



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature




Letters from The Raven

BEING THE CORRESPONDENCE OF

Lafcadio Hearn with
Henry Watkin

WITH INTRODUCTION AND
CRITICAL COMMENT BY THE EDITOR

MILTON BRONNER

NEW YORK

Brentano's

1907



To

My Sweethearts Three

Marian, May

and

Motherkin




Contents

INTRODUCTION

LETTERS FROM THE RAVEN

LETTERS TO A LADY

LETTERS OF OZIAS MIDWINTER




Introduction


It is felt that no apology is necessary for offering to the interested
public, even though it be a limited one, the letters and extracts from
letters which appear in this little volume. In a day when the letters
of Aubrey Beardsley--who was a draughtsman rather than a writer--are
gravely offered to possible readers by a great publishing house, it is
surely allowable to present for the first time epistles of a really
great author. No excuse was offered for printing such things as:
"Thank you so much. It was very good of you to call." If this tells us
anything concerning the unfortunate young master of white and black,
I am unable to discern it. I feel quite sure that no one can make the
same objection to the correspondence herewith given. It tells us many
things concerning Hearn's life and moods and aspirations that otherwise
would have been unknown to us. He wrote to Mr. Henry Watkin as to his
dearest friend. In his letters, we get what we do not find elsewhere.
We have here facts without which his future biographer would be at a
loss.

If there be any repetitions in the sections which follow, the
indulgence of the reader is craved. Such as they are, they were
written at widely separated intervals in the hope that material might
be finally gathered for a "Life and Letters of Hearn." This hope has so
far been frustrated, but it is felt that much is here offered that will
lead to a better understanding and appreciation of this famous writer.
The endeavor of the editor has been so far as possible to let Hearn
tell his own story, giving only enough comment to make clear what Hearn
himself had to say.

In writing of their beloved R. L. S., enthusiasts tell us Stevenson is
endeared to mankind not only because of his writings, but also because
of his dauntless cheerfulness in the face of incurable disease. Hearn,
in another field, was equally charming in his work and, in the face of
another danger, equally dauntless. From the first he was confronted
by the possible fate of the sightless. At best he had but a pearly
vision of the world. The mere labor of writing was a physical task
with him, demanding hours for the composition of a single letter. Yet
he accomplished almost two score volumes, none of which is carelessly
written. Seeing as through a ghostly vapor, in his books he revelled
in color as few writers of our day have been able to do. How he
managed to see, or rather to comprehend, all the things he so vividly
described, was one of his secrets.

The best work of his life was commenced at the age of forty, when he
arrived in Japan. He had many qualifications for his chosen field.
During the long, lazy two years in Martinique he had literally soaked
his mind, as it were, with Oriental philosophy. When he came to Japan
he was weary of wandering, and the courtesy, gentleness and kindliness
of the natives soon convinced him that they were the best people in the
world among whom to live. A small man physically, he felt at home in a
nation of small men. It pleased his shy, sensitive nature to think that
he was often mistaken for a Japanese.

To his studies and his work he brought a prodigious curiosity, a
perfect sympathy, and an admirable style. He had an eye that observed
everything in this delightful Nippon, from the manner in which the
women threaded their needles to the effect of Shinto and Buddhism
upon the national character, religion, art, and literature. Japanese
folk-lore, Japanese street songs and sayings, the home life of the
people,--everything appealed to him, and the farther removed from
modern days and from Christianity, the stronger the appeal.

Zangwill has acutely said, in speaking of Loti's famous story of Japan,
"Instead of looking for the soul of a people, Pierre Loti was simply
looking for a woman."

