Japanese Lacquer
What was the matter with Lafcadio Hearn? No American has written prose more delicate and vividly beautiful than his, nor has any one else—not even Yone Noguchi—put into English so clear a revelation of Japan’s soul. Yet after an hour with “Kwaidan” or “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan” the normal reader is wearied and, instead of being grateful to the erudite and skillful author, regards him with actual dislike.
Why is this? Is it because Hearn had a morbid fondness for the tragic, and loved to dwell on mental, physical and spiritual disease? This is partly the reason, yet De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe inspire no such aversion. Is it because Hearn’s style is too rich, exquisite and precious? Walter Pater had the same fault, but Walter Pater is read with delight by Hearn’s enemies. Is it because of Hearn’s ridiculous religious prejudices—his hatred for the Jesuits, for example? No, Hearn’s hatred for the Jesuits is simply a bad little boy’s impudence toward his schoolmaster. He had none of George Borrow’s fiery, romantic passion against the “Man in Black.” And Borrow’s “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye” were loved even by so un-Protestant a writer as Lionel Johnson.
No, the reason lies deeper, and is simpler, than any of these. Hearn failed, not because he was precious, not because he was morbid, not because he was prejudiced, but because he had no imagination.
Lafcadio Hearn was, in the worst sense of the word, a realist. He had thoroughly the materialistic attitude toward life; he could see only the dull outside of things, not the indwelling splendor. An imaginative man would have delighted in his mixed Greek and Irish blood, would have realized that as a newspaperman he was a member of the most romantic profession the world has known, would have seen that New Orleans was no mean city. But Hearn was so prosaic and matter-of-fact that he saw only the forms and outlines of the things about him, and so sentimentally credulous that he believed that Japan contained greater wonders than Louisiana. Dr. George M. Gould, in his interesting but unpleasant work, “Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,” blames many of his dead friend’s faults on his defective vision. But Hearn’s myopia was spiritual as well as physical: he could not see the soul.
What terrible results came from this spiritual myopia! Of course, its worst result was the unspeakable tragedy of Hearn’s rejection of Christianity for that cruel burlesque on religion called Buddhism. But the minor results were many and dreadful... chief among them was the loss to the world of a great writer.
Lafcadio Hearn might have been a great writer. If proof of this were needed, it would be found in a posthumously published book of singular interest—“Fantastics and Other Fancies.” This is a collection of Hearn’s earliest writings, resurrected from the brittle yellow pages of old New Orleans newspapers by Charles Woodward Hutson.
The brief essays in this book are as charmingly phrased as anything this master of charming phrases ever wrote, and they are—unlike his later work—imaginative. That is, they are interpretations and idealizations of the things naturally familiar to Hearn. He had not yet committed the artistic heresy of confusing strangeness with beauty. He was not yet deluded into the belief that romance belongs exclusively to Nippon. He still was loyal to the traditions of his own civilization.
The literary value of Hearn’s work is not to be questioned. No living writer (not even Algernon Blackwood) has so great and fiery an imagination as had this quondam reporter of the New Orleans Daily Item; no living writer (except Alice Meynell) understands so thoroughly the art of putting together a few hundred words so as to form a structure of enduring loveliness.
It was in 1878 that Lafcadio Hearn, half starved and dressed in rags, persuaded Colonel John W. Fairfax, owner of the New Orleans Item, to give him work. He was called “assistant editor,” but it may be supposed that the “assistant editor” of this little two-page paper did most of the reportorial work. What treasures of glowing narrative its news columns may hold can only be conjectured. But on its editorial page appeared from time to time for several years brief sketches, some whimsical, some sombre, all highly imaginative and beautifully phrased. These, with other writings which Hearn contributed later to the New Orleans Times-Democrat, Dr. Hutson has searched out and brought together in this volume of real charm and value.
Any trivial incident of his daily round, any quaint bit of history or legend that he came upon in his amazingly extensive reading, would furnish this strangest of newspaper men with a theme. He saw in some antique shop a faun and dryad pictured in enamel on a little golden case, and, sitting at his littered, ink-stained desk in his noisy office, he wrote the exquisite “Idyl of a French Snuffbox.” Riding to work in a clanging street car, he found on its floor a Japanese fan of paper, and wrote of its unknown owner with a gay fervor surprising in such an amateur of grief. Mark Twain came to New Orleans, and the result was that masterpiece of vivid and sympathetic description, “A River Reverie.”
