Nina H. Kennard

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway, with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a hoary dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball," with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and rising to the ceiling.
Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom the visible world is visible." ”

“ No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit of the public.
Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors, and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University, at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything was favourable to absorption in his work. ”

“ The summer passed in this Japanese Yashiki was as happy as any in Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled—a free, clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully. Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were soothed and forgotten ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the luke-warm air was a mingling of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of sake, smells of seaweed soup, smells of daikon (the strong native radish) , and, dominating all, a sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of sunshine.
Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams, and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies, and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan, where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it, and the wife accepts it as her Ingwa—or sin in a former state of existence—it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the exact shape of which he did not know. ”

“ A man thinks he has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but—such a stubborn thing is human nature—sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born, let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love, worship as they worship."
At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." ”

“ So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,—the complexion darker and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women—but comely, with the comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have been. ”

“ Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies—along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent) , we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. ”

“ And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its own thick breath.'"
Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end of a bay three miles wide. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. ”

“ It is barely possible that I might get into journalism in Japan,—but not at all sure. I suppose you know that is my living profession: I understand all kinds of newspaper work. But as I am no believer in conventions, I am not likely to get any of the big sinecures. To do that one must be a ladies' man, a member of some church, a social figure. I am no ladies' man: I am known to the world as an 'infidel,' and I hate society unutterably. Were I rich enough to live where I please, I should certainly (if unable to live in Japan) return to the tropics. ”

“ To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote [Pg 233] in the warm air. ”

“ 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...." ”