Hearn did not fail to tell us of many women, but his most particular
search was for just that soul of a people which Loti ignored; and in
the hunt for that soul, he became more and more impressed by that
Buddhism which enabled him the better to comprehend the people. His
whole religious life had been a wandering away from the Christianity
to which he was born and a finding of a faith compounded of Buddhism
modified by paganism, and a leaven of the scientific beliefs of
agnostics such as Spencer and Huxley, whom he never wearied of reading
and quoting. In all his writings this tendency is displayed. In one of
the letters we see him an avowed agnostic, or perhaps "pantheist" would
be the better word. In his little-known story of 1889, published in
_Lippincott's,_ with the Buddhist title of "Karma," there is a curious
tribute to a fair, pure woman. It shows the hold the theory of heredity
and evolution and the belief in reincarnation already had upon him:

"In her beauty is the resurrection of the fairest past;--in her youth,
the perfection of the present;--in her girl dreams, the promise of
the To-Be.... A million lives have been consumed that hers should be
made admirable; countless minds have planned and toiled and agonized
that thought might reach a higher and purer power in her delicate
brain;--countless hearts have been burned out by suffering that hers
might pulse for joy;--innumerable eyes have lost their light that hers
might be filled with witchery;--innumerable lips have prayed that hers
might be kissed." On his first day in the Orient he visited a temple
and made an offering, recording the following conversation, which gives
an admirable insight into his religious beliefs:[1]

"'Are you a Christian?'

"And I answered truthfully,'No.'

"'Are you a Buddhist?'

"'Not exactly.'

"'Why do you make offerings if you do not believe in Buddha?'

"'I revere the beauty of his teaching, and the faith of those who follow
it.'"


From this by degrees he reached to a pure Buddhism, tempered, however,
by a strange, romantic half belief, half love for the old pagan gods,
feeling himself at heart a pagan, too:

"For these quaint Gods of Roads and Gods of Earth are really living
still, though so worn and mossed and feebly worshipped. In this brief
moment, at least, I am really in the Elder World,--perhaps just at that
epoch of it when the primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned,
crumbling slowly before the corrosive influence of a new philosophy;
and I know myself a pagan still, loving these simple old gods, these
gods of a people's childhood. And they need some love, these naïf,
innocent, ugly gods. The beautiful divinities will live forever by that
sweetness of womanhood idealized in the Buddhist art of them: eternal
are Kwannon and Benten; they need no help of man; they will compel
reverence when the great temples shall all have become voiceless and
priestless as this shrine of Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless,
mouldering gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who
have gladdened so many simple hearts, who have heard so many innocent
prayers,--how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite
of the so-called 'laws of progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of
evolution."

It is the combination of the various beliefs here shadowed that
explains the unique note he brought into our literature. The man who
was at once a follower of Spencer and of Buddha, with a large sympathy
for the old folk-religion, brought forth an embodied thought entirely
new to the world. Nothing like it had ever been produced before. Its
like may never be produced again. He endeavored to reconcile the
evolutional theory of inherited tendencies with the Buddhist belief in
reincarnation,--one lengthening chain of lives,--and with the worship
of the dead as seen in pure Shinto, for "is not every action indeed the
work of the Dead who dwell within us?"

It was this queer combination that gave a strange charm, a moving
magic, to various passages in his books. For the rest, his work and
method of labor, may best be described in his own words when speaking
of Japanese artists. He writes:

"The foreign artist will give you realistic reflections of what he
sees; but he will give you nothing more. The Japanese artist gives you
that which he feels,--the mood of a season, the precise sensation of
an hour and place; his work is qualified by a power of suggestiveness
rarely found in the art of the West. The Occidental painter renders
minute detail; he satisfies the imagination he evokes. But his Oriental
brother either suppresses or idealizes detail,--steeps his distances
in mist, bands his landscapes with cloud, makes of his experience a
memory in which only the strange and the beautiful survive, with their
sensations. He surpasses imagination, excites it, leaves it hungry with
the hunger of charm perceived in glimpses only. Nevertheless in such
glimpses he is able to convey the feeling of a time, the character
of a place, after a fashion that seems magical. He is a painter of
recollections and sensations rather than of clear-cut realities; and in
this lies the secret of his