CHAPTER XII.--APPRECIATIONS AND EPITOMES

TAKEN as a whole, the criticisms upon Hearn's work are complimentary. He has his warm admirers, and some who are not so enthusiastic; but those who criticize adversely do so with a gentleness,--I may say, almost a reluctance that is perhaps the reflection of the spirit of his work. And whatever else these may offer, all agree that his writings have a unique charm.

Following are a few excerpts which should give an average of opinions:--

"One great secret of his success in interpreting the Japanese mind and temperament lay in his patience in seeking out and studying minutely the little things of a people said to be great in such. As Amenomori says of Hearn's mind, it 'called forth life and poetry out of dust.'" (327.)[20]

[20] The numbers refer to the corresponding items in the Bibliography.

"As an interpreter of the Japanese heart, mind, hand and soul, Mr. Hearn has no superior. But he will not convert those who in health of body and mind love the landmarks of the best faith of the race. It is very hard to make fog and miasmatic exhalations, even when made partly luminous with rhetoric, attractive to the intellect that loves headlands and mountain-tops. The product of despair can never compete in robust minds with the product of faith." (357.)

"Sympathy and exquisiteness of touch are the characteristics of Mr. Hearn's genius. He is a chameleon, glowing with the hue of outer objects or of inward moods, or altogether iridescent. He becomes translucent and veined like a moth on a twig, or mottled as if with the protective golden browns of fallen leaves. We may not look for architectonic or even plastic powers. His is not the mind which constructs of inner necessity, which weaves plots and schemes, or thinks of its frame as it paints. He attempts no epic of history. The delver for sociologic or theologic spoil must seek deeper waters....

"In his later books the all-potent influence of Japanese restraint seems to have refined and subdued his wonderful style to more perfect harmonies....

"His chapters are long or short as are his moods. There is little organic unity in them; no scientific aim or philosophic grasp rounds them into form. Even his paragraphs have little cohesion. Speaking of the forming of his sentences, he himself has compared it to the focussing of an image, each added word being like the turn of a delicate screw." (306.)

"The secret of the charm that we feel to such a marked degree in Mr. Lafcadio Hearn's volumes is that, in contrast to other writers, he does take the Japanese very seriously indeed." (316.)

"To the details of life and thought in Japan Mr. Hearn's soul seems everywhere and at all times responsive. He catches in his eye and on his pen minute motes scarcely noticeable by the keen natives themselves." (367.)

"He has written nothing on Japan equal in length to his tales of West Indian life. But while we deplore this reserve of a writer who possesses every quality of style, except humour, we have reason to be grateful for whatever he gives us." (307.)

"The matchless prose and the sympathy of Mr. Hearn." (324.)

"Mr. Hearn has the sympathetic temperament, the minute mental vision, the subdued style peculiar to all that is good in Japanese art and literature, needed for the accomplishment of a labour which to him has been a labour of love indeed. Here we have no mawkish sentimentality, no excessive laudation, on the one hand; on the other, no Occidental harshness, no Occidental ignorance of the sweet mystery of Eastern ways of life and modes of thought. What this most charming of writers on Far Eastern subjects has seen all may see, but only those can understand who are endowed with a like faculty of perception of unobtrusive beauty, and a like power, it must be added, of patient and prolonged study of common appearances and everyday events." (295.)

"A man has just died, intelligent and generous, who had succeeded in reconciling in his heart, the clear, rational ideas of the West together with the obscure deep sense of Extreme--Asia: Lafcadio Hearn. In the hospitality of his recipient soul, high European civilization and high Japanese civilization found a meeting-place; harmonized; completed, one in the other....

"In English-speaking countries, especially in the United States, Lafcadio Hearn already enjoys a just reputation. The lovers of the exotic, esteem him as equal to Kipling or Stevenson. In France, the _Revue de Paris_ has begun to make him known, by publishing some of his best articles, elegantly and faithfully translated. His budding fame is destined to increase, as Europe takes a greater interest in the arts and the thoughts of the Extreme-Orient. His prose, exact and harmonious, will be admired as one of the finest since Ruskin wrote: his very personal style, at the same time subtle and powerful, will be noted: he will be especially admired for his delicate and profound intelligence of that Japanese civilization which, to us, remains so mysterious. What characterizes the talent of Lafcadio Hearn, that which gives it its precious originality, is the rare mixture of scientific precision and idealistic enthusiasm: his work might justly be entitled Truth and Poesy: 'In reading these essays,' says one of our best existing Japanese scholars, Professor Chamberlain, 'one feels the truth of Richard Wagner's statement: "_Alles verstaendniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe._" (All understanding comes to us only through Love.) If Lafcadio Hearn understands Japan best, and makes it better understood than any other writer, it is because he loves it best.'

"Lafcadio Hearn describes with intelligence, with love all aspects of Japanese life: Nature and inhabitants; landscapes, animals and flowers; material life and life moral; classic Art and popular literature; philosophies, religions and superstitions. He awakens in us an exquisite feeling of old aristocratic and feudal Japan: he explains to us the prodigious revolution that modern Japan has created in thirty years....

"Hearn has consecrated to the study of Japanese art some of his most curious psychological analyses.

"Lafcadio Hearn takes a deep interest in the religious life of the Japanese. He studies with the minutest exactness the ancient customs of Shintoism, high moral precepts of Buddhism, and also the popular superstitions that hold on, for instance, to the worship of foxes, and to the idea of pre-existence." (393.)

"To a certain large class of his adopted countrymen, his hatred of Christianity, which was pronounced long before he went to Japan, and his fondness for Oriental cults of all kinds, was recommendation. But it is still an open question whether he did harm or good to the Japanese by his advocacy of their superstitions....

"Hearn's books are little known to the multitude. But they are familiar to an influential class the world over. In him Japan has lost a powerful and flattering advocate, and the English world one of its masters in style." (332.)

"Mr. Hearn was not a philosopher or a judicial student of life. He was a gifted, born impressionist, with a style resembling that of the French Pierre Loti. His stories and descriptions are delicate or gorgeous word pictures of the subtler and more elusive qualities of Oriental life." (293.)

"His art is the power of suggestion through perfect restraint.... He stands and proclaims his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound.... In these essays and tales, whose substance is so strangely mingled together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of Japan and the relentless science of Europe, I read vaguely of many things which hitherto were quite dark." (308.)

"He brings to the study of all aspects of Japanese life, intelligence, and love; he also sets sail in his descriptions and analyses towards a general theory on life; he is a Japanizing psychologist: he is also a philosopher....

"At all events, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of recalling powerfully to the Europeans of Europe the importance, often misunderstood, of Eastern civilization. No one better than this Japanizing enthusiast to make us feel what there is of narrowness in our habitual conception of the world, in our individualistic literature, misunderstanding too much the influence of the Past in our anthropocentric art, neglecting Nature too often, penetrated too 'singly' in our classic philosophy with Greco-Latin and Christian influences. 'Till now,' says Lafcadio Hearn very forcibly, 'having lived only in one hemisphere, we have thought but half thoughts.' We should enlarge our hearts and our minds by taking into our circle of culture, all the art and all the thought of the extreme East.

"From the philosophical view-point, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of calling attention to the high value of Shintoism, and above all of Buddhism. His work deserves to exercise an influence on the religious ideas of the West. If religion can no longer occupy any place in the intellectual life of humanity, more and more invaded by science, she can subsist a long time yet, perhaps always, in her sentimental life." (392.)

"For that role [as interpreter of Japan] he was eminently unfitted both by temperament and training. Indeed he was not slow to recognize his lack of the judicial faculty, and on one occasion acknowledged that he is a 'creature of extremes.' ... But Hearn often succeeds in reaching the heart of things by his faculty of sympathy, in virtue of which alone his books deserve perusal; when he fails it is because of a lack of the unimpassioned judicial faculty, a tendency to subordinate reason to feeling, an inclination to place sympathy in the position of judge rather than guide." (359.)

"Lafcadio Hearn not only buried himself in the Japanese world, but gave his ashes to the soil so often devastated by earthquake, typhoon, tidal wave and famine, but ever fertile in blooms of fancy which lies under the River of Heaven. The air of Nippon, poor in ozone, is overpopulated by goblins. No writer has ever excelled this child of Greece and Ireland in interpreting the weird fancies of peasant and poet in the land of bamboo and cherry flowers.... Hearn's life seemed crushed under 'the horror of infinite Possibility.' Hence perhaps the weird fascination of his work and style." (348.)

EPITOMES

AVATAR (281).--It was during the Cincinnati period that Hearn made this--his first translation from the French. Writing of it in 1886, he says:--

I have a project on foot--to issue a series of translations of archaeological and artistic French romance--Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint-Antoine"; De Nerval's "Voyage en Orient"; Gautier's "Avatar"; Loti's most extraordinary African and Polynesian novels; and Beaudelaire's "Petits Poemes en Prose."

But three years later, he writes:--

The work of Gautier cited by you--"Avatar"--was my first translation from the French. I never could find a publisher for it, however, and threw the MS. away at last in disgust. It is certainly a wonderful story; but the self-styled Anglo-Saxon has so much--prudery that even this innocent phantasy seems to shock his sense of the "proper."

LA TENTATION DE SAINT-ANTOINE (282) was probably translated at about the same time. Hearn failed to find a publisher who would take it, but the manuscript is still in my possession. Hearn's own complete _scenario_, together with a description of the manuscript, is given on another page. I quote from Hearn about this work:--

The original is certainly one of the most exotically strange pieces of writing in any language, and weird beyond description.

Of his own translation, he writes:--

The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed. That serpent-scene, the crucified lions, the breaking of the chair of gold, the hideous battles about Carthage,--these pages contain pictures that ought not to remain entombed in a foreign museum.

The winter of 1877, the year Hearn arrived in New Orleans, he corresponded with the Cincinnati _Commercial_ under the name of "Ozias Midwinter" (219). Excerpts from this series of letters are given in the chapter, "The New Orleans Period."

ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS (20) was the first book to be published. The translations were made during the latter part of the Cincinnati period, but the volume did not appear until some years later, while Hearn was in New Orleans. It was prepared at the hour when his craving for the exotic and weird was at its height. From the opening word to the last the six stories are one long Dionysian revel of an Arabian Night's Dream, and within their pages it is not difficult to feel that "one is truly dead only when one is no longer loved." What an exotic group of names it is:--Cleopatra, "she that made the whole world's bale and bliss;" Clarimonde,

"Who was famed in her lifetime As the fairest of women;"

Arria Marcella; the Princess Hermonthis; Omphale; and the one "fairer than all daughters of men, lovelier than all fantasies realized in stone"--Nyssia. It is a tapestry woven of the lights and jewels and passion of an antique world. "You will find in Gautier," Hearn writes, "a perfection of melody, a warmth of word colouring, a voluptuous delicacy;" "Gautier could create mosaics of word jewellery without equals." Hearn's "pet stories" are "Clarimonde" and "Arria Marcella." Is it strange that he should delight in these beautiful vampires?

In this work, and in the tales to follow, we already perceive that colour is to become a sort of a fetich to be worshipped. Here in the studio of another artist, he serves his first apprenticeship, and from the highly toned palette of Gautier he learns how to mix and lay on the colours that he himself is later to use so richly.

In speaking of this book, a critic says:--

"His learning and his inspiration were wholly French in these productions, as also in what was his first and in some ways his best book, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and other tales translated from Theophile Gautier. While Hearn was faithful to his original, he also improved upon it, and many a scholar who knows both French and English has confessed under the rose that Gautier is outdone." (332.)

Of his work, Hearn writes:--

You asked me about Gautier. I have read and possess nearly all his works; and before I was really mature enough for such an undertaking I translated his six most remarkable short stories. The work contains, I regret to say, several shocking errors, and the publishers refused me the right to correct the plates. The book remains one of the sins of my literary youth, but I am sure my judgment of the value of the stories was correct.

While preparing his next book, Hearn published in the _Century_, "The Scenes of Cable's Romances" (220). In this article he vivifies the quarters and dwellings that Mr. Cable in his delightful stories had already made famous.

THE FIRST MUEZZIN, BILAL (405), was written in the fall of 1883, during the New Orleans period. It is a beautiful, serious piece of work, and is written with the fine, sonorous quality that such a theme should inspire. That it was a labour of love is shown in Hearn's letters written at its inception to Mr. Krehbiel, who was an invaluable aid to him in compiling its musical part. "Bilal" was probably published finally in the _Times-Democrat_, after being refused by _Harper's_, the _Century_, and some others.

The traveller slumbering for the first time within the walls of an Oriental city, and in the vicinity of a minaret, can scarcely fail to be impressed by the solemn beauty of the Mohammedan Call to Prayer. If he have worthily prepared himself, by the study of book and of languages, for the experiences of Eastern travel, he will probably have learned by heart the words of the sacred summons, and will recognize their syllables in the sonorous chant of the Muezzin,--while the rose-coloured light of an Egyptian or Syrian dawn expands its flush to the stars. Four times more will he hear that voice ere morning again illuminates the east:--under the white blaze of noon; at the sunset hour, when the west is fervid with incandescent gold and vermilion; in the long after-glow of orange and emerald fires; and, still later, when a million astral lamps have been lighted in the vast and violet dome of God's everlasting mosque.

In four parts Hearn tells the history of Bilal, who

was an African black, an Abyssinian,--famed for his fortitude as a confessor, for his zeal in the faith of the Prophet, and for the marvellous melody of his voice, whose echoes have been caught up and prolonged and multiplied by all the muezzins of Islam, through the passing of more than twelve hundred years.... And the words chanted by all the muezzins of the Moslem world,--whether from the barbaric brick structures which rise above "The Tunis of the Desert," or from the fairy minarets of the exquisite mosque at Agra,--are the words first sung by the mighty voice of Bilal.

Bilal was the son of an Abyssinian slave-girl, and himself began life as a slave. The first preaching of Mahomet had deep effect upon the slaves of Mecca, and Bilal was perhaps the earliest of these to become a convert. Even under the tortures of the persecutors, he could not be made to apostatize--always he would answer, "_Ahad! Ahad_:" "_One_, one only God!" Abu Bekr, the bosom friend of the great Prophet, observing Bilal, bought him, and set him free. Then Bilal became the devoted servant of Mahomet; and, in fulfilment of a dream, he was made the First Muezzin to sound the _Adzan_, the Call to Prayer.

God is Great! God is Great! I bear witness there is no other God but God! I bear witness that Mahomet is the Prophet of God! Come unto Prayer! Come unto Salvation! God is Great! There is no other God but God!

* * * * *

After the death of Mahomet, Bilal ceased to sing the _Adzan_:--the voice that had summoned the Prophet of God to the house of prayer ought not, he piously fancied, to be heard after the departure of his master. Yet, in his Syrian home, how often must he have prayed to chant the words as he first chanted them from the starlit housetop in the Holy City, and how often compelled to deny the petitions of those who revered him as a saint and would perhaps have sacrificed all their goods to have heard him but once lift up his voice in musical prayer!... But when Omar visited Damascus the chiefs of the people besought him that, as Commander of the Faithful, he should ask Bilal to sing the Call in honour of the event; and the old man consented to do so for the last time....

To hear Bilal must have seemed to many as sacred a privilege as to have heard the voice of the Prophet himself,--the proudest episode of a lifetime,--the one incident of all others to be related in long afteryears to children and to grandchildren. Some there may have been whom the occasion inspired with feelings no loftier than curiosity; but the large majority of those who thronged to listen in silent expectancy for the _Allah-hu-akbar!_ must have experienced emotions too deep to be ever forgotten. The records of the event, at least, fully justify this belief;--for when, after moments of tremulous waiting, the grand voice of the aged African rolled out amid the hush,--with the old beloved words,--the old familiar tones, still deep and clean,--Omar and all those about him wept aloud, and tears streamed down every warrior-face, and the last long notes of the chant were lost in a tempest of sobbing.

STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE[21] (I) is the second book. It was written also during the period in New Orleans, many of the stories first appearing in the _Times-Democrat_, and the little volume is dedicated to its editor--Mr. Page M. Baker.

[21] Copyright, 1884, by James R. Osgood and Company.

These tales, as Hearn tells us in his Preface, are "reconstructions of what impressed me as most fantastically beautiful in the most exotic literature which I was able to obtain." In a letter he writes, "The language of 'Stray Leaves' is all my own, with the exception of the Italic texts and a few pages translated from the 'Kalewala.'"

The tapestry he is weaving is of the same crimson threads as that of the earlier tales, but the colours of sunset are softening to the gentler hues of the after-glow, and interwoven sometimes are strands of pure moonlight.

We read of the great Book of Thoth which contains a formula whosoever could recite might never know death, and we learn how the cunning magician Noferkephtah obtained the book, which caused the wrath of the gods to fall upon him; later, how Satni, of whom "there was not in all Egypt so wise a scribe," yearned for the book, and took it from the tomb of Noferkephtah, and of the magic wrought and the penance done.

There is the exquisite tale of the Fountain Maiden, whom Aki caught in his own fish-net, and whom he grew to love more than his own life.

The story lingers of the sea-bird which fell into the hunter's hand, and when he looked more closely he found it had become transformed into a beautiful girl, "slender ... like a young moon," and pity rose in the hunter's heart, and then love. One day, when their children had become strong and swift, and while they were all hunting together, the Bird-Wife called to the little ones to gather feathers: then she covered their arms and her own shoulders with the feathers, and far away they flew.

Passing onward, we read of Tilottama, and that by reason of her beauty "the great gods once became multiple-faced and myriad-eyed"; and that this beauty brought punishment to the wicked Sounda and Oupasounda.

There is Bakawali, for "whose history of love, human and superhuman, a parallel may not be found." For her great love of the mortal youth Taj-ulmuluk each night she sacrificed herself to the fiercest purification of fire. And then to appease the gods, she suffered herself to be turned for ten long years into marble from her waist to her feet. Her lover ministered to her and watched by her side through the terrible years until she was reincarnated for him.

Then we see the statue of Natalika, who avenged the death of her people.

And who shall answer the riddle of the Corpse Demon? And which one may not profit by the wisdom of the youth who knew nothing of science? Perhaps our hearts stir with a soft regret for the atonement of Pundari. And so we wander through a maze of colour and of magic, tarrying to listen to the voice of Kalewala, for--

As he sang the fair Sun paused in her course to hear him; the golden Moon stopped in her path to listen; the awful billows of the sea stood still; the icy rivers that devour the pines, that swallow up the firs, ceased to rage; the mighty cataracts hung motionless above their abysses; the waves of Juortana lifted high their heads to hear.

"Slender she was as the tulip upon its stalk, and in walking her feet seemed kisses pressed upon the ground. But hadst thou beheld her face unveiled, and the whiteness of her teeth between her brown lips when she smiled!" Alas, she was a good Christian maiden and he a good Mussulman, and so in this Legend of Love each loyal heart dies pronouncing the faith of the other, lest they should not meet at the Day of Judgment.

As we draw near the last figures on the tapestry, we find those two tender pictures of which Hearn himself speaks: "Your preference for Boutimar pleases me: Boutimar was my pet. There is a little Jewish legend in the collection--Esther--somewhat resembling it in pathos." These stories afford a glimpse into that gentle heart, which was later to respond to the exquisite faiths and loyalties of the Japanese.

Now the Creator sent unto Solomon a cup which contained some of the waters of youth and of life without end. And Solomon was asked: "Wilt thou drink hereof and live divinely immortal through ages everlasting, or wilt thou rather remain within the prison of humanity?" And Solomon dreamed upon these words; and he assembled in council a representative of all those over whom he held dominion. Then Solomon asked Boutimar, the wild dove, most loving of all living creatures, whether he should drink of the magic waters, and thus learn the bliss of earthly immortality. When Boutimar, the wild dove, learned that the cup held only enough water for one person, he made answer in the language of birds:--

"O prophet of God! how couldst thou desire to be living alone, when each of thy friends and of thy counsellors and of thy children and of thy servants and of all who loved thee were counted with the dead? For all of these must surely drink the bitter waters of death, though thou shouldst drink the Water of Life. Wherefore desire everlasting youth, when the face of the world itself shall be wrinkled with age, and the eyes of the stars shall be closed by the black fingers of Azrael? When the love thou hast sung of shall have passed away like a smoke of frankincense, when the dust of the heart that beat against thine own shall have long been scattered by the four winds of heaven, when the eyes that looked for thy coming shall have become a memory, when the voices grateful to thine ear shall have been eternally stilled, when thy life shall be one oasis in a universal waste of death, and thine eternal existence but a recognition of eternal absence,--wilt thou indeed care to live, though the wild dove perish when its mate cometh not?"

And Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond dew of the heart, which is tears.

Esther, whose comeliness surpassed even that of Sarah, and her rich husband had lived together ten years, but there was no happiness in the soul of the good man, for "the sound of a child's voice had never made sunshine within his heart." So Esther and her husband sorrowed bitterly. And they brought the burden of their grief to Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, and when they had told him, a silence as of the Shechinah came upon the three, only the eyes of the Rabbi seemed to smile. And it was agreed that the twain should part; thus the Israelite could be known as a father in Israel.