He was not always absolutely original, this obscure hack whose genius was one day to surprise and delight the world. Subconsciously, he remembered his spiritual brother, Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote those tales of the grotesque and arabesque, “The Black Cupid” and “The One Pill Box.” Also there are echoes of Coleridge, and of those Parnassian Frenchmen whose methods and ideals Hearn always shared.
But no Frenchman of his time could match the tender humor of “The Post Office,” nor were Poe and Coleridge standing at his elbow when he wrote “Hiouen-Thrang.” These were written by Lafcadio Hearn himself, by that strange nomad who called no one race his own, who looked at life with huge and perilous curiosity, who gave to most un-English thoughts a splendidly English dress, who just missed being a poet, who just missed being a mystic, who just missed being happy.
Already, the “Fantastics” show, Hearn was hearing the Orient’s alluring voice. New Orleans, that brave old bright-colored Latin city, struggling with the aftermath of war and pestilence, was just the place for a man of his exotic tastes. “I cannot say how fair and rich and beautiful this dead South is,” he wrote. “It has fascinated me.” But not the venerable splendors of New Orleans, not the picturesque shores of Grand Isle, could take the place of the radiant East, to which he continually referred, of which clairvoyantly he seemed to know himself already a citizen.
There are sketches in this extraordinary little book, notably “Les Coulisses” and “The Undying One,” which remind the reader, strangely enough, of certain prose fancies of another son of Ushaw, Francis Thompson. A healthier Lafcadio Hearn, with a broader vision and a tradition more clearly English, might have written “Finis Coronat Opus.” And the thought makes one, perhaps, a little regretful that Hearn was so sincerely a gypsy, that he was drawn away from the scenes of his young manhood to a lovely but wholly alien land. Of course, he wrote beautifully of Japan. But these youthful sketches show that Japan was not necessary to his artistic expression. And to take on that strange new culture he had to give up some heritages of thought and belief that he could ill spare, the loss of which, it may be, is the cause of that melancholy, shading sometimes into despair, which permeates even his richest and most sympathetic Japanese studies.
Hearn did not ruin himself as a writer by writing about Japan. He ruined himself by trying to be a Japanese. Now, one can write about Japan without being a Japanese, just as one can write about hell without being damned. But Hearn was not sufficiently imaginative to perceive this.
So he gave up European civilization for that of Japan. His Irish father’s faith held all that was noble of his Greek mother’s pagan tradition, but Hearn chose the novelties of Buddhism. He went to Japan: he devoted the gifts that God had given him, and the technical skill that the Jesuits had taught him, to the celebration of anti-Christian legends and ceremonials. But cherry-blossoms bloom only for a season—unlike Sharon’s rose. And the tragic letters published after Hearn’s death show that this fantastic adventurer learned at last that he had forsaken the splendid adventure first appointed for him. His bitter revilings of the people and customs of the land he had spent years in praising show that within Nippon’s golden apples, too, are ashes.
Hearn has been held up by the sentimentalists as a shining example of humanity’s cruelty to great artists. He is instead a shining example of the minor artist’s cruelty to humanity. He was not rejected of men. His was not “divine discontent,” his was the pernicious “desire for new things.” Therefore he became merely the maker of fair and futile decorations, and he who might have been a poet, a creator, became a clever wordsmith.
The essays in this little book of Hearn’s earliest work show a strange resemblance to the prose of Francis Thompson. What a contrast the lives of the two men present! Both were vagabonds, both were physically handicapped. But Francis Thompson was imaginative enough to be himself, so he wrote “The Hound of Heaven.” And Lafcadio Hearn was so lacking in imagination as to want to be somebody else—so he wrote “Gleanings in Buddha Fields.”
It is not for a mere journalist to point out the moral significance of the tragedy of Lafcadio Hearn. But I venture to suggest that the young American and English poets who are kissing the silken hem of Mr. Rabindranath Tagore’s garment might profitably read Lafcadio Hearn’s later correspondence. Fame and happiness are not always the reward of him who gives up the Occident for the Orient. Orientalism has its own truths, its own splendors. But the writers whose words we cherish, whose names are graven on our hearts, the makers of our literature, did anyone of these sell his birthright for a mess of—rice?