Volume I Part 7 (2/2)
CHAPTER III
A MASTER-WORKMAN
It was characteristic of the oddity of Hearn's whole life that his way to the Farthest East should have led through the Farthest West, and that his way to a land where one's first i strayed into a child's world of faery,--so elfishly frail and fantastically sht destroy a baby's dear ”antic as e of the contrast and amazement are recorded in ”My First Day”--the introductory paper in ”Glimpses of Unfaible and volatile as a perfu as well as everybody is small and queer and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the s little people in their blue costu about in straw rain-coats and straw sandals--bare-li bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their _geta_
And suddenly a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before a weirdly sculptured portal,--a sensation of dreaon-swar over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and the shadow of rey masonry, must all vanish presentlybecause the forons, the Chinese grotesqueries of carving--do not really appear to s dreamed A moment and the delusion vanishes; the romance of reality returns, with freshened consciousness of all that which is truly and deliciously new; the ical transparencies of distance, the wondrous delicacy of tones, the enorht of the summer blue, and the white soft witchery of the japanese sun”
That first witchery of japan never altogether failed to hold hireat work of his life, though he exclaims in one of his letters of a later ti japan! It is the hardest country to learn--except China--in the world” He greare too in ti into the spirit of other races, must forever remain alien to the Oriental After so and the difficulties of the language render it impossible for an educated japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European Here is an astounding fact The japanese child is as close to you as a European child--perhaps closer and sweeter because infinitely more natural and naturally refined Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the farther you push him from you
Why?--Because here the race antipodalism shows itself As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more he will think in the opposite direction froh he arrived at a happy moment, his artistic _Wanderjahre_ done, and the tools of his art, after long and bitter apprenticeshi+p, at last obedient to his will and thought in the hand of a master-workman; the material hich he was to labour new and beautiful; yet he never ceased to believe that his true medium was denied to him In one of his letters he cries:--
”Pretty to talk of my 'pen of fire' I've lost it Well, the fact is, it is of no use here There isn't any fire here It is all soft, dreaentle, hazy, vapoury, visionary,--a land where lotus is a common article of diet,--and where there is scarcely any real sus Don't please iine there are any tropics here Ah! the tropics--they still pull at s Goodness! my real field was there--in the Latin countries, in the West Indies and Spanish Auese and Spanish cities, and steaet romances nobody else could find And I could have done it, and made books that would sell for twenty years”
Perhaps he never hireater in iathering up in the outlying parts of the neorld the diht seek in Spanish-Aold-threaded, glowing tapestries brought to adorn the exile of Conquistadores--he had the good fortune to be chosen to assist at one of the great births of history Out of ”a race as primitive as the Etruscan before Rohtyfull-arreat rey hidden shell of a feeble-looking pupa He saw the fourteenth century turn swiftly, aly, into the twentieth, and his twelve volumes of studies of the japanese people were to have that unique and lasting value that would attach to equally painstaking records of Greek life before the Persian wars Inestimable, immortal, would be such books--could they anywhere be found--setting down the faiths, the traditions, the daily lives, the songs, the dances, the naends, the humble lore of plants, birds, and insects, of that people who suddenly stood up at Thermopylae, broke the wave from the East, made Europe possible, and set the cornerstone of Occidental thought This hat Lafcadio Hearn, a little penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer had come to do for japan To make immortal the story of the childhood of a people as sireat wave of conquest from the West and to rejuvenate the most ancient East
So naturally humble was his estimate of himself that it is safe to assert that not at this tinitude and importance of the work he had been set to do For the moment he was concerned only with the odylic charm of the new faery world in which he found hiidities underlying the charm No Occidental at that period had as yet divined the iron core underlying the silken courtesy of the japanese character Within the first lustrurasped the truth, and expressed it in a metaphor In the volume entitled ”Out of the East” he says:--
”Under all the a self-control and patience there exists an adaerous to reach In the house of any rich fauest is likely to be shown some of the heirlooms A pretty little box, perhaps, will be set before you Opening it you will see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with a silk running-cord decked with tiny tassels Very soft and choice the silk is, and elaborately figured Whatand see within another bag, of a different quality of silk, but very fine Open that, and lo! a third, which contains a fourth, which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth, which contains a seventh bag, which contains the strangest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay that you ever beheld Yet it is not only curious but precious; it may be more than a thousand years old”
In time he came to know better than any other Occidental has ever known all those smooth layers of the japanese nature, and to understand and adh hard clay within--old and wonderful and precious
Again he says:--
”For no little tiive you all the softness of sleep But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in coet the dream--never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, into a world that is not, and never could be your own You have been transported out of your own century, over spaces enorotten, into a vanished age, back to soypt or Nineveh That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways Fortunate mortal; the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence”
For in tientleness and altruism, had attained to its noble ideal of duty by tremendous coercion of the will of the individual by the will of the rest, with a resultant absence of personal freedo as the stern socialism of bees and ants
These, however, were the subtler difficulties arising to confront him as the expatriation stretched into years The iinal purpose of reh to prepare a series of illustrated articles for _Harper's Magazine_--to be later collected in book form--was almost immediately subverted by a dispute with the publishers The discovery, during the voyage, that the artist who accompanied him was to receive ered him beyond measure, and this, added to other matters in which he considered himself unjustly treated, caused him to sever abruptly all his contracts
It was an exaements from the ordinary point of view that he declined even to receive his royalties from the books already in print, and the publishers could discharge their obligations to hi over the money to a friend, who after so hination at what he considered an injustice left him without resources or prospects in re this course Fortunately a letter of introduction carried hi officer of the American navy stationed in Yokohama Between these two very dissi up a warm friendshi+p, from which Hearn derived benefits so delicately and wisely tendered that even his fierce pride and sensitiveness could accept them; and this friendshi+p, which lasted until the close of his life, proved to be a beautiful and helpful legacy for his children The letters to Paymaster McDonald included in Voluood fellowshi+p--with hireat measure the prepossessions of his life, and beca in the ether; long evenings of gay talk and re days of sea and sunshi+ne; but agreeable as were these cheerful experiences--so foreign to his ordinary course of existence--he was continually driving froain to forget the seriousness of his task
Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, already famous for his studies of japanese life and literature, also becah his potent influence Hearn received an appointakko or Ordinary Middle School at Matsue, in the province Izuust of 1890
[Illustration: LAFCADIO HEARN AND MITChell McDONALD]
Matsue lies on the northern coast, near that western end of japan which trails like a strea the coast of China It is a town of about thirty-five thousand inhabitants, situated at the junction of Lake shi+nji and the Bay of Naka-umi, and was at that time far out of the line of travel or Western influence, thea peculiarly favourable opportunity for the study of feudal japan The ruins of the castle of the Daiun Ieyasu,--as overthrown in the wars of the Meiji, still frowned from the wooded hill above the city, and still his love of art, his conservatisid laws of politeness were stamped deeply into the culture of the subjects over whos housed the schools of that Western learning he had so contemned, and which the newcomer had been hired to teach But this was a teacher of different calibre from those who had preceded him Here was one not a holder of the ”little yellow e of forty of receiving new i a civilization alien to all its previous knowledge
Out of this remarkable experience--a stray fro about in the unrealized world of the Fourteenth--grew that portion of his first japanese book, ”Glimpses of Unfamiliar japan,”
which he called ”Frolish Teacher,” and ”The Chief City of the Province of the Gods” It is interesting to compare the impression made upon the teacher by his pupils with the opinion forn teacher