A feast then was laid at the house, and before all the guests her husband spoke lovingly to Esther, and in token of his affection and his grief bade her to take from the house "whatever thou desirest, whether it be gold or jewels beyond price." And the wine was passed, and the people made merry, and finally a deep sleep fell upon them all. Then Esther gave command that her husband sleeping should be carried to her father's house. In the morning her husband awakened, and confused he cried out, "Woman, what hast thou done?"

Then, sweeter than the voice of doves among the fig-trees, came the voice of Esther: "Didst thou not bid me, husband, that I should choose and take away from thy house whatsoever I most desired? And I have chosen thee, and have brought thee hither, to my father's home ... loving thee more than all else in the world. Wilt thou drive me from thee now?" And he could not see her face for tears of love; yet he heard her voice speaking on,--speaking the golden words of Ruth, which are so old yet so young to the hearts of all that love: "Whithersoever thou shalt go, I will also go; and whithersoever thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. And the Angel of Death only may part us; for thou art all in all to me." ...

And in the golden sunlight at the doorway suddenly stood, like a statue of Babylonian silver, the grand grey figure of Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, lifting his hands in benediction.

"_Schmah Israel!_--the Lord our God, who is One, bless ye with everlasting benediction! May your hearts be welded by love, as gold with gold by the cunning of goldsmiths! May the Lord, who coupleth and setteth thee single in families, watch over ye! The Lord make this valiant woman even as Rachel and as Lia, who built up the house of Israel! And ye shall behold your children and your children's children in the House of the Lord!"

Even so the Lord blessed them; and Esther became as the fruitful vine, and they saw their children's children in Israel. Forasmuch as it is written: "He will regard the prayer of the destitute."

GOMBO ZHEBES[22](2) followed in the New Orleans period. It is a compilation of 352 proverbs selected from six dialects. According to the indexes, there are 6 in the Creole of French Guyana; 28 in the Creole of Hayti; 51 in the Creole of New Orleans, Louisiana; 101 in the Creole of Martinique; 110 in the Creole of Mauritius; 52 in the Creole of Trinidad. Most of the proverbs are similar to our own, but are translated into the simple homely language of the Creole, reflecting its mode of thought. The same proverb often appears in the different dialects. Although a proverb is of European origin, "the character of Creole folk-lore is very different from European folk-lore in the matter of superstition." Many proverbs are direct from the African. Those in the Creole of Hayti are generally rough and coarse. The most popular subjects are, pot or kettle, rain, serpent or snake, of which there are six of each; devil, eggs, belly, horse, mothers, tail, of these there are seven of each; chicken, children, ox have eight of each; cat has nine; goat has eleven; talking has sixteen; monkey has seventeen; fine clothes has only four, idleness has five, and marriage has six.

[22] Copyright, 1885, by Will H. Coleman.

Hearn speaks of this book as a Dictionary of Proverbs. He made an extensive study of the subject and in later researches found it most helpful. "I have," he says, "quite a Creole library embracing the Creole dialects of both hemispheres."

Following are a selection of the proverbs chosen from the different dialects:--

No. 23. _Bel tignon pas fait bel negresse. (Le beau tignon ne fait pas la belle negresse.)_ "It isn't the fine head-dress that makes the fine negress." (_Louisiana._)

_Tignon_ or _tiyon_, the true Creole word, "is the famously picturesque handkerchief which in old days all slave-women twisted about their heads."

No. 44. _Ca qui boude manze boudin. (Celui qui boude mange du boudin.)_ "He who sulks eats his own belly." That is to say, spites himself. The pun is untranslatable. (_Mauritius_.)

_Boudin_ in French signifies a pudding, in Creole it also signifies the belly. Thus there is a double pun in the patois.

No. 256. _Quand diabe alle lamesse li caciette so laquee. (Quand le diable va a la messe, il cache sa queue.)_ "When the Devil goes to mass he hides his tail." (_Mauritius._)

No. 352. _Zozo paillenqui crie la-haut, coudevent vini. (Le paille-en-cul crie la-haut, le coup de vent vient.)_ "When the tropic-bird screams overhead, a storm-wind is coming." (_Mauritius._)

No. 267. _Quand milatt tini yon vie chouvral yo dit negress pas manman yo. (Quand les mulatres ont un vieux cheval ils disent que les negresses ne sont pas leur meres.)_ "As soon as a mulatto is able to own an old horse, he will tell you that his mother wasn't a nigger." (_Martinique._)

No. 324. _Toutt milett ni grand zaureilles. (Tout les mulets ont des grandes oreilles.)_ "All mules have big ears." Equivalent to our proverb: "Birds of a feather flock together." (_Martinique._)

No. 291. _Si coulev oule viv, li pas pronminee grand-chemin. (Si la couleuvre veut vivre, elle ne se promene pas dans le grand chemin.)_ "If the snake cares to live, it doesn't journey upon the high-road." (_Guyana._)

No. 292. _Si couleve pas te fonte, femmes se pouend li fair ribans jipes. (Si la couleuvre n'etait pas effrontee les femmes la prendraient pour en faire des rubans de jupes.)_ "If the snake wasn't spunky, women would use it for petticoat strings." (_Trinidad._)

No. 100. _Complot plis fort passe ouanga.[23] (Le complot est plus fort que l'ouanga.)_ "Conspiracy is stronger than witchcraft." (_Hayti._)

[23] _Di moin si to gagnin homme! Mo va fe ouanga pouli; Mo fe li tourne fantome Si to vle mo to mari...._

"Tell me if thou hast a man (a lover) I will make a _ouanga_ for him--I will change him into a ghost if thou wilt have me for thy husband."

This word, of African origin, is applied to all things connected with the Voudooism of the negroes.

In the song, "_Dipi mo voue, toue Adele_," from which the above lines are taken, the wooer threatens to get rid of a rival by _ouanga_--to "turn him into a ghost." The victims of Voudooism are said to have gradually withered away, probably through the influence of secret poison. The word _grigri_, also of African origin, simply refers to a charm, which may be used for an innocent or innocuous purpose. Thus, in a Louisiana Creole song, we find a quadroon mother promising her daughter a charm to prevent the white lover from forsaking her:

"_Pou tchombe li na fe grigri._" "We shall make a _grigri_ to keep him."

Simultaneously with the publication of "Gombo Zhebes," Hearn contributed a series of articles[24] to _Harper's Weekly._ (221-227, 230, 232.) These papers, which are commonplace newspaper work, tell of New Orleans, its Expositions, its Superstitions, Voudooism, and the Creole Patois. He feels that the Creole tongue must go, but while there is still time, he hopes that some one will rescue its dying legends and curious lyrics.

[24] Copyright, 1884, 1885, 1886, by Harper and Brothers.

The unedited Creole literature comprises songs, satires in rhymes, proverbs, fairy-tales--almost everything commonly included under the term folk-lore. The lyrical portion of it is opulent in oddities, in melancholy beauties.

There are few of the younger generation of Creoles who do not converse in the French and English languages. Creole is the speech of motherhood, and "there is a strange naive sorrow in their burdens as of children sobbing for lonesomeness in the night."

There is an interesting account of Jean Montanet, "Voudoo John"--The Last of the Voudoos. He was said to be a son of a prince of Senegal. From a ship's cook he rose to own large estates. While he was a cotton-roller, it was noticed that he seemed to have some peculiar occult influence over the negroes under him. Voudoo John had the mysterious _obi_ power. Soon realizing his power, he commenced to tell fortunes, and thousands and thousands of people, white and black, flocked to him. Then he bought a house and began as well to practise Creole medicine. He could give receipts for everything and anything, and many a veiled lady stopped at his door.

Once Jean received a fee of $50 for a potion. "It was water," he said to a Creole confidant, "with some common herbs boiled in it. I hurt nobody, but if folks want to give me fifty dollars, I take the fifty dollars every time!"

It is said that Jean became worth at least $50,000. He had his horses and carriages, his fifteen wives, whom he considered, one and all, legitimate spouses. He was charitable too. But he did not know what to do with his money. Gradually, in one way or another, it was stolen from him, until at the last, with nothing left but his African shells, his elephant's tusk, and the sewing-machine upon which he used to tell fortunes even in his days of riches, he had to seek hospitality of his children.

Hearn devotes several columns to Voudooism, telling of its witchcrafts and charms and fetiches which work for evil, and also of the superstitions regarding the common occurrences of daily life.

In a paper on Mexican feather-work at the New Orleans Exposition, there is this paragraph which presages his later descriptions:--

As I write, the memory of a Mexican landscape scene in feather-work is especially vivid--a vast expanse of opulent wheat-fields, whereof the blonde immensity brightens or deepens its tint with the tremor of summer winds; distance makes violet the hills; a steel-bright river serpentines through the plain, reflecting the feminine grace of palms tossing their plumes against an azure sky. I remember also a vision of marshes--infinite stretches of reed-grown ooze, shuddering in gusts of sea-wind, and paling away into bluish vagueness as through a miasmatic haze.

In conjunction with these articles, Hearn published in _Harper's Bazaar_ (228-229) two papers on the Curiosities to be found at the New Orleans Exposition.

SOME CHINESE GHOSTS[25] (3) was the next book of the New Orleans period. The first publisher to whom it was submitted did not accept it, but Roberts Brothers finally brought it out. "There are only six little stories," writes Hearn, "but each of them cost months of hard work and study, and represents a much higher attempt than anything in the 'Stray Leaves.'" The book is dedicated to his friend Mr. Krehbiel, and the Dedication, which is given in the Bibliography, is as unique as the tales themselves.

[25] Copyright, 1887, by Roberts Brothers.

In the Preface Hearn says that while preparing these legends he sought for "weird beauty." The era of fierce passions and horror is waning, and in these six perfect tales there is a new-found restraint, a firmer handling of the brush in more normal colours.

One of the earliest reviews of his work remarks:--

"In his treatment of the legend lore of the Celestial Empire, Mr. Hearn has, if possible, been even more delicate and charming than in the stories which go to make the previous volume, so much so, indeed, that one is persuaded to full belief in the beauty and witchery of the almond-eyed heroines of his pages." (322.)

The opening story is of the beautiful Ko-Ngai, daughter of Kouan-Yu, whose divine loyalty to her father never faltered even at a hideous death. He was a great bellmaker, and the Mandarin ordered that he should make a bell of such size that it would be heard for one hundred _li_, and further that the bell "should be strengthened with brass, and deepened with gold, and sweetened with silver." But the metals refused to mingle. Again the bell was cast, but the result was even worse, and the Son of Heaven was very angry; and this word was sent to Kouan-Yu:--

"If thou fail a third time in fulfilling our command, thy head shall be severed from thy neck."

When the lovely Ko-Ngai heard this, she sold her jewels, and paid a great price to an astrologer, and it was told to her:--

Gold and brass will never meet in wedlock, silver and iron never will embrace, until the flesh of a maiden be melted in the crucible; until the blood of a virgin be mingled with the metals in their fusion.

Ko-Ngai told no one what she had heard. The awful hour for the heroic effort of the final casting arrived.

All the workmen wrought their tasks in silence; there was no sound heard but the muttering of the fires. And the muttering deepened into a roar of typhoons approaching, and the blood-red lake of metal slowly brightened like the vermilion of a sunrise, and the vermilion was transmuted into a radiant glow of gold, and the gold whitened blindingly, like the silver face of a full moon. Then the workers ceased to feed the raving flame, and all fixed their eyes upon the eyes of Kouan-Yu; and Kouan-Yu prepared to give the signal to cast.

But ere ever he lifted his finger, a cry caused him to turn his head; and all heard the voice of Ko-Ngai sounding sharply sweet as a bird's song above the great thunder of the fires,--"For thy sake, O my Father!" And even as she cried, she leaped into the white flood of metal; and the lava of the furnace roared to receive her, and spattered monstrous flakes of flame to the roof, and burst over the verge of the earthen crater, and cast up a whirling fountain of many-coloured fires, and subsided quakingly, with lightnings and with thunders and with mutterings.

Of the lovely Ko-Ngai no trace remained save a little shoe, which was left in the hand of the faithful serving-woman who had striven to catch her as she leaped into the flame.

And ever does the bell, whose tones are deeper and mellower and mightier than the tones of any other bell, utter the name of Ko-Ngai; and ever between the mighty strokes there is a low moaning heard, a sobbing of "_Hiai!_" and that they say is Ko-Ngai crying for her little shoe.

The next tale tells of Ming-Y and how it was that he did not heed the counsel of the words of Lao-Tseu, and so it befell that he was loved by the beautiful Sie-Thao, whose tomb had many years ago crumbled to ruins.

The Legend of Tchi-Niu is the queen flower of the nosegay of six. Tong's father died, and as they were very poor, the only way that Tong could obtain money to pay for the funeral expenses was to sell himself as a slave. The years passed, and he worked without rest or pay, but never a complaint did he utter. At length the fever of the ricefields seized him, and he was left alone in his sickness, for there was no one to wait on him. One noon he dreamed that a beautiful woman bent over him and touched his forehead with her hand. And Tong opened his eyes, and he saw the lovely person of whom he had dreamed. "I have come to restore thy strength and to be thy wife. Arise and worship with me." And reading his thoughts she said, "I will provide."

"And together they worshipped Heaven and Earth. Thus she became his wife."

But all that Tong knew of his wife was that her name was Tchi. And the fame of the weaving of Tchi spread far, and people came to see her beautiful work. One morning Tchi gave to her husband a document. It was his freedom that she had bought.

Later the silk-loom remained untouched, for Tchi gave birth to a son. And the boy was not less wonderful than his mother.

Now it came to the Period of the Eleventh Moon. Suddenly one night, Tchi led Tong to the cradle where their son slumbered, and as she did so a great fear and awe came over Tong, and the sweet tender voice breathed to him:--

"Lo! my beloved, the moment has come in which I must forsake thee; for I was never of mortal born, and the Invisible may incarnate themselves for a time only. Yet I leave with thee the pledge of our love,--this fair son, who shall ever be to thee as faithful and as fond as thou thyself hast been. Know, my beloved, that I was sent to thee even by the Master of Heaven, in reward of thy filial piety, and that I must now return to the glory of His house: I AM THE GODDESS TCHI-NIU."

Even as she ceased to speak, the great glow faded, and Tong, reopening his eyes, knew that she had passed away for ever,--mysteriously as pass the winds of heaven, irrevocably as the light of a flame blown out. Yet all the doors were barred, all the windows unopened. Still the child slept, smiling in his sleep. Outside, the darkness was breaking; the sky was brightening swiftly; the night was past. With splendid majesty the East threw open high gates of gold for the coming of the sun; and, illuminated by the glory of his coming, the vapours of morning wrought themselves into marvellous shapes of shifting colour,--into forms weirdly beautiful as the silken dreams woven in the loom of Tchi-Niu.

Another tale is that of Mara, who tempted in vain, for the Indian pilgrim conquered.

And still, as a mist of incense, as a smoke of universal sacrifice, perpetually ascends to heaven from all the lands of earth the pleasant vapour TE, created for the refreshment of mankind by the power of a holy vow, the virtue of a pious atonement.

Like unto the Tale of the Great Bell, Pu, convinced that a soul cannot be divided,

entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for the soul of his Vase.

And when the workmen came upon the tenth morning to take forth the porcelain marvel, even the bones of Pu had ceased to be; but lo! the Vase lived as they looked upon it: seeming to be flesh moved by the utterance of a Word, creeping to the titillation of a Thought. And whenever tapped by the finger, it uttered a voice and a name,--the voice of its maker, the name of its creator: PU.

This same year, Hearn contributed to _Harpers Bazaar_ the valiant legend of "Rabyah's Last Ride"(234)--Rabyah upon whom no woman had ever called in vain, and who defended his women even after he was dead. This tale was copied in the _Times-Democrat_.

CHITA[26] (4), although published after Hearn left New Orleans, properly belongs to that period. It first appeared in much shorter form in the _Times-Democrat_ under the title of "Torn Letters." This version met with many warm friends, and the author was urged to enlarge it. He did so, and Harpers accepted the story, publishing it first as a serial in their magazine. With this book came Hearn's first recognition, and because of its success, he was given a commission by Harpers for further studies in the tropics, which eventuated in the volume, "Two Years in the French West Indies."

[26] Copyright, 1889, by Harper and Brothers.

"Chita" is the first glimpse of what Mr. Hearn could write from out himself; for whereas, as always, the plot must be given to him, the thread here is so frail that what we admire and remember is the fabric itself which only Hearn could have woven. In "Chita" he recreates elemental nature. In "Karma" he becomes the conscience of a human being. Then, for the first time he realizes the spiritual forces which are stronger than life or death, and without which no beauty exists.

A criticism of "Chita" at the time of its publication says:--

"By right of this single but profoundly remarkable book, Mr. Hearn may lay good claim to the title of the American Victor Hugo ... so living a book has scarcely been given to our generation." (342.)

Concerning the story, Hearn himself writes as follows:--

"Chita" was founded on the fact of a child saved from the Lost Island disaster by some Louisiana fishing-folk, and brought up by them. Years after a Creole hunter recognized her, and reported her whereabouts to relatives. These, who were rich, determined to bring her up as young ladies are brought up in the South, and had her sent to a convent. But she had lived the free healthy life of the coast, and could not bear the convent; she ran away from it, married a fisherman, and lives somewhere down there now,--the mother of multitudinous children.

This slight structure of plot gave Hearn the opportunity to paint a marvellous picture. Hundreds of quotations could be given. He is delighted with the rich glory of the tropics, and by his power of word imagery he so reproduces it that with him we too can see and feel it. In this glowing Nature the poisoned beauty of the Orient is forgotten. Take this description:--

The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendour of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of colour, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;--it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the [Greek: pneuma] indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the Great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,--save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift into delicious oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away for ever.

So it is told that into this perfect peace one August day in 1856, a scarlet sun sank in a green sky, and a moonless night came.

Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice moaning across the world hooting,--uttering nightmare sounds,--_Whoo!_--_whoo!_--_whoo!_--and with each stupendous owl-cry the mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through all the hours of darkness.

Morning dawned with great rain: the steamer _Star_ was due that day. No one dared to think of it. "Great God!" some one shrieked,--"She is coming!"

On she came, swaying, rocking, plunging,--with a great whiteness wrapping her about like a cloud, and moving with her moving,--a tempest-whirl of spray;--ghost-white and like a ghost she came, for her smoke-stacks exhaled no visible smoke--the wind devoured it.

And still the storm grew fiercer. On shore the guests at the hotel danced with a feverish reckless gaiety.

Again the _Star_ reeled, and shuddered, and turned, and began to drag away from the great building and its lights,--away from the voluptuous thunder of the grand piano,--even at that moment outpouring the great joy of Weber's melody orchestrated by Berlioz: _l'Invitation a la Valse_,--with its marvellous musical swing.

--"Waltzing!" cried the captain. "God help them!--God help us all now!... The Wind waltzes to-night, with the Sea for his partner." ...

O the stupendous Valse-Tourbillon! O the mighty Dancer! One-two--three! From north-east to east, from east to south-east, from south-east to south: then from the south he came, whirling the Sea in his arms....

And so the hurricane passed, and the day reveals utter wreck and desolation. "There is plunder for all--birds and men."

At a fishing village on the coast on this same night of the storm Carmen, the good wife of Feliu, dreamed--above the terrors of the tempest which shattered her sleep--once again the dream that kept returning of her little Concha, her first-born who slept far away in the old churchyard at Barcelona. And this night she dreamed that her waxen Virgin came and placed in her arms the little brown child with the Indian face, and the face became that of her dead Conchita.

And Carmen wished to thank the Virgin for that priceless bliss, and lifted up her eyes; but the sickness of ghostly fear returned upon her when she looked; for now the Mother seemed as a woman long dead, and the smile was the smile of fleshlessness, and the places of the eyes were voids and darknesses.... And the sea sent up so vast a roar that the dwelling rocked.

* * * * *

Feliu and his men find the tide heavy with human dead and the sea filled with wreckage. Through this floatage Feliu detects a stir of life ... he swims to rescue a little baby fast in the clutch of her dead mother.

To Carmen it is the meaning of her dream. The child has been sent by the Virgin. The tale leads on through the growing life of Chita. Finally one day Dr. La Brierre, whose wife and child had been lost in the famous storm, is summoned to Viosca's Point to the deathbed of his father's old friend, who is dying of the fever. It is Feliu who brings him. But before they can reach the Point the man has already died. The Doctor remains at Feliu's fishing smack. He feels the sickness of the fever coming over him. Then he sees Chita.... Hers is the face of his dead Adele. Through the fury of the fever, which has now seized him, the past is mingled with the present. He re-lives the agony of that death-storm, re-lives all the horror of that scene, when all that he held dear was swept away--until his own soul passes out into the night.

The description of Dr. La Brierre in the throes of the fever is terrible. It is so realistic that one shudders.

TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES[27] (6) was the _piece de resistance_ of the sojourn in the tropics. Some of the papers appeared first in _Harper's Magazine_. They are marvellous colour-pictures of the country, its people, its life, its customs, with many of the picturesque legends and the quaintnesses that creep into the heart.

[27] Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers.

