
and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and
divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of
beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it,
recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and
existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing
of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from
countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from
the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."

It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in
the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as
having been found amongst his papers after his death.

His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with
a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any
religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual
sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly,
stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however,
exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing
figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all
the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure
after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear.
Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he
remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan
statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the
gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediæval creed
seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.

The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow;
the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books
disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places,
but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was
placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many
figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had
been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross
strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of
beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational
value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried
persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By
this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....

After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things
began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green
of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before
unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for
he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty
and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees,
in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At
moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so
deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him
a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.

A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he
had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the
"Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of
her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and
difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city
of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.

                               CHAPTER IV
                                 USHAW

     "Really there is nothing quite so holy as a College
     friendship. Two lads, absolutely innocent of everything in
     the world or in life, living in ideals of duty and dreams of
     future miracles, and telling each other all their troubles,
     and bracing each other up. I had such a friend once. We were
     both about fifteen when separated. Our friendship began with
     a fight, of which I got the worst; then my friend became for
     me a sort of ideal which still lives. I should be almost
     afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other
     so): but your letter brought his voice and face back--just as
     if his ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder."

St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, is situated on a slope of the Yorkshire
Hills, near Durham. In the estimation of English Roman Catholics, it
stands next to Stonyhurst as an educational establishment. Since Patrick
Lafcadio Hearn's days it has counted amongst its pupils Francis Thomson,
the poet, and Cardinal Wiseman, the archbishop, both of whom ever
retained an affectionate and respectful memory of their Alma Mater.

Lafcadio Hearn was sent there from Redhill in Surrey, arriving on
September 9th, 1863, at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Brenane is not likely
to have been a determining influence in sending him to college. For all
her narrow-minded piety, the old lady was warm-hearted and intensely
attached to Lafcadio, and must have known how unfitted he was for
collegiate life in consequence of constitutional delicacy and defective
eyesight.

We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his religious
education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs.
Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a
hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been
prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the
Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early
impressions.

That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is
incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to
preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says:
"You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the
priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic
Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the
pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic."

Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a
school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the
part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the
authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the
"mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was
quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This
disposes of one of the many Hearn myths.

That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities
of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the
Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject"
was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit
that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in
his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and
conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of
forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in
Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire
absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching.

All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against
prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against
restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst
those whom the French term _deséquilibrés_, one of those ill-poised and
erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to
madness.

Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism
was artistic and æsthetic.

Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and
informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient
Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as
exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof.

"I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my
back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I
could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe
that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to
explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the
folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I
immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my
imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground,
but also to become the sky!"

That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of
discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were
the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded
ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very
stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist?

If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been
at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a
contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the
little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his
prototype, Flaubert, there was a _fond d'ecclésiastique_ in Hearn's
nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry,
and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and
pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line?

It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional
youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a
university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his
eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped
himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger,
better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from
Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is
plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry,
French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to
instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre
Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely
ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition
for three years of his residence at Ushaw.

He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance on
many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were
cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions
of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight
in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible
dream of modern æsthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.'

"Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas, and
the Sagas, and the Chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of the
Vikings and Berserks, he had at his finger ends, because they were
mighty and awesomely grand."

Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from Kobe,
in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me incapacitated
to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of having
dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge of some
one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of
so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything I
learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some
of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..."

In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D----, one of those in his class
at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you much about
him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember him as a boy
about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming with delight
at some of his many mischievous plots with which he disturbed the
College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or three classes,
or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But he was always
considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and the terror of
his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I fancy very
popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody, but he
loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or of
glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,'[4] who was one of
his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many whippings, wrote
poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in fact, quite
irresponsible."

[4] I give this name as it is written in Canon D----'s letter.

Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of Ushaw
College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:--

"He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one
could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in
evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks
of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very
respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped
muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc.

"As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his
class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly
first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who
were considered very good English writers--for boys. In other subjects,
he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose he exerted
himself except in English.

"I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to say
and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from the
Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and brightness,
disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He was so very
curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that you felt he
might do anything in different surroundings."

Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat the
same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this
subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably
getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati,
Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being
given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little
fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it.

His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was
exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very
close to his eyes. He had a great taste for the strange and weird, and
had a certain humour of a grim character. There was always something
mysterious about him, a mystery which he delighted in increasing rather
than dissipating. The confession which he is supposed to have made to
Father William Wrennal that he hoped the devil would come to him in the
form of a beautiful woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the
desert, was worthy of his fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic
mischief and humour.

Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been
Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary
talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel.
His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed
and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already
noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what
chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once
rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had
never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects,
and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque.
Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low
red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces, and glinting
on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts
shrieking in the gale--these were favourite topics of conversation, and
in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich.

"I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I
were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in, I
think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'[5]
This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not
permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A
note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this
library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was
eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now
more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a
correct copy of it:--

[5] "High Figures" is the name of a class or "School" (as we call
"classes" at Ushaw), _e.g._ Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax,
Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or class for
two years, _e.g._ High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to be
moved up into the next class, Grammar. Each class has its own library,
so that a boy in the class of High Figures would not be allowed to
intrude into the Library of the school or class above him, Grammar.

          "'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door,
            Massive and quaint, of the days of yore;
            When the spectral forms of the mighty dead
            Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread;
            When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak
               Shrieks forth his note so wild,
            And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak
               In the moonlight soft and mild,
            When the dead in the lonely vaults below
               Rise up in grim array
            And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow,
               Weird forms, unknown in day;
            When the dismal death-bells clang so near,
               Sounding o'er world and lea,
            And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear
               Like the moan of the sobbing sea.'

