Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) (Wikicommons)
What raised Hearn above his contemporaries was the power of his pen. Like most people, I had never heard of Hearn before coming to Japan, and it’s no doubt true to say that because he wrote favourably of the Japanese they have made him into something of a cult. His work in spreading a positive image of the country came at a time when it was opening to the world and particularly sensitive to charges of primitivism and backwardness. Hearn’s writings praising the folk culture and traditions secured him a treasured place in the national memory.
But there is something more which underlies the lasting legacy, and that is the force of his writing. Anyone familiar with his works, which range from ghost tales to travel pieces to literary criticism, will be aware of the extraordinary eloquence. He never went to university and was something of an autodidact, in addition to which he was handicapped by poor eyesight. That doesn’t seem to have stopped him from devouring books however, and from being a prolific writer in a range of genres.
Here by way of example is an excerpt from his visit to Enoshima, which in the pen of another would be a prosaic guide of little wider interest. In the words of Hearn, the visit turns into a veritable verbal delight fired by an unashamed romanticism. One can’t help but be struck by the delicious choice of words – ‘blood-brightening’; ‘quaintly gabled’; ‘sweet sharp scents’; ‘the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things’. Notice too the accumulation of atmospheric words – ‘appeal’, ‘vision’, ‘fairy veil’, ‘weird majesty’, ‘riddles’, ‘glory’, ‘majesty’, ‘mystic’ x2, and that final magnificent image of ‘Boddhisattvas about to melt forever into some blue Nirvana’.
There is a charm indefinable about the place – that sort of charm which comes with a little ghostly thrill never to be forgotten. Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of numberless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and interblended: the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening, vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished generations.
The romance of Benten
And other memories ineffaceable: the first sight of the sea-girt City of Pearl, though a fairy veil of haze: the windy approach to the lovely island over the velvety soundless brown stretch of sand; the weird majesty of the giant gate of bronze; the queer, high-sloping, fantastic, quaintly gabled street, flinging down sharp shadows of aerial balconies; the flutter of colored draperies in the sea wind, and of flags with their riddles of lettering; the pearly glimmering of the astonishing shops.
And impressions of the enormous day – the day of the Land of the Gods – a loftier day than ever our summers know; and the glory of the view from those green sacred silent heights between sea an sun; and the remembrance of the sky, a sky spiritual as holiness, a sky with clouds ghost-pure and white as the light itself – seeming, indeed, not clouds but dreams, or souls of Boddhisattvas about to melt forever into some blue Nirvana.
And the romance of Benten, too – the Deity of Beauty, the Divinity of Love, the Goddess of Eloquence. Rightly is she likewise named Goddess of the Sea. For is not the Sea most ancient and excellent of Speakers – the eternal Poet, changer of that mystic hymn whose rhythm shakes the world, whose mighty syllables no man may learn?
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For Part 1 comparing Hearn with his friend, B.H. Chamberlain, please see here. Part 2 deals with his life and house at Matsue, Part 3 a reflection upon mirrors, and Part 4 with his paganism.
” the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things”
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