"There is not a writer who could have so steeped himself in this languorous Creole life and then tell so well about it. Trollope and Froude give you the hard, gritty facts, and Lafcadio Hearn the sentiment and poetry of this beautiful island." (387.)

More and more is Hearn realizing the necessity of finding new colour. "I hope to be able to take a trip to New Mexico in the summer just to obtain literary material, sun-paint, tropical colour, etc." It is always the intense that his fancy craves, and indeed _must_ have in order to work. "There are tropical lilies which are venomous, but they are more beautiful than the frail and icy white lilies of the North." "Whenever I receive a new and strong impression, even in a dream, I write it down, and afterwards develop it at leisure.... There are impressions of blue light and gold and green, correlated to old Spanish legend, which can be found only south of this line." "I will write you a little while I am gone,--if I can find a little strange bit of tropical colour to spread on the paper,--like the fine jewel-dust of scintillant moth-wings." "Next week I go away to hunt up some tropical or semi-tropical impressions."

He is bewitched by St. Pierre--"I love this quaint, whimsical, wonderfully coloured little town." On opening the present volume we at once feel how thoroughly sympathetic this whole Nature is to him, how ravished his senses are with all that she portrays.

From Pier 49, East River, New York, we travel with Hearn through days of colour and beauty to the glorious Caribbean Sea, where we sail on to Roseau and St. Pierre. Here the colour is becoming so intense that the eyes are blinded.

The luminosities of tropic foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some great height, through which the colours come to his eye softened and subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing atmosphere.

... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of colour. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I see the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light.

Over her memoried paths we wander with Josephine, and then we pause before the lovely statue which seems a living presence.

She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumour has it that she spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet space of summer sea, through the vast splendour of azure light, she is looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive smile,--unutterably touching....

"Under a sky always deepening in beauty" we steam on to the level, burning, coral coast of Barbadoes. Then on past to Demerara.

We pass through all the quaint beautiful old towns and islands. We see their wonders of sky and sea and flowers. We see their people and all that great race of the mixed blood.

With dear old Jean-Marie we wait for the return of Les Porteuses, and we hear his call:--

"_Coument ou ye, che? coument ou kalle?_" ... (How art thou, dear?--how goes it with thee?)

And they mostly make answer, "_Toutt douce, che,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and thou?) But some, over-weary, cry to him, "_Ah! decharge moin vite, che! moin lasse, lasse!_" (Unload me quickly, dear; for I am very, very weary.) Then he takes off their burdens, and fetches bread for them, and says foolish little things to make them laugh. And they are pleased and laugh, just like children, as they sit right down on the road there to munch their dry bread.

Again we follow on: this time to La Grande Anse, where we see the powerful surf-swimmers. With the population we turn out to witness the procession of young girls to be confirmed; we see the dances and games; we hear the chants, and the strange music on strange instruments.

At St. Pierre once more we listen to the history of Pere Labat, who in twelve years made his order the richest and most powerful in the West Indies.

"Eh, Pere Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day!... And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colours of the perpetual hills; the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie; the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Pere Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of a tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm, wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies, through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home.... '_Mi fanal Pe Labatt!--mi Pe Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_'"

Then we see the lights of the shrines that will protect us from the Zombi and the Moun-Mo, and all the terrible beings who are filled with witchcraft; and we listen to the tale of that Zombi who likes to take the shape of a lissome young negress.

By this time it is Carnival Week with its dances and games and maskers. But a little later we are shuddering at the horrible pestilence Verette that has seized the city. A gleam of the old love of horror is caught in the following quotation:--

She was the prettiest, assuredly, among the pretty shop-girls of the Grande Rue,--a rare type of _sang-melee_. So oddly pleasing, the young face, that once seen, you could never again dissociate the recollection of it from the memory of the street. But one who saw it last night before they poured quick-lime upon it could discern no features,--only a dark brown mass, like a fungus, too frightful to think about.

At the beautiful Savane du Fort our eyes and hearts are gladdened by the quaint sight of the Blanchisseuses with their snowy linen spread out for miles along the river's bank. Their laughter echoes in our ears, and we try to catch the words of their little songs.

One warm and starry, and to us unforgettable, September morning we make the ascent of Mt. Pelee by the way of Morne St. Martin, and on our way we come to know the country that lies all around. Let me quote our sensation as we reach the summit:--

At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new impressions: every face was radiant.... Now all look serious; none speaks.... Dominating all, I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is looking upon,--such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in that tremendous question of the Book of Job: "_Wast thou brought forth before the hills?_"

And the blue multitudes of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,--telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath,--until something like the fulness of a grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and colour, will surely endure,--marvellous as now,--after we shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it.

Another day we are laughing at the little _ti canotie_ who in the queerest tiny boats surround a steamer as soon as she drops anchor. These are the boys who dive for coins. A sad tale is told of Maximilien and Strephane. Again our hearts are moved by the pathos and the tragedy of La Fille de Couleur; and in this chapter we find that characteristic description:--

I refer to the celebrated attire of the pet slaves and _belles affranchies_ of the old colonial days. A full costume,--including violet or crimson "petticoat" of silk or satin; chemise with half-sleeves, and much embroidery and lace; "trembling-pins" of gold (_zepingue tremblant_) to attach the folds of the brilliant Madras turban; the great necklace of three or four strings of gold beads bigger than peas (_collier-choux_); the ear-rings, immense but light as egg-shells (_zanneaux-a-clous_ or _zanneaux-chenilles_); the bracelets (_portes-bonheur_); the studs (_boutons-a-clous_); the brooches, not only for the turban, but for the chemise, below the folds of the showy silken foulard or shoulder-scarf,--would sometimes represent over five thousand francs' expenditure. This gorgeous attire is becoming less visible every year: it is now rarely worn except on very solemn occasions,--weddings, baptisms, first communions, confirmations. The _da_ (nurse) or "_porteuse-de-bapteme_" who bears the baby to church, holds it at the baptismal font, and afterwards carries it from house to house in order that all the friends of the family may kiss it, is thus attired: but now-a-days, unless she be a professional (for there are professional _das_, hired only for such occasions), she usually borrows the jewellery. If tall, young, graceful, with a rich gold tone of skin, the effect of her costume is dazzling as that of a Byzantine Virgin. I saw one young _da_ who, thus garbed, scarcely seemed of the earth and earthly;--there was an Oriental something in her appearance difficult to describe,--something that made you think of the Queen at Sheba going to visit Solomon. She had brought a merchant's baby, just christened, to receive the caresses of the family at whose house I was visiting; and when it came to my turn to kiss it, I confess I could not notice the child: I saw only the beautiful dark face, coiffed with orange and purple, bending over it, in an illumination of antique gold. What a _da_!... She represented really the type of that _belle affranchie_ of other days, against whose fascination special sumptuary laws were made: romantically she imaged for me the supernatural godmothers and Cinderellas of the Creole fairy-tales.

Still we have much to learn about the little creatures in the shapes of ants and scorpions and lizards. They form no small part of the population of Martinique. And still more about the fruits and the vegetables do we learn from good Cyrillia, Ma Bonne. One longs to have a housekeeper as loving and child-like and solicitous. We leave her gazing with love unutterable at the new photograph of her daughter, and wondering the while why they do not make a portrait talk so that she can talk to her beautiful daughter.

And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you more;--day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature--delighting in furious colour--bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity of having to leave it all some day--the far-seen pain of bidding it farewell weighs upon you, even in dreams.

But before we go, we must learn how Nature must treat those who are not born under her suns.

Then at last reluctantly we board the _Guadeloupe_, and with Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes, who is leaving her country, perhaps for a very long time, to become a governess in New York, we realize that nowhere on this earth may there be brighter skies.

Farewell, fair city,--sun-kissed city,--many-fountained city!--dear yellow-glimmering streets,--white pavements learned by heart,--and faces ever looked for,--and voices ever loved! Farewell, white towers with your golden-throated bells!--farewell, green steeps, bathed in the light of summer everlasting!--craters with your coronets of forests!--bright mountain paths upwinding 'neath pomp of fern and angelin and feathery bamboo!--and gracious palms that drowse above the dead! Farewell, soft-shadowing majesty of valleys unfolding to the sun,--green golden cane-fields ripening to the sea!...

Dominica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Pelee--so they vanish behind us. Shall not we too become _Les Revenants_?

YOUMA[28] (5) was written in Martinique, and also belongs to the New Orleans period. "I think you will like it better than 'Chita.' It is more mature and exotic by far,"--so Hearn wrote of the story in one of his letters. Later on, when living in Japan, he wrote:--

[28] Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers.

It gave me no small pleasure to find that you like "Youma": you will not like it less knowing that the story is substantially true. You can see the ruins of the old house in the Quartier du Fort if you ever visit Saint-Pierre, and perhaps meet my old friend Arnoux, a survivor of the time. The girl really died under the heroic conditions described--refusing the help of the blacks and the ladder. Of course I may have idealized her, but not her act. The incident of the serpent occurred also; but the heroine was a different person,--a plantation girl, celebrated by the historian Rufz de Lavison. I wrote the story under wretched circumstances in Martinique, near the scenes described, and under the cross with the black Christ.

An English notice says:--

"It is an admirable little tale, full of local characteristics with curious fragments of Creole French from Martinique, and abundance of wide human sympathy. It deserves reprinting for English readers more than three-fourths of the fiction which is wont to cross the Atlantic under similar circumstances." (294.)

"Youma" is the tale of the exquisite devotion and loyalty of a _da_. (A _da_ is the foster-mother and nurse of a Creole child.) At the death of Aimee, Youma's playmate and rich foster-sister, little Mayotte, her child, becomes Youma's charge. An intimate description is given us of the Creole life of Mayotte and Youma. The love of this _da_ is very beautiful. Once with an extraordinary heroism Youma saves Mayotte from a serpent which has slipped into their room. With a still greater heroism she refuses to run away with Gabriel, who has opened the world to her,--Gabriel who has brought her love, and whom she can marry in no other way. No, above the pleadings of her lover, comes the voice of her dying mistress, begging, with such trust,--

"Youma, O Youma! you will love my child?--Youma, you will never leave her, whatever happens, while she is little? promise, dear Youma!"

And she had--promised....

Then comes the final test of Youma's strength of devotion. There is an outbreak among the blacks, who have become inflamed by the dreams of coming freedom. The Desrivieres with many other families are forced to flee for refuge in safer quarters. Under one roof all these people gather. Youma is urged to leave and save herself. But she will not forsake Mayotte or her master. The infuriated blacks surround the house, and horror follows. Presently the house is set on fire. Youma, with Mayotte in her arms, appears at an upper window. Gabriel, "daring the hell about him for her sake," puts up a ladder. Youma hands him Mayotte. "Can you save her?" she asks.

"Gabriel could only shake his head;--the street sent up so frightful a cry....

"_Non!--non!--non!--pa le yche-beke--janmain yche-beke!_"

"Then you cannot save me!" cried Youma, clasping the child to her bosom,--"_janmain! janmain, mon ami._"

"Youma, in the name of God...."

"In the name of God, you ask me to be a coward!... Are you vile, Gabriel?--are you base?... Save myself and leave the child to burn?... Go!"

"Leave the _beke's yche_!--leave it!--leave it, girl!" shouted a hundred voices.

"_Moin!_" cried Youma, retreating beyond the reach of Gabriel's hand,--"_moin!_ ... Never shall I leave it, never! I shall go to God with it."

"Burn with it, then!" howled the negroes ... "down with that ladder! down with it, down with it!"

The ladder catches fire and burns. The walls quiver, and there are shrieks from the back of the house. Unmoved, with a perfect calm, Youma remains at the window. "There is now neither hate nor fear on her fine face." Softly she whispers to Mayotte, and caresses her with an infinite tenderness. Never to Gabriel had she seemed so beautiful.

Another minute--and he saw her no more. The figure and the light vanished together, as beams and floor and roof all quaked down at once into darkness.... Only the skeleton of stone remained,--black-smoking to the stars.

A stillness follows. The murderers are appalled by their crime.

Then, from below, the flames wrestled out again,--crimsoning the smoke whirls, the naked masonry, the wreck of timbers. They wriggled upward, lengthening, lapping together,--lifted themselves erect,--grew taller, fiercer,--twined into one huge fluid spire of tongues that flapped and shivered high into the night....

The yellowing light swelled,--expanded from promontory to promontory,--palpitated over the harbour,--climbed the broken slopes of the dead volcano leagues through the gloom. The wooded mornes towered about the city in weird illumination,--seeming loftier than by day,--blanching and shadowing alternately with the soaring and sinking of the fire;--and at each huge pulsing of the glow, the white cross of their central summit stood revealed, with the strange passion of its black Christ.

... And at the same hour, from the other side of the world,--a ship was running before the sun, bearing the Republican gift of liberty and promise of universal suffrage to the slaves of Martinique.

There are two little bits of description which are so characteristic that I quote them:--

Then she became aware of a face ... lighted by a light that came from nowhere,--that was only a memory of some long-dead morning. And through the dimness round about it a soft blue radiance grew,--the ghost of a day.

Sunset yellowed the sky,--filled the horizon with flare of gold;--the sea changed its blue to lilac;--the mornes brightened their vivid green to a tone so luminous that they seemed turning phosphorescent. Rapidly the glow crimsoned,--shadows purpled; and night spread swiftly from the east,--black-violet and full of stars.

KARMA[29] (242) was written during the Philadelphia period, but was not published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ until after Hearn had sailed for Japan. The story is concentrated, with its every word a shaft of light, and it seems a wrong to attempt to epitomize it. Except in its entirety no adequate conception can be formed of this marvellous revelation of the anguish that a human soul may suffer; nor of the artistic power with which Hearn has developed and perfected his study. Many quotations could be gleaned from his subsequent books which reflect the inspiration of "Karma."

[29] Copyright, 1889, by Lafcadio Hearn; and, copyright, 1890 by J. B. Lippincott Company.

Despite her unusual intellect, the heroine had a childlike simplicity and frankness which invited her lover's confidence, but he had never told her his admiration, for a dormant power beneath her girlishness made a compliment seem a rudeness. He was often alone with her, which is helpful to lovers, but her charm always confused him, and his embarrassment only deepened. One day she archly asked him to tell her about it.

Is there one who does not know that moment when the woman beloved becomes the ideal, and the lover feels his utter unworthiness? Yet, if she is one of those rare souls, the illusion, however divine, is less perfect than is her worth. Do you know what she truly is--how she signifies "the whole history of love striving against hate, aspiration against pain, truth against ignorance, sympathy against pitilessness? She,--the soul of her! is the ripened passion-flower of the triumph. All the heroisms, the martyrdoms, the immolations of self,--all strong soarings of will through fire and blood to God since humanity began,--conspired to kindle the flame of her higher life."

And then you question yourself with a thousand questions, and then there are as many more of your duty to her, to the future, and to the Supreme Father.

She was not surprised when he told her his wish, but she was not confident that he really loved her, nor whether she should permit herself to like him. Finally she bade him go home and "as soon as you feel able to do it properly,--write out for me a short history of your life;--just write down everything you feel that you would not like me to know. Write it,--and send it.... And then I shall tell you whether I will marry you."

How easy the task seemed, and his whole being was joyous; but the lightness lasted for only a moment, and gradually all that her command meant crept over him.... "_Everything you feel you would not like me to know._" Surely she had no realization of what she had asked. Did she imagine that men were good like women--how cruel to hurt her.

Then for a period he was uplifted with the desire to meet her truthfulness, but his courage failed again after he had written down the record of his childhood and youth. It was no slight task to make this confession of his sins. And how pale and trivial they had seemed before. Was it possible that he had never before rightly looked at them? Yet why should he so falter? Surely she meant to pardon him. He must put everything down truthfully, and then recolour the whole for her gaze. But his face grew hot at the thought of certain passages.

Hour after hour he sat at his desk until it was past midnight, but no skill could soften the stony facts. Finally he lay down to rest: his fevered brain tried to find excuses for his faults. He could forgive himself everything ... except--ah, how unutterably wicked he had been there. No, he could not tell her _that_: instead he must lose her for ever. And in losing her he would lose all the higher self which she had awakened. To lose her--when he of all men had found his ideal.

"_Everything you feel you would not like me to know._" Perhaps when she had put this ban upon him, she suspected that there were incidents in his life which he dared not tell her. Could he not deceive her? No, he might write a lie, but he could never meet her fine sweet eyes with a lie. What was he to do? And why had he always been so humble before that slight girl? "Assuredly those fine grey eyes were never lowered before living gaze: she seemed as one who might look God in the face."

Slowly his senses became more confused, and a darkness came, and a light in the darkness that shone on her; and he saw her bathed in a soft radiance, that seemed of some substance like ivory. And he knew that she was robing for her bridal with him.

He was at her side: all around them was a gentle whispering of many friends, who were dead. Would they smile thus--_if they knew_?

Then there arose something within him, and he knew that he must tell her all. He commenced to speak, and she became transfigured, and smiled at him with the tenderness of an angel; and the more he told the greater was her forgiveness. And he heard the voices of the others lauding him for his self-sacrifice and his sincerity. Yet as they praised a fear clutched him for one last avowal that he must make. And with the growing of this doubt all seemed maliciously to change, and even she no longer smiled. He then would have told her alone, but even as he tried to hush his voice, it seemed to pierce the quietude "with frightful audibility, like the sibilation of a possessing spirit." Then with a reckless despair he shouted it aloud, and everything vanished, and the darkness of night was about him.

For many restless days and nights he harried himself with bitter self-analysis; and day by day he tore up a certain page; yet without that page his manuscript was worthless. As the days grew into weeks a new fear seized him that his silence had betrayed him, and that already she had decided against him. In the face of this danger he became terrified, and one morning he feverishly copied the memorable page, and, addressing the whole, dropped it in the first letter-box, before he might change his mind.

Then an awful revelation of his act overcame him. Should he telegraph her to return the manuscript unopened. No, it was already too late. What was done--was done for ever. He now vaguely realized what he feared in her--"a penetrating dynamic moral power that he felt without comprehending." He tried to steel himself for the worst, but he knew with a premonition that behind his imagined worst there were depths beyond depths of worse.

The single word "Come" which he received two days later confirmed his fears. When he reached the door of her apartment, she had already risen to take from a locked drawer an envelope which he knew was his. She proffered him no greeting, but asked in a cold voice if he wished her to burn the document. At his whispered _yes_, he met her eyes, and they seemed to strip him of the last remnant of his pride. "He stood before her as before God,--morally naked as a soul in painted dreams of the Judgment Day."

The fire caught the paper, and he stood near, in fear of her next word, while she watched the flame.

At last she asked if the woman was dead. He well knew to what she referred, and replied that almost five years had passed since her death. To the penetrating questions which followed he answered that the child--a boy--was well, and that his friend was still there--in the same place. She turned to him abruptly and coldly, angered that he could have believed that she would pardon such a crime.

He must have had some hope, or he would not have sent the letter. Had he measured her by his own moral standard? Certainly he had placed her below the level of honest people. Would he dare to ask their judgment of his sin?

Speechless, he writhed under the scorn of her words, and a knowledge of shame to which his former agony was as nothing burned within him. That in him which her inborn goodness had taught her, was now laid bare to himself.

Again she spoke after a silence--perhaps he would think she was cruel; but she was not, nor was she unjust, for transcendent sin that denies "all the social wisdom gained by human experience" cannot be pardoned, it can only be atoned. And that sin was his; and God would exact his expiation. And that expiation she now demanded in God's name, and as her right. He must go to the friend whom he had wronged, and tell him the whole truth. He must ask for the child, and fulfil his whole duty; also he must place even his life at the man's will. And she would rather see him dead than believe that he could be a coward as well as a criminal. This she requested not as a favour, but as her right.

At her words he grew pale as if to death, and for a moment she feared that he might refuse, and that she must despise him. No! his colour rushed back, and her heart leaped, as with a calm resolve he answered, "I will do it."

"Then go!" she replied, betraying no gladness.

A year went by. She knew that he had kept his promise. He wrote to her often, and passionately, but the letters were never answered. Did she doubt him still?--or was she afraid of her own heart? He could not know the truth, so he waited with hopes and fears, and the seasons passed. Then one day she was startled to receive a letter which told her that he was passing through her suburb, and he begged only to be permitted to see her. To his surprise the answer brought the happy words, "You may."

From the shy, beautiful eyes of the child, whom he brought, there seemed to plead a woman's sorrow, until her own soul answered in forgiveness. And the boy and the father marvelled at the tenderness that had come upon her, and the father sobbed until her voice thrilled: that suffering was strength and knowledge, that always he must suffer for the evil he had wrought, but she would help him to bear the pain, and to endure his atonement. She would shield his frailty--she would love his boy.

THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD (21) was translated in New York, while Hearn was finishing the proofs of "Two Years in the French West Indies." Of it he writes:--

As for the "Sylvestre Bonnard" I believe I told you that that was translated in about ten days and published in two weeks from the time of beginning it.... But the work suffers in consequence of haste.

After his departure for the Orient, two articles on West Indian Society appeared in the _Cosmopolitan_ (243-244). They give a sympathetic study of the sad and pathetic tragedy of the race of the mixed blood. These articles bear a similarity to the chapter upon and the references to this subject, in "Two Years in the French West Indies."

GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN[30] (7) is the first of the series of Japanese books. It was published after Hearn had been in Japan for four years; since 1891 six of the articles had appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (246-251). Also in 1890, an article, "A Winter Journey to Japan," was published in _Harper's Monthly_ (245). This was his initial paper on Japan.

[30] Copyright, 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn; and published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.]

In many ways the present book on Japan is his happiest, for the charm over everything is fresh and radiant. It is here that we learn the old graceful customs, the touching child-like ways, and the sacred appealing rites and beliefs that so endear to us the Japanese. Later we are to have studies more philosophical, more erudite, but none more penetrating in virtue of the very simplicity of subject.

It is difficult to believe that the writer, bewitched with the warmth and colour of the tropics, giving his pen an unlicensed flow of word colour and enthusiasm, in a few years could have matured into this quiet, gentle thinker equally absorbed by the East. One finds scarcely a trace of the Hearn of the tropics: therein lies his unique genius; just so admirably as he reflected the West Indian life, does he now reflect that of the Japanese.

It is the old Japan that Hearn loves, and the passing of which he mourns even at the first. In his Preface, he says, "My own conviction, and that of many impartial and more experienced observers of Japanese life, is that Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose." Also in one of his letters he writes, "I felt, as never before, how utterly dead old Japan is, and how ugly New Japan is becoming." It is old Japan that we find in the present volume. It is much as if we looked into a diary of his first days in the Orient, giving his impressions and conclusions, as well as portraying the pictures themselves.

One of the reviews of the book contains the following:--

"If Japan is all that he says; if the Japanese are so compounded of all the virtues, and so innocent of the ugly failings that mar our Western civilization, then the poet's dream of a Golden Age has actually been realized in the remote East. Much as we should like to believe that such a land and such a people actually exist, we cannot altogether conquer our doubts, or avoid the suspicion that the author's feeling sometimes gets the better of his judgment." (379.)

And another says:--

"In volume one he is still the outside observer, remote enough to be amused with the little pretty, bird-like glances of the Orient towards the Occident, pleased at the happy chance which makes a blind shampooer's cry musical as she taps her way down the street, instead of giving her a voice raucous as that which hurts and haunts the unwilling ears of wayfarers down Newgate Street and on Ludgate-Hill; or complimentary to the cunning fancy which paints a branch of flowering cherry in a cleft bamboo on a square of faintly-coloured paper and calls the cherry blossom 'beauty' and the bamboo 'long life.' He notices the shapely feet of the people: 'bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny, tiny _geta_, or feet of young girls in snowy _tabi_. The _tabi_, the white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect--the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness.'

"A little further on the leaven of witchcraft is working, and he cannot write so airily. It is not as a mere spectator that he talks of his visit to the Buddhist cemetery, where the rotting wooden laths stand huddled about the graves, and one tomb bears an English name and a cross chiselled upon it. Here he made acquaintance with the god, who is the lover of little children, Jizo-Sama, about whose feet are little piles of stones heaped there by the hands of mothers of dead children. He is not quite as much in earnest as volume two will find him, or he could not call the gentle god 'that charming divinity'; but the sight-seer is dying in him nevertheless. It was with a friend's hand that he struck the great bell at Enoshima." (286.)

But even here with a new world unfolding to his delighted eyes, it was colour that Hearn really wanted.

I am not easy about my book, of which I now await the proofs. It lacks colour--it isn't like the West Indian book. But the world here is not forceful: it is all washed in faint blues and greys and greens. There are really _gamboge_, or saffron-coloured valleys,--and lilac fields; but these exist only in the early summer and the rape-plant season, and ordinarily Japan is chromatically spectral.

The opening chapter is his first day in the Orient, "the first charm of Japan is intangible and volatile as a perfume." Everything seems to him elfish and diminutive. "Cha," his Kurumaya, takes him past the shops where it appears to him "that everything Japanese is delicate, exquisite, admirable--even a pair of common wooden chop-sticks in a paper bag with a little drawing upon it." The money itself is a thing of beauty. But one must not dare to look, for there is enchantment in these wares, and having looked, one must buy. In truth one wishes to buy everything, even to the whole land, "with its magical trees and luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and forty millions of the most lovable people."

Before the steps leading to a temple he stops.

I turn a moment to look back through the glorious light. Sea and sky mingle in the same beautiful pale clear blue. Below me the billowing of bluish roofs reaches to the verge of the unruffled bay on the right, and to the feet of the green wooded hills flanking the city on two sides. Beyond that semi-circle of green hills rises a lofty range of serrated mountains, indigo silhouettes. And enormously high above the line of them towers an apparition indescribably lovely,--one solitary snowy cone, so filmly exquisite, so spiritually white, that but for its immemorially familiar outline, one would surely deem it a shape of cloud. Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous heaven,--the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama.

Passing to the temple garden he wonders why the trees are so lovely in Japan.

Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake? Assuredly they have mastered men's hearts by their loveliness, like beautiful slaves. That is to say, Japanese hearts. Apparently there have been some foreign tourists of the brutal class in this place, since it has been deemed necessary to set up inscriptions in English announcing that "it is forbidden to injure the trees."

Of Hearn's first visit to a Buddhist temple, I quote what one of his critics has to say:--

"The silence of centuries seems to descend upon your soul, you feel the thrill of something above and beyond the commonplace of this every-day world, even here, amidst the turmoil, the rush, the struggle of this monster city of the West, if you take up his 'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,' and turn to his description of his first visit to a Buddhist temple. Marvellous is his power of imparting the mystery of that strange land, of hidden meanings and allegories, of mists and legends. The bygone spirit of the race, the very essence of the heart of the people, that has lain sleeping in the temple gloom, in the shadows of the temple shrines, awakes and whispers in your ears. You feel the soft, cushioned matting beneath your feet, you smell the faint odour of the incense, you hear the shuffling of pilgrim feet, the priest sliding back screen after screen, pouring in light upon the gilded bronzes and inscriptions; and you look for the image of the Deity, of the presiding Spirit, between the altar groups of convoluted candelabra. And you see:

Only a mirror, a round, pale disc of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this mockery of me a phantom of the far sea.

Only a mirror! Symbolizing what? Illusion? Or that the Universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? Or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our own hearts? Perhaps some day I shall be able to find out. (350.)

Many more temples are visited in the following chapter. What impresses him the most is the joyousness of the people's faith: everything is bright and cheerful, and the air is filled with the sound of children's voices as they play in the courts. He sees the many representations of Jizo, the loving divinity who cares for the souls of little children, who comforts them, and saves them from the demons. The face of Jizo is like that of a beautiful boy, and the countenance is made "heavenly by such a smile as only Buddhist art could have imagined, the smile of infinite lovingness and supremest gentleness." There is also Kwannon, "the goddess of mercy, the gentle divinity who refused the rest of Nirvana to save the souls of men." Her face is golden, smiling with eternal youth and infinite tenderness. And he sees Emma Dai-O, the unpitying, tremendous one. He learns many things of many gods and goddesses. There is the temple of Kishibojin--the mother of Demons. For some former sin she was born a demon and devoured her own children. But through the teaching of Buddha she became a divine being, loving and protecting the little ones, and Japanese mothers pray to her, and wives pray for beautiful boys. At her shrine what impresses the visitor are hundreds of tiny dresses, mostly of poor material, stretched between tall poles of bamboos. These are the thank-offerings of poor simple country mothers whose prayers to her have been answered.

In another chapter Hearn writes of the Festival of the Dead, for between the 13th and the 15th day of July the dead may come back again. Every small and great shrine is made beautiful with new mats of purest rice straw, and is decorated with lotus flowers, _shikimi_ (anise) and _misohagi_ (lespedeza). Food offerings, served on a tiny lacquered table--a _zen_--are placed before the altars. Every hour, tea daintily served in little cups is offered to the viewless visitors. At night beautiful special lanterns are hung at the entrances of homes. Those who have dead friends visit the cemeteries and make offerings there with prayers, and the sprinkling of water, and the burning of incense. On the evening of the 15th the ghosts of those, who in expiation of faults committed in a previous life are doomed to hunger, are fed. And also are fed the ghosts of those who have no friends.

For three days everything is done to feast the dead, and on the last night there comes the touching ceremony of farewell, for the dead must then return.

Everything has been prepared for them. In each home small boats made of barley straw closely woven have been freighted with supplies of choice food, with tiny lanterns, and written messages of faith and love. Seldom more than two feet in length are these boats; but the dead require little room. And the frail craft are launched on canal, lake, sea, or river,--each with a miniature lantern glowing at the prow, and incense burning at the stern. And if the night be fair, they voyage long. Down all the creeks and rivers and canals the phantom fleets go glimmering to the sea; and all the sea sparkles to the horizon with the lights of the dead, and the sea wind is fragrant with incense.

But alas! it is now forbidden in the great seaports to launch the _shoryobune_, "the boats of the blessed ghosts."

In Kami-Ichi, in the land of Hoki, there is a glimpse into ancient Japan, for there the Bon-odori, the Dance of the Festival of the Dead, is still maintained. No longer is it danced in the cities. In the temple court, in the shadow of the tomb, with the moonlight as a guide, long processions of young girls dance a slow ghostly dance while the vast audience of spectators keeps a perfect stillness. A deep male chant is heard, and the women respond. Many songs follow, until the night is waning. Then this seeming witchcraft ends, and with merry laughter and soft chatting all disperse.

Hearn spends a long happy day at Matsue, the chief city of the Province of the Gods, where he gathers legends and impressions. Of course it has its temples. The temple is the best place to see the life of the people. There it is that the children play all day long. In the summer evening, the young artisans and labourers prove their strength in wrestling-matches. The sacred dances are held there; and on holidays it is also the place where toys are sold.

Often at night your attention will be drawn to a large, silent, admiring group of people standing before some little booth. They will be looking at a few vases of sprays of flowers--an exhibition of skill in their arrangement.

Returning homeward, there is seen a poor woman scattering some white papers into a stream of water, and, as she throws each one in, murmuring something sweet in a low voice. She is praying for her little dead child, and these are little prayers that she has written to Jizo.

Kitzuki is the most ancient shrine in Japan, and it is the living centre of Shinto. There the ancient faith burns as brightly as ever it did in the unknown past. Buddhism may be doomed to pass away, but Shinto "unchanging and vitally unchanged remains dominant, and appears but to gain in power and dignity." Many of the wisest scholars have tried to define Shinto.

But the reality of Shinto lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic, there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive.

At Kaka is the Cave of the Children's Ghosts. No evil person may enter the Shin-Kukedo, for if he does, a large stone will detach itself and fall down upon him. Here in this great vault, lifting forty feet above the water, and with walls thirty feet apart, is a white rock out of which drips a water apparently as white as the rock itself. This is the Fountain of Jizo, which gives milk to the souls of little dead children.

And mothers suffering from want of milk come hither to pray that milk may be given unto them; and their prayer is heard. And mothers having more milk than their infants need come hither also, and pray to Jizo that so much as they can give may be taken for the dead children; and their prayer is heard and their milk diminishes.

At least thus the peasants of Izumo say.

In another cavern are countless little piles of stones and pebbles, which must have been made by long and patient labour. It is the work of the dead children. One must step carefully, for the sake of these little ones, for if any work is spoiled, they will cry. In the sand are prints of little naked feet, "_the footprints of the infant ghosts_." Strewn here and there on the rocks are tiny straw sandals, pilgrims' offerings to keep the baby feet from being bruised by the stones.

In the temple of Hojinji of the Zen sect at Mionoseki, there is an altar which bears many images of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Before the altar, and hung from the carven ceiling, is a bright coloured mass of embroidered purses, patterns of silk-weaving and of cotton-weaving, also balls of threads and worsted and silk. These are the first offerings of little girls. As soon as a baby girl learns how to sew or knit or embroider, she brings to the Maid-Mother of all grace and sweetness and pity, the first piece that she has made successfully.

Even the infants of the Japanese kindergarten bring their first work here,--pretty paper-cuttings, scissored out and plaited into divers patterns by their own tiny flower-soft hands.

Among the many Notes on Kitzuki which interest, is the annual festival of the Divine Scribe, the Tenjin-Matsuri, to which every school-boy sends a specimen of his best writing. The texts are in Chinese characters, and are generally drawn from the works of Confucius or Mencius. And Hearn remarks that the children of other countries can never excel in the art of Japanese writing. The inner ancestral tendencies will not let them catch the secret of the stroke with the brush. It is the fingers of the dead that move the brush of the Japanese boy.

At every temple festival in Japan there is a sale of toys. And every mother, however poor, buys her child a toy. They are not costly, and are charming. Many of these toys would seem odd to a little English child. There is a tiny drum, a model of the drum used in the temples; or a miniature sambo table, upon which offerings are presented to the gods. There is a bunch of bells fastened to a wooden handle. It resembles a rattle, but it is a model of the sacred _suzu_ which the virgin priestess uses in her dance before the gods. Then there are tiny images of priests and gods and goddesses. There is little of grimness in the faiths of the Far East; their gods smile. "Why religion should be considered too awful a subject for children to amuse themselves decently with never occurs to the common Japanese mind."

Besides these, there are pretty toys illustrating some fairy-tale or superstition and many other playthings of clever devices, and the little doll, O-Hina-San (Honourable Miss Hina), which is a type of Japanese girl beauty. The doll in Japan is a sacred part of the household. There is a belief that if it is treasured long enough it becomes alive. Such a doll is treated like a real child: it is supposed to possess supernatural powers. One had such rare powers that childless couples used to borrow it. They would minister to it, and would give it a new outfit of clothes before returning it to its owners. All who did this became parents. To the Japanese a new doll is only a doll; but a doll that has received the love of many generations acquires a soul. A little Japanese girl was asked, "How can a doll live?" "Why," was the lovely answer, "_if you love it enough_, it will live!"

Never is the corpse of a doll thrown away. When it has become so worn out that it must be considered quite dead, it is either burned or cast in running water, or it is dedicated to the God Kojin. In almost every temple ground there is planted a tree called _enoki_, which is sacred to Kojin. Before the tree will be a little shrine, and either there or at the foot of the sacred tree, the sad little remains will be laid. Seldom during the lifetime of its owner is a doll given to Kojin.

When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman--the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and of her mother's mother.

There is a sad and awful tradition in the history of the Kengyos, the oldest of the noble families of Izumo. Seven generations ago the Daimyo of Izumo made his first official visit to the temples of Hinomisaki, and was entertained royally by the Kengyo. As was the custom, the young wife served the royal visitor. Her simple beauty unfortunately enchanted him, and he demanded that she leave her husband and go with him. Terrified, but like a brave loving wife and mother, she answered that sooner than desert her husband and child she would kill herself.

The Lord of Izumo went away, but the little household well knew the evil that now shadowed it. And shortly the Kengyo was suddenly taken from his family; tried at once for some unknown offence, and banished to the islands of Oki, where he died. The Daimyo was exultant, for no obstacle was in the way of his desire. The wife of the dead Kengyo was the daughter of his own minister, whose name was Kamiya. Kamiya was summoned before the Daimyo, who told him that there was no longer any reason why Kamiya's daughter should not enter his household, and bade Kamiya bring her to him.

The next day Kamiya returned, and with the utmost ceremony announced that the command had been fulfilled--the victim had arrived.

Smiling for pleasure, the Matsudaira ordered that she should be brought at once into his presence. The Karo prostrated himself, retired, and presently returned, placed before his master a _kubi-oke_ upon which lay the freshly-severed head of a beautiful woman,--the head of the young wife of the dead Kengyo,--with the simple utterance:

"This is my daughter." Dead by her own brave will,--but never dishonoured.

"None love life more than the Japanese; none fear death less." So it is that when two lovers find that they can never wed, they keep the love death together, which is _joshi_ or _shinju_. By dying they believe that they will at once be united in another world. They always pray that they may be buried together. (In other books are written additional stories illustrating the touching custom.)

At the temple of Yaegaki at Sakusa, are the Deities of Wedlock and of Love, and thither go all youths and maidens who are in love. Hundreds of strips of soft white paper are knotted to the gratings of the doors of the shrine. These are the prayers of love. Also there are tresses of girls' hair, love-sacrifices, and offerings of sea-water and of sea-weed. In the soil around the foundation of the shrine are planted quantities of small paper flags.

All over Japan there are little Shinto shrines before which are images in stone of foxes.

The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods,--whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about most of them, even those whose noses have been broken off. Moreover, these ancient foxes have certain natural beauties which their modern Tokyo kindred cannot show. Time has bestowed upon them divers speckled coats of beautiful colours while they have been sitting on their pedestals, listening to the ebbing and flowing of the centuries and snickering weirdly at mankind. Their backs are clad with finest green velvet of old mosses; their limbs are spotted and their tails are tipped with the dead gold or the dead silver of delicate fungi. And the places they most haunt are the loveliest,--high shadowy groves where the _uguisu_ sings in green twilight, above some voiceless shrine with its lamps and its lions of stone so mossed as to seem things born of the soil--like mushrooms.

It is difficult to define the Fox superstition, chiefly because it has sprung from so many elements. The origin is Chinese, and in Japan it has become mixed with the worship of a Shinto deity, and further enlarged by the Buddhist belief of thaumaturgy and magic. The peasants worship foxes because they fear them. But there are good foxes and bad ones. The country holds legend after legend of goblin foxes and ghost foxes, and foxes that take the form of human beings. Every Japanese child knows some of them.

Seldom is a Japanese garden a flower-garden: it may not contain a flower. It is a landscape garden, and its artistic purpose is to give the impression of a real scene. Besides, it is supposed to express "a mood in the soul." Such abstract ideas as Chastity, Faith, Connubial Bliss were expressed by the old Buddhist monks who first brought the art into Japan. Little hills, and slopes of green, tiny river-banks, and little islands, together with trees, and stones, and flowering shrubs are combined by the artist. All these things have their poetry and legend, and sometimes have a special name signifying their position and rank in the whole design.

In the ponds little creatures such as the frog and water-beetle live, and they too have their legends. The children make all of these creatures and the insects their playmates. Then there are the _semi_, which are musicians, and lovely dragon-flies which skim over the ponds; and back on the hill above the garden are many birds. It is not necessary to have a garden outdoors, for there are indoor gardens too which can even be put into a _koniwa_, the size of a fruit-dish.

The dead are never dead with the Japanese; they become even more important members of the family, for the spirits of the dead control the lives of the living. Each day there is some ceremony in memory of these blessed dead; and no home is so poor but it has its household shrine. And Shinto, ancestor-worship,

signifies character in the higher sense,--courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things loyalty. The spirit of Shinto is the spirit of filial piety, the zest of duty, the readiness to surrender life for a principle without a thought of wherefore. It is the docility of the child; it is the sweetness of the Japanese woman. It is conservatism likewise; the wholesome check upon the national tendency to cast away the worth of the entire past in rash eagerness to assimilate too much of the foreign present. It is religion,--but religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse,--religion transmuted into ethical instinct. It is the whole emotional life of the race,--the Soul of Japan.

Self-sacrifice, loyalty, the deepest spirit of Shinto, is born with the child. If you ask any Japanese student what his dearest wish is he will surely answer,--"To die for His Majesty, our Emperor." It is impossible in this limited space to give an adequate idea of all that Shintoism implies.

The dressing of the hair is a very important part of a Japanese woman's toilet. It is dressed once in every three days, and the task takes probably two hours. The elaborateness of the coiffure changes with the growing age of the maiden. But when she is twenty-eight, she is no longer young, and so thereafter only one style is left, that worn by old women. Of course, there are many superstitions about women's hair. It is the Japanese woman's dearest possession, and she will undergo any suffering not to lose it. At one time it was considered a fitting vengeance to shear the hair of an erring wife, and then turn her away.

Only the greatest faith or the deepest love can prompt a woman to the voluntary sacrifice of her entire _chevelure_, though partial sacrifices, offerings of one or two long thick cuttings, may be seen suspended before many an Izumo shrine.

What faith can do in the way of such sacrifice, he best knows who has seen the great cables, woven of women's hair, that hang in the vast Hongwanji temple at Kyoto. And love is stronger than faith, though much less demonstrative. According to an ancient custom a wife bereaved sacrifices a portion of her hair to be placed in the coffin of her husband, and buried with him. The quantity is not fixed: in the majority of cases it is very small, so that the appearance of the coiffure is thereby no wise affected. But she who resolves to remain for ever faithful to the memory of the lost yields up all. With her own hand she cuts off her hair, and lays the whole glossy sacrifice--emblem of her youth and beauty--upon the knees of the dead.

It is never suffered to grow again.

The "Diary of a Teacher" gives a careful picture of the school-life in Japan as Hearn finds it. At the Normal School, which is a state institute, the young man student has no expenses. In return for these kindnesses, when he graduates he serves as a teacher for five years. Discipline is severe, and deportment is a demand. "A spirit of manliness is cultivated, which excludes roughness but develops self-reliance and self-control."

The silence of study hours is perfect, and without permission no head is ever raised from a book.

The female department is in a separate building. Girls are taught the European sciences, and are trained in all the Japanese arts, such as embroidery, decoration, painting; and of course that most delicate of arts--the arranging of flowers. Drawing is taught in all the schools. By fifty per cent. do Japanese students excel the English students in drawing.

There is also a large elementary school for little boys and girls connected with the Normal School. These are taught by the students in the graduating classes. Noteworthy is the spirit of peace prevailing at the recesses that occur for ten minutes between each lesson. The boys romp and shout and race, but never quarrel. Hearn says that among the 800 scholars whom he has taught, he has never even heard of a fight, nor of any serious quarrel. The girls sing or play some gentle game, and the teachers are kind and watchful of the smaller scholars. If a dress is torn or soiled the child is cared for as carefully as if she were a younger sister.

No teacher would ever think of striking a scholar. If he did so he would at once have to give up his position. In fact, punishments are unknown. "The spirit is rather reversed. In the Occident the master expels the pupil. In Japan it happens quite as often that the pupil expels the master."

It takes the Japanese student seven years to acquire the triple system of ideographs, which is the alphabet of his native literature. He must also be versed in the written and the spoken literature. He must study foreign history, geography, arithmetic, astronomy, physics, geometry, natural history, agriculture, chemistry, drawing.

Worst of all he must learn English,--a language of which the difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by any one unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue,--a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought.

And he studies all this upon the slimmest of diets, clad in thin clothes in cold rooms. No wonder many fall by the way.

The students have been trained to find a moral in all things. If the theme given to them for a composition is a native one, they will never fail to find it. For instance,--a peony is very beautiful, but it has a disagreeable odour; hence we should remember that "To be attracted by beauty only may lead us into fearful and fatal misfortune." The sting of the mosquito is useful, for "then we shall be bringed back to study."

There is nothing distinctive about the Japanese countenance, but there is an intangible pleasantness that is common to all. Contrasted with Occidental faces they seem "half-sketched." The outlines are very soft, there is "neither aggressiveness nor shyness, neither eccentricity nor sympathy, neither curiosity nor indifference.... But all are equally characterized by a singular placidity,--expressing neither love nor hate, nor anything save perfect repose and gentleness,--like the dreamy placidity of Buddhist images." Later, these faces become individualized.

In another chapter Hearn tells of Two Festivals: one the festival of the New Year; and the other, the Festival of Setsubun, which is the time for the casting out of devils. On the eve of this latter festival, the Yaku-otoshi, who is the caster-out of the demons, goes around, to any houses that may desire his services, and performs his exorcism, for which he receives a little fee. The rites consist of the recitation of certain prayers, and the rattling of a _shakujo_. The _shakujo_ is an odd-shaped staff. There is a tradition that it was first used by Buddhist pilgrims to warn little creatures and insects to get out of the way.

I quote from a French review for the description of one of Hearn's stories:--

"But the most beautiful of all, 'A Dancing Girl,' is drawn from the chronicles of that far-off past, from which, say what one may, he is certainly wise in drawing his inspirations. It is the story of a courtesan in love.

"At the height of her celebrity, this idol of a capital disappears from public life, and nobody knows why. Leaving fortune behind, she flies with a poor youth who loves her. They build for themselves a little house in the mountains, and there exist apart from the world, one for the other. But the lover dies one cold winter, and she remains alone, with no other consolation than to dance for him every evening in the deserted house. For he loved to see her dance, and he must still take pleasure in it. Therefore, daily, she places on the memorial altar the accustomed offerings, and at night she dances decked out in the same finery as when she was the delight of a large city. And the day comes, when old, decrepit, dying, reduced to beggary, she carries her superb costume faded with time, to a painter who had seen her in the days of her beauty, that he may accept it in exchange for a portrait made from memory, which shall be placed before the altar always bearing offerings, that her beloved may ever see her young, the most beautiful of the _shirabyashi_, and that he may forgive her for not being able to dance any more.

"This _shirabyashi_, from the distance of time, appears to us here, clothed with I know not what of hieratical dignity, such as the modern _geisha_ could never possess. Lafcadio Hearn in no wise pretends in the pages he devotes to these latter, to idealize them beyond measure. They appear under his pen as pretty animals somewhat dangerous; but is it not their calling to be so? Whatever be the rank of the Japanese woman, he only speaks of her with an extreme discretion, and with a caution that one would look for in vain in the portrait of _Mme. Chrysantheme_. The subtle voluptuousness of his style is never extended to the scenes he reproduces; it is a style immaterial to a rare degree; he knows how to make us understand what he means, without one word to infringe those proprieties that are dear to the Japanese, even more than virtue itself. And to believe him, the young, well-brought-up girl, the honest wife, are in Japan the most perfect types of femininity that he has ever met in any part of the world;--he, who has travelled so much. Opinions formed superficially by globe-trotters on this subject that he scarcely glances at because of respect, arouse as much indignation in him as could they in the Japanese themselves. Evidently he has penetrated into their inner life, into the mystery of their thoughts, into their hidden springs of action, to the point of participating in their feelings." (390.)

From Hoki to Oki there is much to learn about the landscapes of Western and Central Japan; and Hearn gives many legends, and many more impressions and intimate glimpses.

As there are only walls of thin paper separating the lives of these Japanese people, no privacy can exist. Really everything is done in public, even your thoughts must be known. And it never occurs to a Japanese that there should be any reason for living unobserved. This must show a rare moral condition, and is understood only by those who appreciate the charm of the Japanese character, its goodness, and its politeness.

No one endeavours to expand his own individuality by belittling his fellow; no one tries to make himself appear a superior being: any such attempt would be vain in a community where the weaknesses of each are known to all, where nothing can be concealed or disguised, and where affectation could only be regarded as a mild form of insanity.

Hearn speaks of the strange public curiosity which his presence aroused at Urago. It was not a rude curiosity; in fact, one so gentle that he could not wish the gazers rebuked. But so insistent did it become that he had to close his doors and windows to prevent his being watched while he was asleep.

Kinjuro, the ancient gardener, knows a great many things about souls. "No one is by the gods permitted to have more souls than nine." Kinjuro also knows legends about ghosts and goblins.

An essay penetrating the very heart of the Japanese, is the chapter on the "Japanese Smile." It crowns Hearn's work as a superb interpretation of Japanese soul-life. This smile is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of self-sacrifice. It is metaphysically and psychologically exquisite. It is an etiquette which for generations has been cultivated. It was a smile, _in origin_, however, demanded by hard heathen gods of the victims they sacrificed; and, in history, it was demanded of the subject race by the early conquerors. If refused, then off came their heads! The smile is born with the Japanese child, and is nurtured through all the growing years.

The smile is taught like the bow; like the prostration; like that little sibilant sucking-in of the breath which follows, as a token of pleasure, the salutation to a superior; like all the elaborate and beautiful etiquette of the old courtesy.

The Japanese believe that one should always turn one's happiest face to people. It is a wrong to cause them to share your sorrow or misfortune, and so hurt or sadden them. One should never look serious. It is not only unkind but extremely rude to show one's personal griefs or anger: these feelings should always be hidden. Even though it is death one must face, it is a duty to smile bravely.

It was with such a smile that the dying boy Shida wrote and pasted upon the wall over his bed:--

Thou, my Lord-Soul, dost govern me. Thou knowest that I cannot now govern myself. Deign, I pray thee, to let me be cured speedily. Do not suffer me to speak much. Make me to obey in all things the command of the physician.

This ninth day of the eleventh month of the twenty-fourth year of Meiji.

From the sick body of Shida to his Soul.

The key to the mystery of the most unaccountable smiles is Japanese politeness. The servant sentenced to dismissal for a fault prostrates himself, and asks for pardon with a smile. That smile indicates the very reverse of callousness or insolence: "Be assured that I am satisfied with the great justice of your honourable sentence, and that I am aware of the gravity of my fault. Yet my sorrow and my necessity have caused me to indulge the unreasonable hope that I may be forgiven for my great rudeness in asking pardon." The youth or girl beyond the age of childish tears when punished for some error, receives the punishment with a smile which means: "No evil feeling arises in my heart; much worse than this my fault has deserved."

This quality, which has become as natural to the Japanese as the very breath of his body, is the sweet tonic-note of his whole character.

_Sayonara!_ Across the waters echoes the cry, _Manzai, Manzai!_ (Ten thousand years to you! ten thousand years!). Hearn is leaving. He is going far away. His pupils write expressing their sorrow and regret. He sends them a letter thanking them for their gift of a beautiful sword, and in a loving farewell says:--

May you always keep fresh within your hearts those impulses of generosity and kindliness and loyalty which I have learned to know so well, and of which your gift will ever remain for me the graceful symbol!

And a symbol not only of your affection and loyalty as students to teachers, but of that other beautiful sense of duty expressed, when so many of you wrote down for me, as your dearest wish, the desire to die for His Imperial Majesty, your Emperor. That wish is holy: it means perhaps more than you know, or can know, until you shall have become much older and wiser. This is an era of great and rapid change; and it is probable that many of you, as you grow up, will not be able to believe everything that your fathers believed before you, though I sincerely trust you will at least continue always to respect the faith, even as you still respect the memory, of your ancestors. But however much the life of New Japan may change about you, however much your own thoughts may change with the times, never suffer that noble wish you expressed to me to pass away from your souls. Keep it burning there, clear and pure as the flame of the little lamp that glows before your household shrine.

OUT OF THE EAST[31] (8), followed "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." The charm of the first impression is waning.

[31] Copyright, 1895, by Lafcadio Hearn; and published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

In a letter Hearn writes:--

Every day, it strikes me more and more how little I shall ever know of the Japanese. I have been working hard at a new book, which is now half finished, and consists of philosophical sketches chiefly. It will be a very different book from the "Glimpses," and will show you how much the Japanese world has changed for me. I imagine that sympathy and friendship are almost impossible for any foreigner to obtain,--because of the amazing difference in the psychology of the two races. We only guess at each other without understanding.

In another letter, speaking of the title for this book, he continues:--

It was suggested only by the motto of the Oriental Society, "_Ex Oriente lux._" ... The simpler the title, and the vaguer--in my case--the better: the vagueness touches curiosity. Besides, the book is a vague thing.

The _Academy_, writing of "Out of the East," says:--

"Each book marks a longer step towards the Buddhist mysticism, wherein we have lost our poet. 'The Stone Buddha,' in the first mentioned book, is a dreamy dialogue between the wisdom of the West; Science, with her theories of evolution, revolution and dissolution; Buddhism, with its re-birth on re-rebirth; and Nirvana at the end. This thing also is vanity. As there can be no end, so there can be no beginning; even Time is an illusion, and there is nothing new beneath a hundred million suns." (286.)

The old charm of word colour sparkles in "The Dream of a Summer Day."

Mile after mile I rolled along that shore, looking into the infinite light. All was steeped in blue,--a marvellous blue, like that which comes and goes in the heart of a great shell. Glowing blue sea met hollow blue sky in a brightness of electric fusion; and vast blue apparitions--the mountains of Higo--angled up through the blaze, like masses of amethyst. What a blue transparency! The universal colour was broken only by the dazzling white of a few high summer clouds, motionlessly curled above one phantom peak in the offing. They threw down upon the water snowy tremulous lights. Midges or ships creeping far away seemed to pull long threads after them,--the only sharp lines in all that hazy glory. But what divine clouds! White purified spirits of clouds, resting on their way to the beatitude of Nirvana? Or perhaps the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago?

The gnat of the soul of me flitted out into that dream of blue, 'twixt sea and sun,--hummed back to the shore of Suminoye through the luminous ghosts of fourteen hundred summers.

And Hearn tells with charm why "the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago," and also of the old, old woman who drank too deeply of the magical waters of youth.

Reviewing the present volume, the _Spectator_ remarks:--

"The main drift of his books, however, is to bring into view not so much the glories of Japanese sunlight or the charms of animate or inanimate Nature, on which it falls, as the prevalence, at any rate in extensive sections of Japanese society, of modes of thought and standards of conduct which, though often widely apart from our own, demand the respect of every candid Englishman. And certainly in this endeavour he meets with a large measure of success. His account of the essays written and the questions asked by the members of his class in English language and literature at the Government college, or Higher Middle School, of Kyushu, discloses not only what must be regarded as a very good development of general intelligence among those young men, but a moral tone which in many respects is quite as high, though with interesting differences in point of view, as would be expected among English boys or young men in the upper forms of our great public-schools or at the Universities. Of course, what boys or young men write for or say to their masters and tutors cannot by any means always be taken as sure evidence of their inner feelings or of the character of their daily life. But, so far as one can judge, Hearn's pupils appear to have given him their confidence, and what he tells us of them may therefore reasonably be taken without much discount. It certainly illustrates an attractive simplicity of character and thought, not untouched by poetic imagination, together with a high development of family affection and strong sense of family duty, and also a remarkably high level of patriotic feeling. This spirit is apparently inherited from the old military class of the island of Kyushu, and it is not surprising to hear that rich men at a distance are keen to give their sons the opportunity of acquiring the Kyushu 'tone.' Towards the close of his book Mr. Hearn gives an extremely interesting account of a farewell visit paid him in the autumn of 1894 by an old pupil who had entered the army after leaving college, and had been placed, at his own request, in one of the divisions ordered for service in Corea:--

"And now I am so glad," he exclaimed, his face radiant with a soldier's joy, "we go to-morrow." Then he blushed again, as if ashamed of having uttered his frank delight. I thought of Carlyle's deep saying, that never pleasures, but only suffering; and death are the lures that draw true hearts. I thought also--what I could not say to any Japanese--that the joy in the lad's eyes was like nothing I had ever seen before, except the caress in the eyes of a lover on the morning of his bridal.

"A beautiful thought, the reader will agree; but why could it not be uttered to a Japanese? A good deal will be found on this subject in Mr. Hearn's book, and, as we have indicated, we do not think it all holds together. His class of students, we learn, professed to think it 'very, very strange' that there should be so much in English novels about love and marrying; and then he tells us that--

Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the authors of one's being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of the parents by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves ... appears, to the Japanese student of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.

"Now, of course, it is known here that in Japan, as in other Oriental countries, it is a rule for marriages to be family arrangements, as regards which it is expected that the young persons will conform to the wishes of their respective parents.

* * * * *

"But of course some inconsistencies are to be expected from an author enamoured of the whole country. He is very Buddhist, and is anxious to show that Buddhists have always held, in matters of faith, something very like the doctrines of modern science with regard to the perpetual sequence of evolution and dissolution. On this subject he argues cleverly and effectively; but when, by implication or expressly, he compares Buddhism with Christianity, it is evident that the latter faith has not received any very close study from him. None the less is his book, though dominated by a somewhat uncritical enthusiasm, full of interest and instruction as to the difference between the gifts, the motives, and the mental and moral attitude of the Japanese and the peoples of the West, ourselves in particular. It is well worth while to study that remarkable people as they are seen by one who is so much captivated by them, and believes in them so strongly, as Mr. Lafcadio Hearn." (380.)

The _Athenaeum_ does not speak so cordially, and a review in the _Atlantic Monthly_ says:--

"Mr. Hearn is not at his best as a metaphysician.... But we can forgive him in that he stands forth a staunch champion, defying the West from the heart of the Japanese people. He does this most clearly in his finest essay, 'Jiujutsu.' Here the very meaning of the martial exercise, to 'conquer by yielding' is taken as text to explain the phenomena or national awakening which foreign cities have denounced as a 'reversal.' Japan has borrowed weapons of force from the West, in order successfully to resist its insidious influence. True progress is from within. Mr. Hearn writes:--

However psychologists may theorize on the absence or the limitations of personal individuality among the Japanese, there can be no question at all that, as a nation, Japan possesses an individuality stronger than our own." (306.)

Hearn further brings out in a conversation with a young Japanese the fact that Japan, in order to keep pace with the competition of other nations, must adopt the methods which are in direct variance to her old morality, and all that which has made the Japanese what he is. Japan's future depends upon her industrial development, and the fine old qualities of self-sacrifice, simplicity, filial piety, the contentment with little, are not the weapons for the modern struggle. In a postscript to this essay, written two years later, after the war with China, Hearn adds that "Japan has proved herself able to hold her own against the world.... _Japan has won in her jiujutsu._"

Japan holds infinite legends of ghostly significance, and it is no wonder that Hearn found so much that was sympathetic. Every new town or new temple reveals some aspect of the odd. In this second book the joyousness is gone; he is now a philosopher, and his philosophy reflects much of the ghostly. The gruesome has been buried, but it is not dead: it will return reincarnated, not of the ghastly of real life, but of the dim, far-away, always more distant ghostly in the lives of the dead.

A revelation of the Nirvana into which Hearn is being slowly drawn appears in "At Hakata." He has been telling the story of the sacred mirror that a mother in dying gave to her daughter, bidding her to look into it every morning and evening and there see her mother. And the girl looked and "having the heart of meeting her mother every day," knew not that the shadow in the mirror was her own face.

One are we all,--and yet many, because each is a world of ghosts. Surely that girl saw and spoke to her mother's very soul, while seeing the fair shadow of her own young eyes and lips, uttering love!

And with this thought, the strange display in the old temple court takes a new meaning,--becomes the symbolism of a sublime expectation. Each of us is truly a mirror, imaging something of the universe,--reflecting also the reflection of ourselves in that universe; and perhaps the destiny of all is to be molten by that mighty Image-maker, Death, into some great sweet passionless unity. How the vast work shall be wrought, only those to come after us may know. We of the present West do not know: we merely dream. But the ancient East believes Here is the simple imagery of her faith. All forms must vanish at last to blend with that Being whose smile is immutable Rest,--whose knowledge is Infinite Vision.

"The Red Bridal" is a story of _joshi_--the joint suicide for love. These two young people had been playmates since their early school-days, and were deeply attached to each other. The girl's father, under the influence of an evil stepmother, agrees to sell his daughter to the richest and also the most disreputable man in the village. Hearing this awful command, the maiden only smiles the brave smile--inheritance of her Samurai blood. She knows what she must do.... Together she and her lover quietly meet the Tokyo express. As its low roar draws nearer, they "wound their arms about each other, and lay down cheek to cheek, very softly and quietly, straight across the inside rail."

We close the book with the memory of Yuko, heroic little Yuko, who, even as noble Asakachi, who had his beautiful wish to die for his country fulfilled, proves that the Japanese spirit of loyalty is far greater than our word implies. With all her country, Yuko, a humble little serving-maid, whose name signifies "valiant," is sorrowing because of a Japanese attack upon the Czarevitch of the Russians. Her soul burns with the desire to give something that will soften the sorrow of the August One; for the heart of the girl, being that of a true Japanese, grieves not alone for what has happened, but with a deeper sense of the grief caused to the August One. The cry goes from Yuko asking how she, who has nothing, can give; and from the lips of the dead within her comes the answer: "Give thyself. To give life for the August One is the highest duty, the highest joy." "And in what place?" she asks. "Saikyo," answer the silent voices; "in the gateway of those who by ancient custom should have died."

Does she falter? No.

For her the future holds no blackness. Always she will see the rising of the holy Sun above the peaks, the smile of the Lady-Moon upon the waters, the eternal magic of the Seasons. She will haunt the places of beauty, beyond the folding of the mists, in the sleep of the cedar-shadows, through circling of innumerable years. She will know a subtler life, in the faint winds that stir the snow of the flowers of the cherry, in the laughter of playing waters, in every happy whisper of the vast green silences. But first she will greet her kindred, somewhere in shadowy halls awaiting her coming to say to her:

"Thou hast done well,--like a daughter of Samurai. Enter, child! because of thee to-night we sup with the Gods!"

It is daylight when Yuko enters Kyoto. She finds a lodging, and then goes to a skilful female hairdresser. Her little razor is made very sharp. Returning to her room, she writes a letter of farewell to her brother, and an appeal to the officials asking that the Tenshi-Sama may be begged to cease from suffering "seeing that a young life, even though unworthy, has been given in voluntary expiation of the wrong."

At the dark hour before dawn she slips to the gate of the Government edifice. Whispering a prayer, she kneels. Then with her long under-girdle of silk she binds her robes tightly about her knees, for

the daughter of a Samurai must always be found in death with limbs decently composed. Then, with steady precision, she makes in her throat a gash, out of which the blood leaps in a pulsing jet....

At sunrise the police find her, quite cold, and the two letters, and a poor little purse containing five _yen_ and a few _sen_ (enough, she had hoped, for her burial); and they take her and all her small belongings away.

KOKORO[32] (9), the next book, could well be a continuation of "Out of the East." Hearn speaks of it as "terribly radical," and "rather crazy"; and he fears that his views, which are greatly opposed in the West, may not be well received.