"He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the
initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make
sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd.
His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then
romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when
the passing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for
school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of
his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he
were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the
College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell
summoned us again to study.

"A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio
said his address was longer--'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near
Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, Space,
God.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest.

"You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland or
Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during the
vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I believe
I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having told me
anything of his relations with his family, or of his childhood."

It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter
written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a
heading to this chapter.

At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of Hearn's
subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one
of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to slip from his
hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation
supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by
the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched out at
school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in Jesuitical
schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in Dublin in the
hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation.

Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They
must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton,
has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been
disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the Japanese army.

There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea
of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of
the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he imagined, to
the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of
youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe
limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests,
and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which
Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos.

Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He
never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much
disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in
appearance, especially to women, always pursued him.

Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power,
Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power.

Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he
alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist,
declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more
mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective
sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the
conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as
it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into
others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The
quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind.
"I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being
haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he
says, in his essay on "Dust."

The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and
accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of
his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No
doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of
the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept
him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power.

It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw.
Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of
action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons
were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question
of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence
of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his
grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees.

Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his
holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as
time went on.

Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable any
longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded her
that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and declared
her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a Christian
household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that she, who
only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned a home
of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail himself of
Molyneux's hospitality.

At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage
which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane
bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane,
had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady.
The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the
Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore.

Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited it
would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont to
say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a
necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value
betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I
am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself
to things of the imagination and spirit."

Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live upon,
might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating vague
philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of being
driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and children?

                               CHAPTER V
                                 LONDON

     "In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to
     self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a
     little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody
     else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of
     Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly
     abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no
     escape, save by an iron ladder.

     "As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each
     rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had
     quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the
     least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the
     climber."[6]

[6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied
her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at
Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in
London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To
them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly
comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only
ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr.
Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was
cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open,
or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and
plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and
excitable imagination.

The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law.
It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling
against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and
luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne
and chicken mayonnaise on board.

Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a
biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance.
Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping,
was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he
had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he
might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work.

As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take
refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by
his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to
submit to discipline or restraint of any kind.

Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this
period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some
of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to
finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home,
surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in
spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of
his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was
forced to become a servant.

This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of
fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he
arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for
there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in
Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his
destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was
probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr.
Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses.

With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum
given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the
first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio
that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles
away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying
himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all
the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by
official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can
imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during
the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no
dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or
trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going.

At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the
experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to
the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to
the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up.
He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never
possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of
the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness
was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the
psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive
recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that
the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to
spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self,
lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most
efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.

Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then,
as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or
when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of
rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the
body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight
and acute dyspepsia.

Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from
communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he
possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in
silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and
aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.

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.

"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be
of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there
never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the
utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the
myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar
even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no
doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of
pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may
revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual
being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of
generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the
darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest
moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7]

[7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock.

It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England
in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the
wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the
future.

Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in
every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and
the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at
Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his
fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his
candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of
art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in
writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in
dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of
October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers,
called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to
lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of
sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The
_Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published
in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of
Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the
intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to
Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first
time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans,
and _kakemonos_ embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his
whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon
marbles."

Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and
evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy
and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single
theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text,
seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature
in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by
Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he
maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been
written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy."

Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to
Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the
creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached
his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have
wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that
came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to
think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been
fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter,"
indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters
contributed to the _Commercial_ from New Orleans. There is a certain
pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and
character of _Midwinter_ made to his imagination. "What had I known of
strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as
hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had
known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in
corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and
cheated and starved."

Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his
lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period
intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain
endeavoured to penetrate.

Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven,"
alludes 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."

In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency
to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow,
told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at
the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had
been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His
brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says
that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France,
and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that
Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to
Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has
been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic
colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of
every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of
the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or
destroyed.

Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads
to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and
good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman
Catholic institution of the _Petits Précepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen.
Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he
took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he
went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle
Richard, who was living there at the time.

Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor,
disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort
of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The
church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore,
not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as
far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and
renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.

It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage
of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris,
where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to
express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to
clutch the Unattainable."

A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital
memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.

It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war,
when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and
luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the
world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin,"
while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon
Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists
who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of
their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_,
and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were
inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the
painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, François Millet, in
poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing
"The Sowers" and "The Angelus."

Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of
Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle
it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's.
Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however
lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers.
However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty
to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.

It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that
ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the
moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for
itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of
Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of
Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of
his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented
exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit,
which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and
Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He
could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves
of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in
praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the
originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.

It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert
Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands,
Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the
same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about
the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also
frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which
he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"--"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes
later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.

In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who
had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed
to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he
was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's
brother-in-law.

It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to
propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have
well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any
inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.

                               CHAPTER VI
                               CINCINNATI

     "... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus
     and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the
     Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every
     one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the
     Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't
     kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and
     I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my
     soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome
     question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply
     telling her, 'I don't know.'"[8]

[8] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later,
Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English
printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I
asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know
anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay
you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can
feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming
department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of
tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr.
Watkin's frugal meals."

In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation
that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his
shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in
the year 1859.

"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"

"To write, sir."

"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first,
try your hand at writing later on."

Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied
reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge
of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to,
but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other
than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one
time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy,
Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant,
regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's
weird tales.

The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely
near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had
befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy,