CHAPTER IV

USHAW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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