[32] Copyright, 1896, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

"The fifteen chapters of which the book is composed," says a German review, "do not contain the results of any research into the domain of politics, art or religion. They are rather fragments from Japanese life, and so clear is the language that the pictures given are brought home to us with wonderful effect. Lafcadio Hearn is a journalist in the best sense of the word. He is a writer who has something striking and original to say upon the events of the day, upon the conditions and institutions of a land, upon the possibilities of development in a people, upon deep philosophical, social and religious problems, upon the 'Idea of Pre-existence,' upon Buddhism and Shintoism, upon the difference between Occidental and Oriental culture, and who judges all things, all conditions that he sees, from lofty heights. He is besides a character, a man of great ideals; he has a fine artistic feeling and is, moreover, able to render in wonderfully sympathetic language tender moods which come to him at the sight of a landscape, a work of art. Extraordinarily capable of assimilation, he, to whom Japan has become a second home, has entirely fitted himself into the Japanese life. He is so delighted with the customs, with the political and social conditions, with the simple family life, with the religion, the ceremonies, the ancestor-worship, and with the business intercourse carried on among themselves--which he assures us is characterized by exceptional probity--in short, he is so delighted with all the activities of this people that he thinks them the best possible because they spring from the inmost life of an ethical and never intellectual temperament. Therefore he takes sides with them passionately against the modern tendencies of Europe." (395.)

In the opening story, which I think will be found one of his best, is portrayed the manner of a Japanese crowd in dealing with a criminal; and how this criminal was brought to atonement by the gaze of a little child, the son of the man he murdered, while the little one was yet in his mother's womb.

The next chapter is a discussion of Japanese Civilization. In 1903 Hearn wrote:--

"The Genius of Japanese Civilization" is a failure. I thought that it was true when I wrote it; but already Japan has become considerably changed, and a later study of ancient social conditions has proved to me that I made some very serious sociological errors in that paper.

He shows that in the wonderful development of Japanese power, there is vitally no self-transformation. All that Japan is, she always has been. Nor is there any outward change. "The strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs little material display: both exist where the deepest real power of any great peoples exists,--in the Race Ghost." He contrasts the noise and confusion and vastness of Western cities. The construction of the West is endurance; of Japan impermanency. The very land is a land of impermanence. But in this impermanency Hearn finds the greatest excellence. He contrasts how little impedimenta the Japanese have--by that means alone how independent they are. He shows with what a quiet simplicity Japan has become a great commercial centre. He fears the new Western spirit which threatens her:--

I confess to being one of those who believe that the human heart, even in the history of a race, may be worth infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner or later prove itself infinitely better able to answer all the cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life.--I still believe that the old Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than intellectual beauty.

It is the old spirit which found infinite meaning--

in the flushed splendour of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming and the going of the cicadae, in the dying crimson of autumn foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of wave or cloud.

The beautiful voice of a blind peasant woman fills Hearn with gentle memories and an exquisite delight. He muses upon what the meaning of this charm can be; and he realizes that it is the old sorrows and loving impulses of forgotten generations.

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 voice that recalls their past.

The lovely spirit of showing only one's happiest face to the world is charmingly brought out in the little incident that, when in a railway carriage, a Japanese woman finds herself becoming drowsy, before she nods she covers her face with her long kimono sleeve.

Sometimes one may recall the dead, and speak with them. So it happened that O-Tayo heard once again the voice of her little child who begged her not to weep any more, for when mothers weep, the flood of the River of Tears rises so high that the soul cannot pass, and must wander and wander.

O-Tayo never wept again, but softly she herself became as a little child. Her good parents built a tiny temple and fitted it with miniature ornaments, and here all day long children came to play games with her. And when at last she died, the children still played there, for as a little girl of nine said, "We shall still play in the Court of Amida. She is buried there. She will hear us and be happy."

The pathetic tale of Haru gives an interesting picture of the relation in Japan between man and wife; of the exquisite submission of the wife under the saddest conditions, even to the moment when the little grieved heart, which has never murmured, has the dying strength to utter only the single word, "_Anata_." (Thou.)

"A Glimpse of Tendencies" analyzes many conditions in Japan, with various predictions for her future, and speaks of her lack of sympathy for her foreign teachers.

In "A Conservative" Hearn gives a searching study of how the evils of our civilization appear to a Japanese youth.

"In the chapter, 'The Idea of Pre-existence,' Hearn makes the interesting attempt of bringing the teachings of the Buddhistic religion and the conclusions of modern science into accord. The idea which differentiates the Oriental mode of thinking from our own, which more than any other permeates the whole mental being of the Far-East--'it is universal as the wash of air; it colours every emotion; it influences, directly or indirectly, almost every act'--which inspires the utterances of the people, their proverbs, their pious and profane exclamations, that is the idea of pre-existence. The expression, '_Ingwa_,' which signifies the Karma as inevitable retribution, serves as explanation for all suffering, all pain, all evil. The culprit says: 'That which I did I knew to be wicked when doing; but my _ingwa_ was stronger than my heart,' _Ingwa_ means predestination, determinism, necessity." (395.)

In his chapter on "Ancestor-Worship" it is further proved how important a part of the household are the dead.

Another delightful study is "Kimiko,"--the story of one who turns dancing-girl out of filial piety. In the height of her fame she falls in love with a rich young man, and he with her. Kimiko is so good a woman at heart, that the man's friends do not object to his marrying her. She refuses, however, for her life has made her unworthy to be wife or mother. The man hopes to change her, but one day she disappears and is utterly lost to sight. Years pass and he marries. At last Kimiko returns as a wandering nun, looks at her lover's little son, whispers a message for the father in his ear, and is gone once more. The grace with which the story is told is inimitable, and the sickly sentimentality that revolts us in the _Dame aux Camelias_ is absent. (381.)

GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS[33] (10) is the third book of the Japanese period, and was written at Kobe. In this volume of essays, intermingled with sketches in lighter vein, Hearn continues his philosophical studies. There are the unmistakable signs that even this ardour is losing zest. The charm of Japan is going fast; and after this volume, until his final interpretation, which is a summary of all that has gone before, is reached, we find him seeking material in fairy-tales, legends, and even returning to old thoughts about the West Indian life.

[33] Copyright, 1897, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Many of his critics feel that Hearn is becoming too subjective to be quite trustworthy; others feel that he is still too charmed by Japan to render a faithful picture. A review in _Public Opinion_ says:--

"But, this feature of almost pardonable exaggeration pointed out, there is little for the critic to carp at in the majority of the eleven essays that compose the book. The opening paper, 'A Living God,' is a perfect specimen of the author's style, and evinces in a marked degree the influence of Oriental environment on a sensitive mind. It treats of the temples, shrines, and worship of the people, and tells by legend how even a living individual may come to be worshipped as a god by his friends....

"The essay, however, that betrays most strongly the bent of the author's mental metamorphosis, and one, we venture to say, that will be generally challenged is that on 'Faces in Japanese Art.' The contention it embodies, which he boldly fathers, is a flat denial of the truth and worth of our accepted schools of art,--of drawing especially." (376.)

Criticizing the chapters on Buddhism in the present book, the _Athenaeum_ says:--

"They are finely written, but the Buddhism is the Buddhism of Mr. Hearn, not of China or Japan, or of anywhere else. Nevertheless, we think them the most attractive of these gleanings. Laputa is placed not very far from Japan; to a quasi-Laputa Mr. Hearn has gone, and his Laputian experiences are more interesting than any ordinary terrestrial experiences could have been." (298.)

The _Spectator_ says:--

"His chapter on Nirvana, which he describes as 'a study in synthetic Buddhism,' will be read with very great interest by all who care for the problems involved. There have been plenty of studies of the doctrine of Nirvana more elaborate and complete, but few more suggestive and more taking.... Mr. Hearn begins by combating the popular Western notion that the idea of Nirvana signifies to Buddhist minds complete annihilation. The notion is, he declares, erroneous because it contains only half the truth, and a half of the truth which is of no value or interest or intelligibility except when joined to the other half. According to Mr. Hearn, and, indeed, according to 'the better opinion' generally, Nirvana means not absolute nothingness or complete annihilation, but only the annihilation of what constitutes individualism and personality,--'the annihilation of everything that can be included under the term "I".'" (382.)

Hearn makes an elaborate study of the varying stages of births and heavens that one must generally pass through before one rises into the "infinite bliss" of Nirvana. The chapter closes with this significant sentence:--

The only reality is One;--all that we have taken for Substance is only Shadow;--the physical is the unreal:--_and the outer-man is the ghost_.

There are two short chapters devoted to the Japanese Songs. The first songs, "Out of the Street," are, as Manyemon, who would not have the Western people deceived, tells us, the vulgar songs, or those sung by the washermen, carpenters, and bamboo-weavers, etc. The theme always holds some glint of love. Hearn has arranged certain ones in three groups forming a little shadow romance.

To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going; Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.

Things never changed since the Time of the Gods: The flowing of water, the Way of Love.

The second chapter is devoted to Folk-Songs with Buddhist allusions. Nearly all the arts and the greater number of the industries show the influence of Buddhism. A typical song is:--

Even the knot of the rope tying our boats together Knotted was long ago by some love in a former birth.

Another:--

Even while praying together in front of the tablets ancestral, Lovers find chance to murmur prayers never meant for the dead.

On the "Trip to Kyoto" there is more to be learned about poor little Yuko, who gave her life for her nation. To the Japanese all the small details of her story are of the greatest importance, and are carefully treasured. Hearn thinks that the Western "refined feeling" might not care for the poor little blood-stained trifles; if so it is to be regretted.

In "Dust," with a dainty touch, he teaches again that we are but millions upon billions of dead people; that the cells and the souls are themselves recombinations of old welding of forces--forces of which we know nothing save that they belong "to the Shadow-Makers of universes." You are an individual--but also you are a population! This leads on to the end that

In whatsoever time all human minds accord in thought and will with the mind of the Teacher, there shall not remain even one particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood.

The last chapter, "Within the Circle," is of a philosophy so impermanent that it seems but Shadow-play, and one may not behold a visible form, for--like all that which it symbolizes--it is but an illusion.

EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES[34] (11) faithfully followed the ensuing year. The effort to write is manifest; even to himself Hearn is admitting that the _frisson_ which Japan gave him is passing. He is beginning to make copy; and the subjects are becoming more vague, vapoury, and ghostly.

[34] Copyright, 1898, by Little, Brown and Company.

I must eat some humble pie. My work during the past ten months has been rather poor. Why, I cannot quite understand--because it costs me more effort. Anyhow, I have had to rewrite ten essays: they greatly improved under the process. I am trying now to get a Buddhist commentary for them--mostly to be composed of texts dealing with pre-existence and memory of former lives. I took for subjects the following:--Beauty is Memory--why beautiful things bring sadness;--the Riddle of Touch--_i. e._ the thrill that a touch gives;--the Perfume of Youth;--the Reason of the Pleasure of the Feeling Evoked by Bright Blue;--the Pain Caused by Certain Kinds of Red;--Mystery of Certain Musical Effects;--Fear of Darkness and the Feeling of Dreams. Queer subjects, are they not? I think of calling the collection "Retrospectives.

The _Athenaeum_, that wise critic, feels that in this book Hearn "shows himself at his best. He is more subdued," it says, "than is his wont, and indulges less freely in excessive laudation and needless disparagement. The chapters on 'Insect Musicians,' on the 'Literature of the Dead,' and--oddly as it may sound to us--on 'Frogs,' are among the most delightful of all his writings. The keynote of all is struck in the pretty stanza that heads the first of the three:--

_Mushi, yo mushi, Naite ingwa ga Tsukuru nara?_ (Insect, O insect! Singing fulfil you Your fire-life and all life!)

"The translation is ours. The fondness of the Japanese for many kinds of chirping insects, which they keep in little bamboo-cages, is one of the prettiest of the surviving echoes of the past. The plaintive little cry satisfies the curious melancholy that characterizes the reflective moods of the lieges of Mutsu. In the long series of changes that is to end in perfect Buddha-forms, there is hope always, but always tinged with the sadness of vague memories of past pains, and the resigned dread of sorrows to come, one knows not how oft to be repeated ere in 'Nirvana' all earthly moods are lost. There is a regular trade in these tiny songsters, of the history of which Mr. Hearn tells the pleasant story." (299.)

Hearn leads us to a cemetery in a quaint lonesome garden, and teaches us something about the wonderful texts and inscriptions that are chiselled into the stone of the tombs, or painted on the wooden _sotoba_, and go to form the important literature of the dead. A suggestive _sotoba_-text is:--

The Amida-Kyo says: "All who enter into that country enter likewise into that state of virtue from which there can be no turning back."

From the Kaimyo which is engraved on the tomb, we may select:--

_Koji_-- (Bright-Sun-on-the-Way-of-the-Wise, in the Mansion of Luminous Mind.)

_Koji_-- (Effective-Benevolence-Hearing-with-Pure-Heart-the-Supplications -of-the-Poor,--dwelling in the Mansion of the Virtue of Pity.)

The frog is another favourite of the Japanese. There is one special variety called the Kajika, or true singing-frog of Japan, which is kept as a pet in a little cage. For over a hundred years the frog has been the subject of numerous poems. Many of these little verses are love-poems, for the lovers' trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is at its height. Here is a quotation from the Anthology called "Kokinshu," compiled A.D. 905, by the poet Ki-no-Tsurayuki:--

The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart, and thence has grown into a multiform utterance. Man in this world, having a thousand million of things to undertake and to complete, has been moved to express his thoughts and his feelings concerning all that he sees and hears. When we hear the _uguisu_ singing among flowers, and the voice of the _kawazu_ which inhabits the waters, what mortal (_lit. "who among the living that lives"_) does not compose poems?

A charming frog poem is:--

_Te wo tsuite Uta moshi-aguru, Kawazu kana!_

(With hand resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!)

And another:--

_Tamagawa no Hito wo mo yogizu Naku kawazu, Kono yu kikeba Oshiku ya wa aranu?_

(Hearing to-night the frogs of the Jewel River--or Tamagawa, that sing without fear of man, how can I help loving the passing moment?)

A vivid chapter is Hearn's description of his ascent of Fuji-no-Yama. Here he may once again use his palette of many colours, but certainly not with the old _abandon_.

Brighter and brighter glows the gold. Shadows come from the west,--shadows flung by cloud-pile over cloud-pile; and these, like evening shadows upon snow, are violaceous blue.... Then orange-tones appear in the horizon; then smouldering crimson. And now the greater part of the Fleece of Gold has changed to cotton again,--white cotton mixed with pink.... Stars thrill out. The cloud-waste uniformly whitens;--thickening and packing to the horizon. The west glooms. Night rises; and all things darken except that wondrous unbroken world-round of white,--the Sea of Cotton.

A lurking of the gruesome flashes out when the snow-patches against the miles of black soot and ashes on the mountain make him think "of a gleam of white teeth I once saw in a skull,--a woman's skull,--otherwise burnt to a sooty crisp."

"Retrospectives" is a group of gentle reveries, where we may muse with Hearn on such elusive themes as the "Sadness in Beauty," for beauty has no real existence, it is the emotion of the dead within us. Or there is the analysis of that favourite word _frisson_, "the touch that makes a thrill within you is a touch that you have felt before,--sense-echo of forgotten intimacies in many unremembered lives." "Azure Psychology" and "A Red Sunset" recall Hearn's earlier criticisms on colour.

IN GHOSTLY JAPAN[35] (12) followed. The title is revelatory of the Japan that is to people this book and those which are to come. In the opening chapter Hearn crystallizes in a powerful sketch the sum of Buddhist lore. Of this the _Academy_ writes:--

[35] Copyright, 1899, by Little, Brown and Company.

"Of Nirvana one carries away this one picture, painted in words curiously colourless and intangible--the picture of a mountain up whose steep side toil two creatures--the soul and his guide--toiling, stumbling upwards over a brittle and friable chaos of skulls. Skulls crumbled into powder and skulls crumbling mark out the road; 'and every skull,' says the guide, 'is yours, and has been yours in some past incarnation; and the dust that rises round your present body is the dust of your past and deserted bodies that have served you well or ill as may be in your past lives.' In the fine and bewildering haze of this thought we lose our poet, and henceforward he is not a face nor a voice, but an echo of a living man's voice. We hear the echo, but the voice we do not hear. And we grudge the voice, even to Nirvana where all silences are merged in one." (286.)

In a beautiful chapter Hearn outlines all that might be written about the important subject of incense. He tells a good deal about its religious, luxurious, and ghostly uses. There is also a charming custom of giving parties where dainty games are played with it.

Sometimes there can be love between the living and the dead, or so it appears in the ghostly story of "A Passional Karma," or O-Tsuyu, who died of love of Shinzaburo and returns to be his bride. Every night, by the light of their Peony Lanterns, she, accompanied by her maid, comes to keep the ghostly tryst. Shinzaburo does not know that O-Tsuyu is dead, but his servant Tomozo, overhearing voices, gazes through a chink, and sees--

the face of a woman long dead,--and the fingers caressing were fingers of naked bone,--and of the body below the waist there was not anything: it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow. Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the eyes of the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death.

Now he whose bride is a ghost cannot live. No matter what force flows in his blood he must certainly perish. Shinzaburo is warned and an amulet to protect him from the dead is given to him, but treachery is played, and the amulet is stolen; so one morning Tomozo finds his master

hideously dead;--and the face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear;--and lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast about his neck.

The gentle heart of the Japanese shines in the chapter on "Bits of Poetry." You might find yourself, Hearn says, in a community so poor that you could not even buy a cup of real tea, but no place could you discover "where there is nobody capable of making a poem." Poems are written on all occasions and for all occasions.

Poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil;--for example, upon braziers, iron-kettles, vases, wooden-trays, lacquer-ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,--even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women's crepe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches.

A Japanese artist would not think of elaborating a sketch, and a poem to be perfect must also only stir one's fancy. _Ittakkiri_, meaning "entirely vanished" in the sense of "all told," is a term applied contemptuously to him who expresses all his thought.

Japan is rich in proverbs. Hearn has translated one hundred examples of Buddhist proverbs.

_Karu-toki no Jizo-gao; nasu-toki no Emma-gao._

(Borrowing-time, the face of Jizo; repaying-time, the face of Emma.)

_Sode no furi-awase mo tasho no en._

(Even the touching of sleeves in passing is caused by some relation in a former life.)

A powerful relic of the old clinging love of the gruesome is the story of _Ingwa-banashi_. The _daimyo's_ wife knew that she was dying; and she thought of many things, especially of her husband's favourite, the Lady Yukiko, who was nineteen years old. She begged her husband to send for the Lady Yukiko, whom, she said, she loved as a sister. After the dying wife had told Lady Yukiko it was her wish that she should become the wife of their dear lord, she begged that Yukiko would carry her on her back to see the cherry-bloom.

As a nurse turns her back to a child, that the child may cling to it, Yukiko offered her shoulders to the wife, and said:--

"Lady, I am ready: please tell me how I best can help you."

"Why, this way!" responded the dying woman, lifting herself with an almost superhuman effort by clinging to Yukiko's shoulders. But as she stood erect, she quickly slipped her thin hands down over the shoulders, under the robe, and clutched the breasts of the girl, and burst into a wicked laugh.

"I have my wish!" she cried--"I have my wish for the cherry-bloom, but not the cherry-bloom of the garden!... I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it!--oh, what a delight!"

And with these words she fell forward upon the crouching girl, and died.

When the attendants tried to lift the body from Yukiko's shoulders, they found that the hands of the dead had grown into the quick flesh of the breasts of the girl. And they could not be removed. A skilful physician was called, and he decided that the hands could be amputated only at the wrists, and so this was done. But the hands still clung to the breasts;

and there they soon darkened and dried up like the hands of a person long dead.

Yet this was only the beginning of the horror.

Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir--stealthily, like great grey spiders. And nightly thereafter,--beginning always at the Hour of the Ox,--they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease.

Yukiko cut off her hair, and became a mendicant-nun.

Every day she prayed to the dead for pardon, and every night the torture was renewed. This continued for more than seventeen years until Yukiko was heard of no more.

SHADOWINGS[36] (13) appeared the next year, 1900. Of this volume the _Bookman_ says:--

[36] Copyright, 1900, by Little, Brown and Company.

"He gives us several essays upon matters Japanesque, which obviously involve no small amount of erudition and patient research. Such are his papers upon the various species of _Semi_, or Japanese singing-locusts, and on the complicated etiquette of Japanese female names. But the distinctive feature of this volume is the first half, which is given up to a collection of curious tales by native writers, weird, uncanny, little stories, most of them, of ghouls and wraiths, and vampires, or at least the nearest Japanese equivalents for such Occidental spectres." (316.)

The _Athenaeum_ does not find "Shadowings" equal to the volume "Exotics." It thinks that Hearn is "perilously near exhausting his repertory of _Kokin_ [one-stringed fiddle] themes."

"The stories with which the present volume opens have no particular merit: they have lost their chief and real advantage--their local colour--in Hearnesque translation, and seem to be little more than suggestions or drafts of 'nouvelles,' out of which skilful hands might perhaps have made something much better. A good example is the story of the Screen Maiden, which is a most lame presentment of a charming motif. The chapters on female names, on _semi_, couplets and 'Old Japanese Songs' are more interesting, but only to those who possess a considerable knowledge of old Japanese life and literature.... Of the 'Old Japanese Songs'--where is the proof of their antiquity?--much the best is the dance-ballad of the dragon-maid, who bewitched a _yamabushi_, and chased him over moor and hill and river, until the temple of Dojo was reached, under the great bell of which the trembling hill-warrior or outlaw (_yamabushi_ were such originally in all probability) hid himself, whereupon the dragon-maid wrapped her body round the bell once and again and the third time the bell melted and flowed away like boiling water. And with it, according to the legend, flowed away the ashes of the unwilling object of the dragon-maid's affections, consumed not through love, but through disdain." (300.)

Strange things happen in the group of tales, and not the least is the tale of the maiden in the screen whose loveliness so bewitches a youth that he becomes sick unto death. Then an old scholar tells him that the person whom the picture represents is dead, but since the painter painted her mind as well as her form, her spirit lives in the picture and he may yet win her.

So every day, Tokkei, following out the old scholar's injunctions, sits before the portrait calling softly the maiden's name. And finally after many days the maiden answered, "_Hai!_" And stepping down from out the screen, she kneels to take the cup of wine (which was to be so), whispering charmingly, "How could you love me so much?"

Also there is the tale of the Corpse Rider, in which the husband had to ride for one whole night, so far that he could not know the distance, the dead body of his divorced wife; and this was to save him from her vengeance.

The gruesome gleams here, and again in the tale of "The Reconciliation," when the repentant husband found that the wife he was holding in his arms is "a corpse so wasted that little remained save the bones, and the long black tangled hair."

There is no small amount of etiquette in the prefixes and suffixes of the Japanese female names. The majority of the _Yobina_, or personal names, are not aesthetic. Some are called after the flowers, and there are also place names, as for instance _Mine_ (Peak) _Hama_ (Shore); but the large proportion express moral or mental attributes.

Tenderness, kindness, deftness, cleverness, are frequently represented by _yobina;_ but appellations implying physical charm, or suggesting aesthetic ideas only, are comparatively uncommon. One reason for the fact may be that very aesthetic names are given to _geisha_ and to _joro_, and consequently vulgarized. But the chief reason certainly is that the domestic virtues still occupy in the Japanese moral estimate a place not less important than that accorded to religious faith in the life of our own Middle Ages. Not in theory only, but in every-day practice, moral beauty is placed far above physical beauty; and girls are usually selected as wives, not for their good looks, but for their domestic qualities.

I give a few names gleaned from Hearn's lists:--_O-Jun_--"Faithful-to-death"; _O-Tame_--"For-the-sake-of,"--a name suggesting unselfishness; _O-Chika_--"Closely Dear"; _O-Suki_--"The Beloved"--_Aimee_; _O-Tae_--"The Exquisite"; _Tokiwa_--"Eternally Constant."

From the "Fantasies," we read of the Mystery of Crowds, and the horrors of Gothic Architecture, the joys of levitation while one is asleep--with a moral attached; of Noctilucae. Also, as we gaze with the adolescent youth into a pair of eyes we come to know that

The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning-star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,--a ghost-light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.

Thus, and only thus, the depth of that gaze is the depth of the Sea of Death and Birth, and its mystery is the World-Soul's vision, watching us out of the silent vast of the Abyss of Being.

Thus, and only thus, do truth and illusion mingle in the magic of eyes,--the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present;--and the sudden splendour in the soul of the Seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet-lightning of the Infinite Memory.

A JAPANESE MISCELLANY[37] (14) was the next book. What does the memory hold of these stories and sketches? Surely that picture of Old Japan with its charming sentiment for Dragon-flies, to which such delicate poems were written.

[37] Copyright, 1901, by Little, Brown and Company.

_Tombo no Ha-ura ni sabishi,-- Aki-shigure._

(Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under-side of the leaf--Ah! the autumn-rains!)

And that verse by the mother poet, who seeing many children playing their favourite pastime of chasing butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:--

_Tombo-tsuri!-- Kyo wa doko made Itta yara!_

(Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where _he_ has gone to-day!)

Then there are the children's songs about Nature and her tiny creatures, and all their little songs for their plays; the songs which tell a story, and the sweet mother songs that lull the babies to sleep.

How we pity poor misguided O-Dai, who forgot loyalty to her ancestors to follow the teachings of the Western faith. At its bidding even the sacred tablets and the scroll were cast away. And when she had forsaken everything, and had become as an outcast with her own people, the good missionaries found they needed a more capable assistant. Poor little weak O-Dai, without the courage to fill her sleeves with stones and then slip into the river, longing for the sunlight, and so "flung into the furnace of a city's lust."

We hear the gruesome tinkle of the dead wife's warning bell, and we certainly shudder before the vision of her robed in her grave-shroud:--

"Eyeless she came--because she had long been dead;--and her loosened hair streamed down about her face;--and she looked without eyes through the tangle of it; and spake without a tongue."

Then the hideous horror of the evil crime, as this dead wife in her jealousy tore off the head of the sleeping young wife. The terrified husband following the trail of blood found

a nightmare-thing that chippered like a bat: the figure of the long-buried woman erect before her tomb,--in one hand clutching a bell, in the other the dripping head.... For a minute the three stood numbed. Then one of the men-at-arms, uttering a Buddhist invocation, drew, and struck at the shape. Instantly it crumbled down upon the soil,--an empty scattering of grave-rags, bones, and hair;--and the bell rolled clanking out of the ruin. But the fleshless right hand, though parted from the wrist, still writhed; and its fingers still gripped at the bleeding head--and tore, and mangled,--as the claws of the yellow crab fast to a fallen fruit.

Who but Hearn would have chosen this ghastly scene, and described it with such terrible reality?

With the parents we have unravelled the mystery of Kinume, whose spirit belonged to one family, and whose body was the child of the other.

Perhaps we still see the famous picture of Kwashin Koji, which had a soul, for "it is well known that some sparrows, painted upon a sliding screen (_fusuma_) by Hogen Yenshin, once flew away, leaving blank the spaces which they had occupied upon the surface. Also it is well known that a horse painted upon a certain Kakemono, used to go out at night to eat grass." So the water in the picture on the screen of Kwashin overflowed into the room, and the boat thereon glided forth, but not a ripple from the oar was heard. Then Kwashin Koji climbed into the boat, and it receded into the picture, and the water dried in the room. Over the painted water slipped the painted vessel until all disappeared, and Kwashin was heard of no more.

And we remember too the strange brave way that Umetsu Chubei won the gift of great strength for his children, and their children's children.

The _Athenaeum_ finds the story of Kwashin the best of this collection. Speaking of the study, "On a Bridge," it says:--

"The author narrates a personal experience of a _riksha_ man who drew him across an old bridge near Kumamoto. It was in the time of the Satsuma _muhon_ (rebellion), some twenty-two years earlier, that the _Kurumaya_ (_riksha_ man) was stopped on the bridge by three men, who were dressed as peasants, but had very long swords under their raincoats. After a time a cavalry officer came along from the city.

The moment the horse got on the bridge the three men turned and leaped:--and one caught the horse's bridle; and another gripped the officer's arm; and the third cut off his head--all in a moment.... I never saw anything done so quickly.

"The seeming peasants then waited, and presently another cavalry officer came and was murdered in like manner. Then came a third, who met a similar fate. Lastly, the peasants went away, having thrown the bodies into the river, but taking the heads with them. The man had never mentioned the matter till long after the war--why? 'Because it would have been ungrateful.'

"No doubt this is a true story." (301.)

It was probably during the ensuing year that Hearn contributed to the Japanese Fairy Tale Series (15), published in Tokyo, his renditions of four of these stories.

KOTTO[38] (16) followed. Says the _Athenaeum_:--

"The gem of this volume is 'A Woman's Diary,' purporting to be 'the history of a woman's married life recorded by herself, found in a small _haribako_ (work-box) which had belonged to her.' It is an ordinary story, not in the least sensational, yet pitiful and even touching in its record of poverty and suffering, showing the hardships and small enjoyment--according to our notions, at least--of the colourless existence led by the bulk of the Japanese poorer classes upon a total family wage of twelve pounds a year or less." (302.)

[38] Copyright, 1902, by the Macmillan Company.

Except for "A Woman's Diary" and "Fireflies" the tales in "Kotto" are fragmentary. Some are gruesome as the history of the Gaki; or as the story of O-Katsu-San, who was so bold as to go by night to Yurei-Daki, and who to win her bet brought back the little money-box of the gods. But when she came to give her baby his milk,--

Out of the wrappings unfastened there fell to the floor a blood-soaked bundle of baby clothes that left exposed two very small brown feet, and two very small brown hands--nothing more.

The child's head had been torn off!

There is also the story of O-Kame, who returned each night to haunt her husband; of Chugoro, who was bewitched by a beautiful woman whom he married beneath the waters. But he sickened and died, for his blood had been drained by his Circe, who was "simply a Frog,--a great and ugly Frog!"

The literature and the significance of the fire-flies holds an important place with the Japanese, and for more than a thousand years the poets have been making verses about these little creatures.

A sketch in which Hearn is most fortunate is "Pathological," where Tama, the mother-cat, dreams of her dead kittens--

coos to them, and catches for them small shadowy things,--perhaps even brings to them, through some dim window ofmemory, a sandal of ghostly straw....

Beautiful is the "Revery of Mother-Love":--

Yet those countless solar fires, with their viewless millions of living planets, must somehow reappear: again the wondrous Cosmos, self-born as self-consumed, must resume its sidereal whirl over the deeps of the eternities. And the love that strives for ever with death shall rise again, through fresh infinitudes of pain, to renew the everlasting battle.

The light of the mother's smile will survive our sun;--the thrill of her kiss will last beyond the thrilling of stars;--the sweetness of her lullaby will endure in the cradle-songs of worlds yet unevolved;--the tenderness of her faith will quicken the fervour of prayers to be made to the hosts of another heaven,--to the gods of a time beyond Time. And the nectar of her breasts can never fail: that snowy stream will still flow on, to nourish the life of some humanity more perfect than our own, when the Milky Way that spans our night shall have vanished for ever out of Space.

Like unto the Soul is a Drop of Dew for

Your personality signifies, in the eternal order, just as much as the especial motion of molecules in the shivering of any single drop. Perhaps in no other drop will the thrilling and the picturing be ever exactly the same; but the dews will continue to gather and to fall, and there will always be quivering pictures.... The very delusion of delusions is the idea of death as loss.

KWAIDAN[39] (17) was the book before "Japan," which was published after Hearn's death. It is a collection of old stories, many of them of the gruesome, and of careful studies of ants, mosquitoes, and butterflies. Striking is the tale of Yuki-Onna, the snow-woman, as is also the incident of Riki-Baka. One bewitched by the dead is Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi, whose ears were torn off because the holy texts which were written everywhere else upon his body were there forgotten. Sonjo, the hunter, killed the mate of a female _oshidori_, who after appearing to him in a dream as a beautiful woman, who rebukes him the following day as a bird, tears open her body, and dies before his eyes. O-Tei is reborn in the shape of a woman that she may wed years later her promised husband--Nagao Chosei of Echigo. So loyal is the love of O-Sode, the milk-nurse, that the cherry-tree which is planted in commemoration of her, on the anniversary of her death, blossoms in a wonderful way. Because of his selfish wickedness in thinking only of the gains in his profession, a priest was made to be reborn into the state of a _jikininki_, who had to devour the corpses of people who died in his district. Other devourers of human flesh are the Rokuro-Kubi. The head of a Rokuro-Kubi separates itself from its body.

[39] Copyright, 1904, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

JAPAN[40] (18): AN ATTEMPT AT INTERPRETATION is the last book that Hearn published. He was reading its proofs at the time of his death. Although a posthumous volume appeared, this may rightly be termed his final word. It is the crystallization and the summary of all that has been said before. It contains a group of twenty-one lectures, which Hearn had expected at first to deliver at Cornell University. His own words will best reveal their import:--

[40] Copyright, 1904, by the Macmillan Company.

They will form a book explaining Japan from the standpoint of ancestor-worship. They are suited only to a cultivated audience.

The substantial idea of the lectures is that Japanese society represents the condition of ancient Greek society a thousand years before Christ. I am treating of religious Japan,--not of artistic or economical Japan except by way of illustration.

"The history of Japan is really the history of her religion," is the key to the book.

The _Academy_ remarks:--

"No one who wishes to understand the possibilities of the future of Japan can afford to neglect the past, and no one who would grasp the meaning of the past can afford to neglect Mr. Hearn's fine and thoughtful work." (288.)

In a review Mr. Griffis says:--

"They felt that he had done his best and was degenerating. Yet here is a work which is a classic in science, a wonder of interpretation. It is the product of long years of thought, of keenest perception, or marvellous comprehension.

"One cannot quote, one must read this work. It shows the Japanese under his armour, modern science. The Japanese, outwardly, are ruled by treaties, diplomacy, governments, codes, Imperial Diet, armies and battleships--all modern and external. Inwardly they--that is, forty-nine millions of them--are governed by ghosts. The graveyard is the true dictator. It is ever their 'illustrious ancestors' who achieve victories. They, as a nation, are superbly organized for war. There is no originality, no personality, no individuality worth speaking of in the island empire. It is all done by the government, the community. In social evolution the Japanese are even yet far behind the Romans, and much as the pre-Homeric Greeks.

"In a word, Lafcadio Hearn outdoes the missionaries in dogmatism, exceeds even the hostile propagandist in telling the naked truth. Devoted friend of Japan, he excels the sworn enemies of her religions in laying bare, though with admiration, the realities.... Lafcadio Hearn turns the white and searching beams on the ship and man.... His book is a re-reading of all Japanese history, a sociological appraisement of the value of Japanese civilization, and a warning against intolerant propaganda of any sort whatever. This book is destined to live, and to cause searchings of heart among those who imagine that the Japanese soul has been changed in fifty years." (326.)

From the _Spectator_ I quote:--

"Both the prose and poetry of Japanese life are infused into Mr. Hearn's charming pages. Nobody, so far as we know, has given a better description of the fascination which Japanese life has at first for such as enter into its true spirit, and of its gradual disappearance.... Of course it must be remembered that this charm of Japan was something more than a beautiful mirage. 'Old Japan,' in the opinion of Mr. Hearn, 'came nearer to the achievement of the highest moral ideal than our far more evolved societies can hope to do for many a hundred years. Curiously enough, it was under the shadow of the sword that the fascinating life of Japan matured; universal politeness was nurtured by the knowledge that any act of rudeness might, and probably would, cause a painful and immediate death. This supremacy of the sword, governed by the noble rule of _bushi-do_, hardened the Japanese temper into the wonderful spirit of self-sacrifice and patriotism which is now making itself apparent in the stress of war. All this is admirably portrayed in Mr. Hearn's pages,--the swan-song of a very striking writer." (383.)

In _The American Journal of Sociology_ there is a review of this book, by Edmund Buckley of the University of Chicago, which is so admirable and inclusive that I have obtained Professor Buckley's kind permission to quote it in its entirety. This review leaves small margin for further comment. But it is to be regretted that space will not permit citations of Hearn's tributes to the Japanese home, woman and character.

"On p. 160 of W. E. Griffis' 'The Mikado's Empire,' is textual evidence that, so late as 1876, intelligent men, and theologians at that--rather, in sooth, because they are theologians--could harbour such atrocious notions about Shintoism, the ethnic faith of the Japanese, as the following: 'Shinto is in no proper sense of the term a religion.... In its lower forms it is blind obedience to governmental and priestly dictates.' The present reviewer bears these Christian apologists and heathen defamers 'witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.' They wrote in the days when hierology (comparative religion) was still inchoate, for C. P. Ticle's 'Elements' did not appear in its English dress until 1877; and when Japan's abasement before the 'Christian' powers was complete, and therefore everything Japanese assumed to be worthless. But the reaction came, of course, and is now pretty well completed. Japan's novel yet glorious art conquered the world; Japan's new yet ever-victorious army has conquered Russia's imposing array; and now Mr. Hearn completely routs the contemners of a people's sincere faith. The consensus of hierologists that no people was ever found without a religion had already been given; and the creed, cult, and ethics of Shintoism had been correctly described; but it remained for Mr. Hearn to give a more complete and intimate account than had previously been done of the ancestorism in Shinto and of its profound influence upon politics and morality.

"It will surprise no one to learn that Mr. Hearn overdid his contention, just because such excess is the well-nigh inevitable reaction from the underestimate that he found current and sought to correct. As he states the case on p. 4: 'Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has been written of chiefly by the sworn enemies of that religion; by others it has been almost entirely ignored.' But now that 'see-saw' has followed 'see,' we may hope to win a final equilibrium of correct appreciation. To this end several corrections are called for; but, before they are made, clearness will be secured by a concise analysis of the treatise; for in its course religion, politics, and morality are interwoven on a historic warp. The entire fabric runs about as follows: (Chap. 3.) The real religion of the Japanese is ancestorism, which showed in three cults--the domestic, the communal, and the state. The domestic arose first, but the primitive family might include hundreds of households. Ancestorism in Japan confirms Spencer's exposition of religious origins. The greater gods were all evolved from ghost-cults. Good men made good gods; bad men, bad ones. (Chap. 4.) The domestic cult began in offerings of food and drink made at the grave; then, under Chinese influence, was transferred to the home before tablets; where it was maintained until this present by Buddhism. Thin tablets of white wood, inscribed with the names of the dead, are placed in a miniature wooden shrine, which is kept upon a shelf in some inner chamber. Tiny offerings of food, accompanied with brief prayer, must be made each day by some member of the household in behalf of all; for the blessed dead still need sustenance, and in return can guard the house. The Buddhist rite, however, made prayer, not _to_, but _for_ these dead. The Japanese scholar Hirata is correct when he declares the worship of ancestors to be the mainspring of all virtues. (Chap. 5.) The family was united only by religion. The father--not the mother--was supposed to be the life-giver, and was therefore responsible for the cult. Hence the inferior position of woman. The ancestral ghost of an _uji_, or family of several households, became later the _ujigami_, or local tutelar god. Subordination of young to old, of females to males, and of the whole family to its chief, who was at once ruler and priest, shows that the family organization was religious and not marital. Both monogamy and the practice of parents selecting their child's spouse arose because best accordant with religion. Later custom makes the decision, not of the father alone, but of the household and kindred, determinative of any important step.

"(Chap. 6.) The communal cult of the district ruled the family in all its relations to the outer world. The _ujigami_, or clan-god, was the spirit rather of a former ruler than of a common ancestor. Hochiman was a ruler, but Kasuga an ancestor. Beside the _uji_ temple of a district, there may be a more important one dedicated to some higher deity. Every _ujiko_ or parishioner is taken to the _ujigami_ when one month old and dedicated to him. Thereafter he attends the temple festivals, which combine fun with piety; and he makes the temple groves his playground. Grown up, he brings his children here; and, if he leaves home, pays his respects to the god on leaving and returning. Thus the social bond of each community was identical with the religious bond, and the cult of the _ujigami_ embodied the moral experience of the community. The individual of such a community enjoyed only a narrowly restricted liberty. Shintoism had no moral code, because at this stage of ancestor-cult religion and ethics coincide.

"(Chap. 7.) The great gods of nature were developed from ancestor-worship, though their real history has been long forgotten. (Chap. 8.) Rites of worship and of purification were many. (Chap. 9.) The rule of the dead extended to moral conduct and even to sumptuary matters, language, and amusements. (Chap. 10.) Buddhism absorbed the native ancestor-cult, but prescribed that prayers be said for them, not to them. In accordance with its principle, 'First observe the person, then preach the law'--that is, accommodate instruction to the hearer's capacity--Buddhism taught the masses metempsychosis instead of palingenesis, and the paradise of Amida instead of the nirvana of Buddha. Buddhism rendered its greatest service to Japan by education in the learning and arts of China. (Chap. 11.) The higher Buddhism is a kind of monism.

"(Chap. 12.) Japanese society was simply an amplification of the patriarchal family, and its clan-groups never united into a coherent body until 1871. At first the bulk of the people were slaves or serfs, but from the seventh century a large class of freedmen--farmers and artisans--came into existence. The first period of Japanese social evolution was based on a national head, the Mikado, and a national cult, Shintoism; it began in this seventh century, but developed to the limit of its type only under the Tokugawa shoguns, in the seventeenth century.

"Next to the priest-emperor at the head came the _kuge_, or ancient nobility, from whose ranks most of the latter regents and shoguns were drawn. Next ranked the _buke_ or _samurai_, which was the professional military class, and was ruled by nearly three hundred _daimyo_, or feudal lords of varying importance. Next came the commonalty, _heimin_, with three classes--farmers, artisans, and tradesmen, the last being despised by the _samurai_, who also could cut down any disrespectful _heimin_ with impunity. Lowest of all came the _chori_--pariahs, who were not counted Japanese at all, but _mono_-'things.' But even among them distinctions arose according to occupation. The close care taken of the native religion by the government precluded rise of a church. Nor was Buddhism, divided into hostile sects and opposed by the _samurai_, ever able to establish a hierarchy independent of the government. Personal freedom was suppressed, as it would be now under Socialism, which is simply a reversion to an overcome type.

