Nina H. Kennard

“ No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always too much for my own peace of mind,—places, things, and persons,—and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil falls, himself in each and all. ”

“ The whole history of the woman is written in the deep sadness of the eyes, the waxen pallor of the brow and cheeks, which seem worn with the passions and exertions that every night tore the fragile body to pieces, while the tender softness of the expression round the mouth bespeak the mother who wrote: "Come into my heart, dear little one, and find there all the tenderness of which there is an unlimited supply for my sons. It is riches without end that God gives mothers who love their children." ”

“ It was a world strangely at issue with her own ideas into which she had stepped—a dandified, ceremonious world, full of witty and wicked ladies and gentlemen, who played cards and backed horses; but, mercifully for her, a world at the same time full of childish enthusiasm, an age of pallor and fainting and hysterics. Grown men and women sitting up at night weeping and laughing over the woes and escapades of Clarissa Harlowe and Evelina; ladies writing to Richardson: “Pray, Sir, make Lovelace happy; you can so easily do it. Pray reform him! Will you not save a soul?” ”

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

“ Some people place the whole happiness of life in the pleasures of imagination, in building castles; for my part, I am not one that builds very magnificent ones. Nay; I don’t build any castles, but cottages without end. May the great Disposer of all events but permit me to spend the evening of my toilsome, bustling day in a cottage, where I may sometimes have the converse and society which will make me more worthy those imperishable habitations which are prepared for the spirits of just men made perfect! ”

“ To Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year—perhaps the only land to find the new sensation is in the Past,—floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to feel the charm of the Far East—or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality? ”

“ Time goes on whirling away all memories in its relentless rush. A new generation is ever ready to depreciate the enthusiasms of their grandfathers, and ours is incredulous when told of the powers of a Garrick or a Siddons.
It was with a feeling of pain that, while standing the other day by the great actress’s grave where it lies lonely and untended in Paddington churchyard, we heard that our cousins across the Atlantic set more store on the memory of Sarah Siddons than we do. ”

“ At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in geta and kimono, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,—a magic that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions, telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. ”

“ The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature, in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her regret. ”

“ There is something almost heroic, therefore, in the appearance of the young actress on the boards of Drury Lane at this particular juncture. Alone and unaided, against enormous odds, she saved the famous theatre, endeared to every lover of dramatic art, from artistic and financial ruin. She had hitherto proved herself to have indomitable industry and energy, to have all the qualities of a hard-working, painstaking artist; now she was suddenly to flash forth in all the splendour of her genius and power. ”

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

“ Step by step we propose to trace the career of this wonderful woman, who, dowered with singular beauty and genius, and placed amid all the temptations of a profession in which so few of her sex remain pure, has shown an example of unswerving rectitude and religious fervour, unusual in any walk of life, keeping her to the last a “great simple being,” direct and truthful, noble and industrious. ”

“ Writing later to Chamberlain, Hearn acknowledged that what delighted him those first days in Japan was the charm of nature in human nature, and in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness, politeness ... for in Japan even hate works with smiles and pretty words.
For the first time Hearn was not merely describing a sensuous world of sights and sounds, but a world of soft domesticity, where thatched villages nestled in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above a congregation of thatched homesteads. ”

“ Then we recalled various incidents of our travels in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely." Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us, when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental widows when referring to the departed. ”

“ In studying the annals of genius, it is interesting to observe how circumstances working from within force it on and bring it to completion, how circumstances working from without mould it into form, tempering the fine metal until it is supple and adaptable, but breaking the inferior metal by the sheer weight of their inexorable pressure.
Had Mrs. Siddons remained the brilliant, beautiful girl, with life undimmed by clouds, without experience of the bitterness and sorrow of life, she never could have acted Lady Macbeth. ”

“ The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human life—infinite calm, infinite rest. ”

“ Besides all the disabilities of advancing age, that terrible fear of being supplanted was ever before her eyes. Mrs. Jordan had some years before snatched the laurels from her brow in Rosalind; now rumours were wafted across the Channel of a young and lovely actress, Miss O’Neill, who had taken all hearts captive as Juliet (a part Mrs. Siddons could never personate satisfactorily) ; the matchless beauty of form of the young aspirant, her sensibility and tenderness were the theme of every tongue. ”

“ CHAPTER XXIII USHIGOME
"Every one has an inner life of his own,—which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it—sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all Dopplegangers?—and is not the invisible the only life we really enjoy?"
In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue. ”

“ CHAPTER XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO
"Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands,—like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour you still can find Horai—but not elsewhere.... Remember that Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,—the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,—never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...." ”

“ It is very remarkable that Macbeth is frequent in expressions of tenderness to his wife, while she never betrays one symptom of affection towards him, till, in the fiery furnace of affliction, her iron heart is melted down to softness.” This was the side by which Mrs. Siddons had taken such a grasp of the character of Lady Macbeth. It was by bringing into prominence this softer side of her character that, while thrilling her audience with horror, she at the same time brought tears to their eyes with an immense awe-struck pity. ”

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

“ But a careful study of Hearn's "Wesen" will show that his apparent inconstancy did not arise from a change of affection, but because his very affection for the people he had turned from made the taut strands of friendship more difficult to reunite, especially for a person of his shy temperament. Which of us has not recognised the greater difficulty of making up a "tiff" with a friend for whom one cares deeply than with a person to whom one is indifferent? The tougher the stuff the more ravelled the edges of the tear, and the more difficult to join together. ”