Читать книгу Lafcadio Hearn - Nina H. Kennard - Страница 14

[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?