"(Chap. 13.) The second period of Japanese social evolution lasted from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, and was marked by dominance over the mikadoate of successive dynasties of shoguns. The permanence of this mikadoate amid all perturbations of the shogunate was owing to its religious nature. (Chap. 14.) Following the lord in death, suicide, and vendetta were customs based on loyalty, and they involved the noblest self-sacrifice. (Chap. 15.) Catholic missions were suppressed lest they should lead to the political conquest of Japan. (Chap. 16.) The Tokugawa shoguns exercised iron discipline, and now were brought to perfection those exquisite arts and manners of the Japanese. (Chap. 17.) A revival of learning, begun in the eighteenth century, slowly led to a new nationalist support of the Mikado; and when by 1891 the shogun had resigned and the daimiates been abolished, the third period in Japan's social evolution began. (Chap. 18.) In spite of outward seeming, the ancient social conditions and ancestor-cult still control every action. (Chap. 19.) The individual is still restrained by the conventions of the masses, by communistic guilds of craftsmen, and by the government's practice of taking loyal service in all its departments without giving adequate pecuniary reward. (Chap. 20.) The educational system still maintains the old communism by training, not for individual ability, but for co-operative action. This is favoured, too, by the universal practice of rich men meeting the personal expenses of promising students. (Chap. 21.) Japanese loyalty and courage will support her army and navy, but industrial competition with other peoples calls for individual freedom. (Chap. 22.) The Japanese are not indifferent to religion, and can be understood only by a study of their religious and social evolution. Future changes will be social, but ancestor-cult will persist, and offers an insuperable obstacle to the spread of Christianity.

"The critical reader will not have failed to meet in this summary many positions that challenge his previous knowledge, and whether these be correct or not can be determined only by an examination of the full text, which it eminently deserves. The reviewer, however, will confine himself to certain matters that seem to him the dominating errors of the whole. Probably three greater errors were never compressed into a single sentence than in this from p. 27: 'The real religion of Japan, the religion still professed in one form or another by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilized religion and of all civilized society--ancestor-worship.' That ancestor-worship is still professed by the entire nation is negatived by all we know from other sources as well as all we should expect. The ancestor-worship native to Japan had been appropriated by Buddhism; and, since the revolution of 1868 with its disestablishment of that church, the Butsudan, where the tablets were kept, has been largely sold as an art object or has been simply disused. The _mitamaya_ mentioned on p. 50, as if in extensive use for ancestor-worship, is found only in a few purist families, and is known to the mass of Japanese only as the rear apartment or structure of a Shintoist shrine.

"That ancestor-worship is 'the real religion of Japan' and 'has been the foundation of all civilized religion' are errors that Mr. Hearn owes to Herbert Spencer's influence, which is confessed here, and indeed is evident throughout the work. Perhaps nothing has brought Spencer into more discredit than the lengths he went to prove this basic nature of ancestorism in his 'Principles of Sociology,' and the reader of pp. 121-24 of Mr. Hearn's work will readily see how futile also is the attempt to show that the nature-deities of Shintoism were only 'transfigured ghosts.' No, indeed, God did not make man and leave ghosts to make him religious. The heaven and the earth were here before ghosts, and man could personify them just as soon as he knew himself as a person, which he must have done long before he analyzed himself into a ghost-soul and a body. Had Mr. Hearn not ignored Reville, Max Mueller, Pfleiderer, and Saussaye, while steeping himself in Spencer, he might have observed, what is plainly visible in Shintoism as elsewhere: that religion has _two_ tap roots, ancestorism indeed, but also naturism.

"Again, Mr. Hearn's sentence declares that ancestor-worship is 'the foundation of all civilized society.' This is the prevailing view throughout the work; for example, on pp. 23, 57, 86, 99, 175, and 320. But other passages imply the saner view that religion and morality are coordinate functions of one man. Thus at p. 511, Mr. Hearn attributes Japan's power to 'her old religious and social training.' The many and strong cases of influence of religion upon conduct that can really be shown in Japan amount only to influence, of course, and not to 'foundation' or 'origination,' A quite transparent case of Mr. Hearn's error is where (p. 152) he attributes the exceptional cleanliness of the Japanese to their religion, which here, as usual, he sums up as ancestor-worship. One wonders, however, why this world-wide phenomenon of religion should determine a Japanese cleanliness; why ancestor-worshippers are not always clean; as for example the Chinese, who bathe most rarely. It seems saner to seek a cause for the unique daily bath of the Japanese in their also uniquely numerous thermal springs, which occur in no less than 388 different localities. Symbolism did indeed in Japan, as elsewhere, lead to religious bathing in rivers; but bathing in rivers, as in ocean, was never popular in Japan until recently learned from the foreigner; whereas the thermal springs are crowded, and the daily baths at home are always taken exceedingly hot after the thermal pattern, for these have been found not only cleansing, but curing and warming, the last quality being a great merit where winters are cold and houses unheated.

"Finally, the reader need not expect to meet here any adequate reference to those vices that have been fostered by religion in Japan. The concubinage, confirmed by ancestorism, is once mentioned; and the harlotry, promoted by phallicism (the phallos was frequently found in a brothel, though not exclusively there, of course), is relegated to a simple footnote. But such matters can be learned elsewhere, whereas the close and frequent points of influence which religion exercised upon politics and morality in Japan can nowhere else be so well studied as here." (292.)

THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY[41] (19) is Hearn's posthumous book. The last memories are of the "Weaving Lady of the Milky Way"; of "Goblin Poetry"; of "Ultimate Questions," which are called forth by the essay of that name written by the author of the "Synthetic Philosophy"; of the "Mirror Maiden" whom Matsumura, the priest, saved from the well, and who repaid him by good-fortune. Moreover, of the alluring maiden in the dream of Ito Norisuke--if one is to choose a ghost for a bride, who would not seek Himegimi-Sama? As a finale there is the picture of Admiral Togo sending to Tokyo "for some flowering-trees in pots--inasmuch as his responsibilities allowed him no chance of seeing the cherry-flowers and the plum-blossoms in their season."

[41] Copyright, 1905, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I

AMERICAN AND ENGLISH EDITIONS[42] ORIGINAL WORKS (Nos. 1-19)

[42] For the English Editions, the English Catalogue of Books has been followed.

No. 1.

1884. STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE.

Stories reconstructed from the Anvari-Soheili, Baital, Pachisi, Mahabharata, Pantchatantra, Gulistan, Talmud, Kalewala, etc. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1884, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo.

No. 2.

1885. GOMBO ZHEBES. Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, selected from six Creole dialects. Translated into French and into English, with notes, complete index to subjects and some brief remarks upon the Creole idioms of Louisiana. New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885, 8vo.

No. 3.

1887. SOME CHINESE GHOSTS. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887, 16mo.

New Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1906, 12mo.

No. 4.

1889. CHITA: A Memory of Last Island. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889, 12mo.

No. 5.

1890. YOUMA, The Story of a West-Indian Slave. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 12mo.

The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1890, 8vo.

No. 6.

1890. TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo.

The Same. London: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo.

New Edition. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1900, 8vo.

No. 7.

1894. GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894, 2 vols., 8vo.

The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1894, 2 vols., 8vo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 2 vols., Cr. 8vo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, 2 vols., Cr. 8vo.

No. 8.

1895. "OUT OF THE EAST." Reveries and Studies in New Japan. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895, 16mo.

The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1895, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo.

No. 9.

1896. KOKORO: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896, 16mo.

The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1896, 8vo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 8vo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1903, 8vo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1905, 8vo.

No. 10.

1897. GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS, Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897, 12mo.

The Same. London: Constable and Company, 1897, 8vo.

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 8vo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, 8vo.

No. 11.

1898. EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1898, 16mo.

The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1898, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1899, 8vo.

New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, 8vo.

No. 12.

1899. IN GHOSTLY JAPAN. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1899, 16mo.

The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1899, 8vo.

New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo.

No. 13.

1900. SHADOWINGS. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900, 12mo.

The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1900, 8vo.

New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo.

No. 14.

1901. A JAPANESE MISCELLANY. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1901, 12mo.

The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1901, 8vo.

New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo.

No. 15.

1902. JAPANESE FAIRY TALES. Tokyo, Japan: T. Hasegawa (4 vols.), 16mo.

No. 16.

1902. KOTTO. Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs. New York: The Macmillan Company (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd.), 1902, 8vo. Reprinted, April, 1903.

No. 17.

1904. KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904, 12mo.

The Same. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1904, 12mo.

No. 18.

1904. JAPAN: An Attempt at Interpretation. New York: The Macmillan Company (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd.), 1904, 8vo.

No. 19.

1905. THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY, and other Studies and Stories. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905, 12mo.

The Same. London: Constable and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo.

TRANSLATIONS (Nos. 20-21)

No. 20.

1882. ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS, and other Fantastic Romances. By Theophile Gautier. Faithfully translated by Lafcadio Hearn. New York: R. Worthington, 1882, 8vo.

New Edition. New York: Brentano's, 1899, 12mo.

New Edition. New York: Brentano's, 1906, 12mo.

CLARIMONDE. New York: Brentano's, 1899, 16mo.

No. 21.

1890. THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD (Member of the Institute). By Anatole France. The Translation and Introduction by Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo.

II

FOREIGN EDITIONS (Nos. 22-30)

DANISH

No. 22.

1902. FRA SKYGGERNES VERDEN ("From the World of the Shadows"). Complete and translated by Johanne Muenther.

178 pages, one portrait. Gyldendalske book-trade, Copenhagen, 1902, 8vo.

FRENCH

No. 23.

1904. LE JAPON INCONNU. (esquisses psychologiques). Par Lafcadio Hearn. Traduit de l'anglais avec l'autorisation de l'auteur, par Mme. Leon Raynal. In 18 jesus, 111-354 p. Mayenne, impr. Colin, Paris, lib. Dujarric, 1904.

(Selections from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.")

GERMAN

No. 24.

1905. KOKORO. Von Lafcadio Hearn. Einzig autorisierte Uebersetzung aus dem Englischen von Berta Franzos. Mit vorwort von Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Buchschmuck von Emil Orlik. Frankfurt a Main: Ruetten und Loening, 1905, 8vo.

No. 25.

1906. LOTUS. Blicke in das unbekannte Japan. Einzig autorisierte Uebersetzung aus dem Englischen von Berta Franzos. Mit vorwort von Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Buchschmuck von Emil Orlik. Frankfurt a Main: Ruetten und Loening, 1905, 8vo.

(Selections from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.")

No. 26.

1907. Lafcadio Hearn's Werke ueber Japan in kuenstlerischer Buchausstattung von Emil Orlik. Band I. Kokoro. Band II. Lotus. Band III. Izumo. Frankfurt a Main: Ruetten und Loening, 1907.

SWEDISH

No. 27.

1903. EXOTICA. Noveller och studier fran Japan, af Lafcadio Hearn. Bemyndigad oefversaettning af Karin Hirn; med nagra notiser om foerfattaren af Yrjoe Hirn. Tredje Upplagen. Stockholm: Wahlstroem & Widstrand, 1903, 16mo., 2 end pages, pp. 227, decorated paper.

(Selections from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," "Out of the East," "Kokoro," "Exotics and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings.")

Reprint 1905.

No. 28.

1903. EXOTICA. Noveller och studier fran Japan, af Lafcadio Hearn. Ny samling. Bemyndigad oefversaettning af Karin Hirn. Stockholm: Wahlstroem & Widstrand, 1903, 16mo., 2 p. l., pp. 248, decorated paper.

(Selections from "Out of the East," "Kokoro," "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," "Exotics and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," "A Japanese Miscellany," "Kotto.")

No. 29.

1904. SPOeKEN OCH DROeMMAR FRAN JAPAN. (Exotica. Tredje Samlingen) af Lafcadio Hearn. Bemyndigad oefversaettning fran Engelskan af Karin Hirn. Wahlstroem & Widstrands, Foerlag, Stockholm, MCMIV., 16mo., 1 end page, pp. 218, decorated paper.

(Selections from "Shadowings," "A Japanese Miscellany," "Kotto," "Kwaidan.")

No. 30.

1905. NATALIKA. ("Stray Leaves from Strange Literature") af Lafcadio Hearn. Bemyndigad oefversaettning af Karin Hirn. Stockholm: Wahlstroem & Widstrand, 16mo., pp. 189, decorated paper.

("Runes from the Kalewala" omitted.)

III

LIST, WITH DESCRIPTION, OF SEPARATE PUBLISHED WORKS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

(Nos. 1-21)

ORIGINAL WORKS

No. 1.

1884. STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE. Stories reconstructed from the Anvari-Soheili, Baital Pachisi, Mahabharata, Pantchatantra, Gulistan, Talmud, Kalewala, etc. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Publisher's Monogram.) Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1884.

16mo., pp. (16) 225, green cloth, black lettering, and decorations.

(5) Dedication:--

To my Friend PAGE M. BAKER Editor of the New Orleans Times-Democrat

(7-11) Explanatory (_Extract_).

While engaged upon this little mosaic work of legend and fable, I felt much like one of those merchants told of in Sindbad's Second Voyage, who were obliged to content themselves with gathering the small jewels adhering to certain meat which eagles brought up from the Valley of Diamonds. I have had to depend altogether upon the labour of translators for my acquisitions; and these seemed too small to deserve separate literary setting. By cutting my little gems according to one pattern, I have doubtless reduced the beauty of some; yet it seemed to me their colours were so weird, their luminosity so elfish, that their intrinsic value could not be wholly destroyed even by so clumsy an artificer as I.

In short, these fables, legends, parables, etc., are simply reconstructions of what impressed me as most fantastically beautiful in the most exotic literature which I was able to obtain. With few exceptions, the plans of the original narratives have been preserved....

This little collection has no claim upon the consideration of scholars. It is simply an attempt to share with the public some of those novel delights I experienced while trying to familiarize myself with some very strange and beautiful literatures.

... My gems were few and small: the monstrous and splendid await the coming of Sindbad, or some mighty lapidary by whom they may be wrought into jewel bouquets exquisite as those bunches of topaz blossoms and ruby buds laid upon the tomb of Nourmahal.

New Orleans, 1884.

(13-14) Bibliography.

(15-16) Contents:--

Stray Leaves

The Book of Thoth. _From an Egyptian Papyrus._ The Fountain Maiden. _A Legend of the South Pacific._ The Bird Wife. _An Esquimaux Tradition._

Tales retold from Indian and Buddhist Literature

The Making of Tilottama The Brahman and his Brahmani Bakawali Natalika The Corpse-Demon The Lion The Legend of the Monster Misfortune A Parable Buddhistic Pundari Yamaraja The Lotos of Faith

Runes from the Kalewala

The Magical Words The First Musician The Healing of Wainamoinen

Stories of Moslem Lands

Boutimar, the Dove The Son of a Robber A Legend of Love The King's Justice

Traditions retold from the Talmud

A Legend of Rabba The Mockers Esther's Choice The Dispute in the Halacha Rabbi Yochanan ben Zachai A Tradition of Titus

New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Crown 8vo.

New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo.

Articles and Reviews:--

Charles W. Coleman, Jr., _Harper's Monthly_, May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855.

No. 2.

1885. GOMBO ZHEBES. Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, selected from six Creole dialects. Translated into French and into English, with notes, complete index to subjects and some brief remarks upon the Creole idioms of Louisiana. By Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Will H. Coleman, Publisher, No. 70, Business Quarter, Astor House, 1885.

8vo., 6 p. l., pp. 42, brown cloth, design on cover.

(3-4) Introduction (_Extract_).

Any one who has ever paid a flying visit to New Orleans probably knows something about those various culinary preparations whose generic name is "Gombo"--compounded of many odds and ends, with the okra-plant, or true gombo for a basis, but also comprising occasionally "lose, zepinard, laitie," and the other vegetables sold in bunches in the French market. At all events, any person who has remained in the city for a season must have become familiar with the nature of "gombo file," "gombo fevi," and "gombo aux herbes," or as our coloured cook calls it "gombo zhebes"--for she belongs to the older generation of Creole _cuisinieres_, and speaks the patois in its primitive purity, without using a single "r." Her daughter, who has been to school, would pronounce it _gombo zhairbes_:--the modern patois is becoming more and more Frenchified, and will soon be altogether forgotten, not only throughout Louisiana, but even in the Antilles. It still, however, retains originality enough to be understood with difficulty by persons thoroughly familiar with French; and even those who know nothing of any language but English, readily recognize it by the peculiar rapid syllabification and musical intonation. Such English-speaking residents of New Orleans seldom speak of it as "Creole": they call it _gombo_, for some mysterious reason which I have never been able to explain satisfactorily. The coloured Creoles of the city have themselves begun to use the term to characterize the patois spoken by the survivors of slavery days. Turiault tells us that in the town of Martinique, where the Creole is gradually changing into French, the _Bitacos_, or country negroes who still speak the patois nearly pure, are much ridiculed by their municipal brethren:--_Ca ou ka pale la, che, c'est neg;--Ca pas Creole!_ ("What you talk is 'nigger,' my dear:--that isn't Creole!") In like manner a young Creole negro or negress of New Orleans might tell an aged member of his race: _Ca qui to parle ca pas Creole; ca c'est gombo!_ I have sometimes heard the pure and primitive Creole also called "Congo" by coloured folks of the new generation.

The literature of "gombo" has perhaps even more varieties than there are preparations of the esculents above referred to;--the patois has certainly its gombo fevi, its gombo file, its "gombo zhebes"--both written and unwritten. A work like Marbot's "Bambous" would deserve to be classed with the pure "fevi";--the treatises of Turiault, Baissac, St. Quentin, Thomas, rather resemble that fully prepared dish, in which crabs seem to struggle with fragments of many well-stewed meats, all strongly seasoned with pepper. The present essay at Creole folklore, can only be classed as "gombo zhebes"--(_Zhebes ce feuil-chou, cresson, laitie, bettrav, lose, zepinard_); the true okra is not the basis of our preparation;--it is a Creole dish, if you please, but a salmagundi of inferior quality.

* * * * *

Needless to say, this collection is far from perfect;--the most I can hope for is that it may constitute the nucleus of a more exhaustive publication to appear in course of time. No one person could hope to make a really complete collection of Creole proverbs--even with all the advantages of linguistic knowledge, leisure, wealth, and travel. Only a society of folklorists might bring such an undertaking to a successful issue;--but as no systematic effort is being made in this direction, I have had no hesitation in attempting--not indeed to fill a want--but to set an example. _Gouie passe, difil sivre_:--let the needle but pass, the thread will follow.

L. H.

(6) Creole Bibliography.

Pages 40-42 Indexes.

Articles and Reviews:--

_Nation, The_, April 23, 1885, vol. 40, p. 349.

No. 3.

1887. SOME CHINESE GHOSTS. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Chinese Characters.) Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887. 16mo., p. (8) 185, brown cloth with Chinese mask on cover, red top.

Facing Title-page:--

_If ye desire to witness prodigies and to behold marvels, be not concerned as to whether the mountains are distant or the rivers far away._

Kin-Kou-Ki-Koan.

(2) Dedication:--

To my Friend, HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL The Musician, who, speaking the speech of melody unto the children of Tien-hia,-- unto the wandering Tsing-jin, whose skins have the colour of gold,-- moved them to make strange sounds upon the serpent-bellied San-hien; persuaded them to play for me upon the shrieking Ya-hien; prevailed on them to sing me a song of their native land,-- the song of Mohli-hwa, the song of the jasmine-flower. (Sketch of Chinaman's head.)

(Reverse) Chinese Character.

(3-4) Preface.

I think that my best apology for the insignificant size of this volume is the very character of the material composing it. In preparing the legends I sought especially for _weird beauty_; and I could not forget this striking observation in Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad": "The supernatural, though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, _a spring which is peculiarly apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon_." Those desirous to familiarize themselves with Chinese literature as a whole have had the way made smooth for them by the labours of linguists like Julien, Pavie, Remusat, De Rosny, Schlegel, Legge, Hervey-Saint-Denys, Williams, Biot, Giles, Wylie, Beal, and many other Sinologists. To such great explorers indeed, the realm of Cathayan story belongs by right of discovery and conquest; yet the humbler traveller who follows wonderingly after them into the vast and mysterious pleasure-grounds of Chinese fancy may surely be permitted to cull a few of the marvellous flowers there growing,--a self-luminous _hwa-wang_, a black lily, a phosphoric rose or two,--as souvenirs of his curious voyage.

L. H. New Orleans, March 15, 1886.

(5) Contents:--

The Soul of the Great Bell The Story of Ming-Y The Legend of Tchi-Niu The Return of Yen Tchin-King The Tradition of the Tea-Plant The Tale of the Porcelain God

Appendix:--

Notes. Glossary.

New Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1906, 12mo.

Articles and Reviews:--

Charles W. Coleman, Jr., _Harper's Monthly_, May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855.

_Nation, The_, May 26, 1887, vol. 44, p. 456.

No. 4.

1889. CHITA: a Memory of Last Island. By Lafcadio Hearn

"_But Nature whistled with all her winds, Did as she pleased, and went her way._"

--Emerson.

New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1889. 12mo., 3 p. l., pp. 204, terra-cotta cloth, decorated.

(Published first in _Harper's Monthly_, April, 1888.)

(1) Dedication:--

To my Friend DR. RODOLFO MATAS of New Orleans

(2) Contents:--